More In Every Sense (than just a town)

Nobody owned our town, it was greater
than the sum of its component parts;
it had a dodgy heart with nasty set of lungs,

I’d heard its hacking cough enough to
know of that as one of its effete and
warming eccentricities. At the start we

took it all for granted, the town where
we were born was more in every sense
than just a town – could warm you with

its winsome ways or toss you in a heap,
choke you with its fiery breath and tease
you with a subtle breeze; but should she

fart your grip on life was squeezed with acrid
smells she generated in those bowels of
hellish potency. I evoke those smells

again with awesome clarity – gasworks
was the usual claim, but easterlies mixed
easily with offal from the freezing works and

sewage stench that leaked from outfalls at
the northern beach. A demise of heady scent
to greet emphatically and burn the eyes.

In every other sense this town was not unique –
a town with ordinary passions but a hidden
vigour and a signature to make you blench.

It is of little wonder then that claims demur for
ownership, who in hell would want to smile and
own the pledge of such a pile of suppurating shit!
© 24 April 2007, I.D. Carswell.

(Actually the old village wasn’t all that bad!)