Boarded up Pub

My locals run it's taps
old men walk by with dogs, sigh,
and it all comes flooding back
Their stories, small glories
and indeed their way of life.
What better way for us to
understand it, than to have it
poured into the pint
that stands cool in your palm
or to hear it in the aged
creak of polished floor-boards
or woven into the faded fabric
of the stools and curtains.
Just how many beers
how many years have
drained into those beer mats,
my locals run it's taps.

Now people pull up by the traffic lights
and witness the distressing sight
of a boarded-up pub being soaked
in the sad rays of battered sunlight.
It stands there ashamed
forlorn and unamed.
Just there to tease
crackling memories
visualising the smoky scenes of
old men spreading mustard
over their cobs, long retired
from industrial jobs,
tentative young lovers
and strange irish music,
Ironed striped shirts and funky cologne.
And the pints and chinese menus sent
flying in the mad football atmosphere.
I remember the
birthday girls half asleep on stools
and the birthday boys collapsed in cubicles.

Also the low,
low,
low,
points,
the unappeasable dullness of those overcast
weekdays. The outcasts, the henpecked,
the retired, the vagabonds
leaning up the bar with shop-
ing bags, engaged in querulous
conversations centred on
stingy relatives,
hospital appointments,
job-centres and stale marriages.
Frittering away ephemeral time
and cadging cigarettes
on them mind grinding giro days.
Those haunting and desolate sights
of grizzled men playing dominoes
soft eyes set glazed in haggard faces
and slumped figures worn by age and Jamesons.
The foggy racecourse on the television screen
with the ambulance taling the straining pack
pleading eyes fixated and fists held to lips.
I remember sympathetically,
deep inside those dying final furlongs
the familiar hoarse and anguished
pleas of desperate indebted men.
Gambling away their wifes shopping money.