Rob Galpin

It takes the tiniest details to prognosticate:
the chequebook perforation of the stinging nettle.
The dust and debris in the spider web.

After many struggles,
only a single town remained.
(This confident prediction of calamity,
this inexpert view.)

The brick-work is strange,
in the future town.
The water is insanitary
and the school pets are snakes.

There are absences of feeling.

What of the lost ravens, the shrunken moor -
the land before the slag heap collapsed?
Grit pushed to the kerb.

It is the textures
that bring you back.