Murder town prayer

The plaster has a star
where your fist
made a prayer
this town is as ugly
as a trucker’s gutful
forearms graffiti blue
with the thousand-mile stare
the surgeon stitched and excised
peacock feather sunsets
a dead fish
nailed to the wall
with the silent accusation 
of failure’s mockful trophy
when you fast approach
deceleration frenziedly singing
as if freedom were just another word
all the houses
desperately homeless
dumped here in sixty-seven
in three parts, nail-gunned together
with that executioner’s
haphazard, abattoir inelegance
a monstrous angularity 
in the canvas, struts and rails
of rank and empty perambulators
St Anthony’s bloody knuckles
when the bluster changes 
pews filled soon enough
the roses by the crooked gate
with that
scowl and bloodshed hue
of the evening opencut
gleaming and abandoned
the shining, semi-precious stratification 
of a half a century’s
still unhealing wounds