Seven Years of Unemployment

For seven years I’ve struggled up the hill
With a coal-bag covering my head
Breathing in the coal dust of my rearing
The poverty that clogged my swollen windpipes

From holes in the dusty part of coal-yards
I’ve shuffled and scuffled up the slag-heap slope
With the poor-men of the one-horse-town
Who spend the thousands of taxpayer’s money

The weekly landslide through the year
I graze like a horse on imaginary jobs
Wept with fears of homelessness and hunger
With hardly a hope of a change in the tide

Oh, how I longed to retread the bitter past
To cheat the policies that talked me down
To throw off the yolk of my poorer class
To feel my heart beat free of bit and the rein

My seven years of unemployment
Seem like seven years in a coal-yard
Each year I grew stronger with insight
Like a canary singing in the darkness

Throwing off the dirty sacks of doubt
The polls of an authority’s manipulation
The hundredweight years slung over my back
As I fought to be free of the cancer

1997