It is winter in the dead good night.
Rage against the dying light.
God leaves with the day, be awake in fright.
Abandoned, his flock cringe at their plight.
Their church spears the sky with its needle like steeple.
But the sky remains deaf to the needs of the people.
Houses are blinded by shuttered, windowless eyes.
The village is drowned under darkening skies.
It lies in the bleak blackness, isolated from peace.
Weatherbeaten by cold, grinding poverty and a universal desire for release. 

The exhausting smell of brutalised lives,
lived less,
and known to be so,
comes in through the cracks in the walls, 
the roof, the dirty, broken window panes and under the doors.
Coal smoke and dust crusts up the chimneys and smudges the air.
Existence is spare.

Suppressed as lust,
here wishes are flights of fancy, 
lost as soon as the ideas form. 
They are consumed 
by the eternal loss of hope. Everywhere.
The great consumer of dreams.

It is a wooden door that opens directly onto the street.
This one, once painted bright blue now feeling blue 
on the cusp of being unhinged.
Neither entrance nor exit, 
because there is nowhere to go.
With a tarnished and scratched brass letter slot in it 
that flaps when the post man drops 
in yellowed paper letters with postage stamps and addresses written in inky scrawls or flourishes that always ask for money.
It flaps with the icy northern winds 
of every arctic blow, 
whistling through the passageway, biting to the bone, 
settling in each room as a resented guest. 
Taking the heat from the meagre fire - if there is one, 
robbing the heat from the few embers of scavenged sticks and coal scrapings in the cast iron stove, 
extracting the heat from conversation rendering it chill, penetrating ill fitting clothes, darned and redarned 
woollen socks, underwear, vests, scarves and second layer overcoats. 

The smell of fried gristle and butcher’s sweepings sausages comes in from the small mean kitchen 
in the back of the house 
with it’s chipped laminate table and 
chairs so tired they lean against each other to continue standing on legs that have been battered so long they are always threatening to break.
Lower limbs splintered and scraped by 
generations of careless sitters. 
No one ever takes any notice.
Table and chairs hug the wall 
in fear of losing the only thing they 
have to left to hold on too. 
They have learnt the lessons of 
the other inhabitants well. 
Oh, and tonight the roadkill is in the pot 
and the lying is done to their lot as 
a distraction from the truth where 
rats, pigeons, stray pets and their like 
only have benefit if they can be cooked.
Foraged herbs from nearby roadsides 
pretend to add flavour.
Bitter dandelion tea washes 
down the tough, sinewy meat.
Grumbling bellies yet 
again greet the night.

The inhabitants soon leave the kitchen with little room to skin another cat, 
ever squeezing on each other to get by. 
Grunting their “Excuse me”s as potent unwashed bodies 
brush past without ever noticing 
the rancid odour.
The Jonses and the Jenkins, the slag and the heaps.
In the barely candlelit gloom, 
they meet again in the halls 
to rise creaking up the bare narrow stairs to 
the bare narrow bedrooms of 
worn thin bedding on 
narrow flat wooden bunks and groaning cast beds.
No mattress of note mind, 
just a bundle of rags from the previous occupants, now 
long dead and gone.
What was their name?
Oh well, it doesn’t matter does it? 
Names have no bearing. 
Your name will not keep you alive in this world, 
or the next.

So they will not go gentle 
into that good night.
Into any night.
They will struggle through another
where 
adults live a chronic morbid existence, 
stunted children play listless games of hopelessness and cruelty - death may always come early.
Death shall have its dominion.