The Wretched Mills

Petroleum rivers in their veins

They drink from the drains

Eat from the gutters

A generation shackled to cackling looms

While fog chokes the infants

In weary cradles and languid wombs

And they are told, in no uncertain terms

That God knows every man under the Sun

But 'tis spiteful lunacy

Ye who have never beheld the Sun

Who is to say you are under it

Like the frozen rooftop

Rip's the toes from pigeon's feet

So too the mule's

On desperate hands a-stamping

Weaving fingers 'mongst textiles

O'er this weary clock face

All digits in a circle

All hands in their place

It's been a long walk

On these tattered souls

Just to be slot

Odd cogs even-shaped holes

Grinding down and down

Like a tapeworm in the gut

The shifted of paradigms

Sandstone, and white noise

Let these mainsprings rust

There's lots to be thrown in

But into what Jeremiah's pit

Do we shuffle, starved and sunken?

For as long as it keeps productivity on the rise

They'll do their utmost

To grind down your particle size

Score by score, scar by scar

Seven veils for seven eagles of the ninth

Sold short, the clearance sale, the golden years

All spines are spires now

All blue-shifted and gifted

With their own cubic metre of breathing space

Petroleum rivers in their veins

They drink from the drains, eat from the gutters

A generation shackled to cackling looms

While fog chokes the infants

In weary cradles and languid wombs

All piers a'peering

Appearing all sunlight on walnut

Barrel-chested and salt-invested

Gilded limpets on family trees

Out on a limb but not all at sea

Sombre oil wept from betwixt charcoal lips

Naught but lubricant for concrete lungs

And it'll take more than a golden city's glister

To convince that it's not just glass

And paint and well-placed-mirrors