Mike Garry recently read this new poem on BBC Radio Manchester. If you’re coming to see Angels with Manky Faces at the Dancehouse in November, this will get you right in the mood. In the mean time, check out Mike’s work here.
Angels with Manky Faces
Close your eyes
Go back in time
Picture this in your mind
A summer sky without sunshine
Pigs dogs and rats are running wild
The smell of shite the buzz of flies
Pub and mill on every corner
Street alive with disorder
Open sewer smell of sulphur
Poverty of the lowest order
Echoed clog
Echoed hoofs
Dripping rain from dripping roofs
The iron grind steel rimmed cartwheels
Music laughter a choir of screams
Ancoats
Circa 1880
Decadence awash
Vice aplenty
Brothels in hovels dogfights down stairs
Bare-knuckle boxers
Shebeens everywhere
Five families share one house with two rooms
Raucous cries from the singing saloons
Tots pedal sin running door to door
Jugs of ale and gin fly back and forth
Spreading tales of Scuttling Gangs
Who lay down their lives for a small plot of land
Wearing clogs with shined and sharpened brass tips
Belt and Buckle wrapped tight round their fists
A short back and sides and tattooed fore arms
With the name of their true love within a red heart
The Bengal tigers the buffalo bill the meadow lads maim and kill
They’re chalking their codes on the sides of pub walls
All for one
One for all…………………………………………..
Open your eyes
Return to modern times
Walk the streets and you will find
A summer sky without sunshine
Dogs as weapons running wild
The smell of weed the buzz of flies
The pubs and mills on every corner
Have been converted to apartments
Cars, buses, trucks speeding by
The smell of carbon monoxide
Bouncing rain on tarmac streets
Different songs different beats
Ancoats on the cusp of 2010
History repeats itself again
Tots on bikes pedalling sin
In the form of crack cocaine and heroine
And telling tales of the Manchester gangs
Cheetah, Gooch, Doddington
Chalking codes on mobile phones
In pristine trainers and logo’d clothes
Mothers cry into Rosary Beads
A son is gone and he’s only sixteen
On Facebook on t shirts and tattooed shoulder
The letters R.I.P. and a list of fallen street soldiers
A copter hovers, a distant siren sings
There’s blood on the pavement the smell of death in the wind
Boy battles boy with knife and gun
A mother worries – it could be your son
Gone are the scuttlers the battles the chases
But there’ll always be angels with manky faces
(c) Mike Garry, October 2009
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