Small dreams of a doormat

I shall do such things… what they are yet I know not
– King Lear

Go on then – don’t make eye contact
just walk all over me, I know my place
among the lowest of the low, pushed into doorways
under everything and everyone;
you’d put me right out if you could, except – I have my uses.
Wipe yourself off on me then call me dirty? We shall see.
It’s murder here: the wind whistles viciously under the draught excluder
and I bear the brunt of every booted stranger like a scar.

Smutty bastards, lady mucks! I harbour grime:
caked and hardened to a crust its dust becomes me
and my filthy mind. Biding my time, dreaming low-down dreams
of multicoloured silken-tufted flying carpets
morning and evening, from your going out until your coming in
night after night, year after year
I lie here, bristling.

Armley Clock School

Now it’s a business centre, cheaper than downtown Leeds,
where private healthcare clients can get fast-track diagnoses
and young guns parking underneath the clock tower’s symmetry
don’t see asylums, workhouses or transit termini
but ‘an impressive character building, redeveloped to provide
modern office suites within gated landscaped grounds’.

Only a few still left remember their playground’s past: the clouds
of pale blue candy-floss that floated across from Roberts’ works
like feathers over the Aviary’s estate, to whiten the coke heap
and soot-black brick, tinsel the window cords and fall
like the warm dry snow of dreams, into the paradise kids make
of whatever they find. Game after game they played out
the best years of their lives, under the ticking clock.