The Barmaid

Manchester – in the final days of the smoky old town.
 Listed buildings, monoliths, stand amid the rubble of demolition,
tower-block flats and new estates…
The Barmaid

The bar lights define her, a pale girl 
and thin, puppet playing in a booth. 
Alert for the long shift she watches
the shadows hunched at the dark tables, 
selectors, tacticians, experts reliving irrelevant 
games. ‘Do these people ever get real?’

Her mind flees through the window 
where, in twilight, rubbish filled sites are gestating. 
Her young eyes, unaware, see rain sweeping 
the long empty yards and weeping on derelict firms, 
glistening the brick of the devil-dreamed towers
in hell-seeing streets of steel-shuttered shops 
where a base-born baby cries in grandmother's arms.

The bar-bum accountant, aged beyond years
with worries of fees, scrapes the price of a pint 
from his pocket and shuffles towards her.
She finds herself pulling a pump
in a monolith pub, spared bomb blasting 
balls and bulldozing jaws in a mad-architect's
dream of a traffic‑choked scheme – pavements
of vomit and pampered-pets’ shit, ochred 
by lamps on designer-frame posts.

(Around her, forgotten, the ghosts play the 
game‑with‑no‑rules in the dream where the 
strikers who ran for the reds were beaten 
and blooded by penalties forced by the blues 
but dreamed of the goal they would mould 
and then leave for descendants to score).

The sages, oblivious in red and blue blindfolds, 
watch her sway at the pump. Without knowing, 
she sees them as losers who funked the one match 
that was fixed in their favour – and she 
has a baby that cries through the night.