Poem

The Salford Punk Bard paints the picture of life in the squalor of the unemployed denizens of the underclass. These are the people consigned to the scrapheap for whom there is no future; no way out.

With the rats, fleas, drugs and shit; it’s no fun on Beasley Street.

This is where the lowlife live, the forsaken and no-hopers. They’ve nowhere else to fall. It’s all a comatose holiday waiting for release. It’s called Beasley Street.

Johnny Clarke knows the score. He’s lived there on heroin and nods. He’s paid the price, got the T-shirt and re-emerged.

You’d think anyone as lucid would be immune?

Not many people escape the clutches of Beasley Street.

Beasley Street

Far from crazy pavements
The taste of silver spoons
A clinical arrangement
On a dirty afternoon

Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
Are rendered obsolete
The legal term is null and void
In the case of Beasley Street

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
Somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don’t need
A sneak preview of death

Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
On the edge of Beasley Street

Where the action isn’t
That’s where it is
State your position
Vacancies exist

In an X-certificate exercise
Ex-servicemen excrete
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies
In a box on Beasley Street

From the boarding houses and the bedsits
Full of accidents and fleas
Somebody gets it
Where the missing persons freeze

Wearing dead men’s overcoats
You can’t see their feet
A riff joint shuts opens up
Right down on Beasley Street

Cars collide, colors clash
Disaster movie stuff
For a man with a Fu Manchu mustache
Revenge is not enough

There’s a dead canary on a swivel seat
There’s a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code

Hot beneath the collar
An inspector calls
Where the perishing stink of squalor
Impregnates the walls

The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street

The hipster and his hired hat
Drive a borrowed car
Yellow socks and a pink cravat
Nothing la-di-dah

OAP, mother to be
Watch the three-piece suite
When shit-stoppered drains
And crocodile skis
Are seen on Beasley Street

The kingdom of the blind
A one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
The doorbells do not ring

A light bulb bursts like a blister
The only form of heat
Here a fellow sells his sister
Down the river on Beasley Street

The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their common problem is
That they’re not someone else

The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can’t keep it neat
It’s a fully furnished dustbin
Sixteen Beasley Street

Vince the aging savage
Betrays no kind of life
But the smell of yesterday’s cabbage
And the ghost of last year’s wife

Through a constant haze
Of deodorant sprays
He says retreat
Alsatians dog the dirty days
Down the middle of Beasley Street

People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
Every time they kiss

It’s a sociologist’s paradise
Each day repeats
On easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy
Beastly Beasley Street

Eyes dead as vicious fish
Look around for laughs
If I could have just one wish
I would be a photograph

On a permanent Monday morning
Get lost or fall asleep
When the yellow cats are yawning
Around the back of Beasley Street