Sleeping metal
By Dave Finchett 

The mill sighs and hangs its shoulders,
its barred and boarded facade claims the skyline;
the worn cobbles on its street testify
to long gone workers and their clattering feet.

I am drawn inside through its yawning windows
that seem to say that how they have forgotten work
as a shell picked from the beach forgets the sea.
My torch reveals a time capsule before me,

its light clings to the edges of iron and steel.
Disconnected machines lie prone on the floor.
like sleeping metal cattle curled up in the dust,
and in losing themselves, they become beautiful.

Conveyor belts coil and queue in the dark,
they have bonded with the rust and dust
inside the hull of this sunken submarine,
where post-industrial shadows billow.

In unexplored rooms I hear the shriek of rats,
smell the dank of their nests and core markets
as they press their underperforming eyes
up close to the edges of permanent night.

All I can give to this urban Pompeii
that once buzzed with its flywheel cacophony,
is the echoing sound of a pair of boots
as I walk over see-sawing wet floorboards.

You people who were needed then not needed -
Who are you? Where are you?
Did you process the need for processing itself?
Do your fingers claw at non existent pensions?

Do outsourced steel dinosaurs learn to climb
back through the windows of mills and factories
to search in vain for the valves and steam boilers
through which they once spat and hissed their disdain?

And look through the eyes of spiders in their webs -
see the windows with their black eyes attract
the plots of shareholders and the stones of the young,
while contractors busily fill the holes with wood.

Industry is losing the old mills for good:
they are becoming flats and penthouses now
that will tower above the homeless below -
keeping all their tomorrows derelict.