There’s a pack of students 

tearing around

the gutted aquarium halls 

of the old telephone exchange,

the condemned terrace row,

the manor house, the office block, 

burgled bare,

shorn of cables and lead-lined roofs.

The rough-looking kids 

from the local school 

filming their adventures 

down the sewers, 

they post their tour 

of the ward I worked on

before it closed down. Their commentary

on what they think happened 

in the ghostly ‘Asylum’,

their Scooby-Doo theme park,

is unrecognisable to me.

Disturb that wet, decaying pile

of leaves in your back yard.

Lift the manhole cover 

leading down

to blue-green moss 

and mould, steadily 

eating the sofa you never bought 

with the lover you only picked up in a club 

and had an awkward one night stand with.

The sofa hangs precariously 

on and off a joist

in a gaping hole in the sinking floor;

and there in the corner is a cake,

a rotting time capsule 

of mushrooms and spores 

with a miniature you 

and that lover on top.

Eighteen and freshly free 

from home, I joined any university club

that would have me. Signed up 

to the caving soc. for weekends away 

in borrowed Land Rovers, 

electric lamps mounted 

on mud-scuffed helmets,

wetsuits under boiler suits. 

Changing by the roadside

in the Mendips at dawn,

then tracing the thin river 

into darkness

then darker than that.

Past delicate stalagmites, 

tiny blind spiders.

Till the river cuts 

through the limestone seam, 

sculpting a cliff face 

beneath the hillside. 

Not enough for some —

there was a splinter group 

who never stopped talking 

about disused mines.

How they wanted to descend 

from wrecked pump-houses. 

How they wanted to read 

the names of the miners 

that were on the last shift 

before closure, 

carved into 

the hard-packed earth.

Well I have mining blood

or so I believe

in my maternal line,

but I would not go 

into those manmade underworlds,

no not for love nor money.

Even walking in daylight,

sunburnt September, around 

the ancient industrial ruins

of the Ding Dong mine in Cornwall, 

I looked on the stones

in the still-standing walls 

with suspicion.

As if some had been lifted

from the megalithic circles

near Boskednan 

and the surrounding moorlands —

the malevolence in the gorse —

the perfectly circular pit-shaft

was a bottomless challenge

I fought to ignore —

I think I know 

what I would do 

down there: 

The gallons of water 

I’d pour on the ground

until out of the soup of it

would rise my biological father. 

And I’d hold his head 

while the earth filled his mouth, 

his nostrils and lungs, 

and while that subterranean 

quickpool 

hardened again into concrete. 

Then, perhaps while quietly singing

a throwaway tune to myself  

and without ever 

looking back, 

I’d climb out.