Chewing Gum Stars

By Darren Thomas

Location: Oxford Road

A thousand nameless faces
under which hang
angry clothes
tell a world
what it already knows

not a single smile
just a melody
of melancholy played
through buds which
drift into the saps of youth
and the wood
of huge working men.

Chewing gum stars
inside a pavement’s heavens
shining brightest at night
and every deepest thought
is carried with the weight of sirens
or lost in the flash of city blue.

As God’s rain frowns
complaining that it works
too hard in this city,
resting on each
of those thousand faces
like tears,

leaving
religion’s chime to toll
and the Priest
checking a wrist
and the fading shine
in a lifetime of shoes.

Darren Thomas is a mature student at the University of Manchester. His work has been published in The Mental Virus, in various websites, in and around waiting rooms of Wigan train stations (as part of the NXNW Festival) and is featured in the book The Best of the Manchester Poets, published by Puppywolf in 2010.