This Jericho Road

 This Jericho Road

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I actually wrote this in the mid-1980's, during the depths of Thatcherism, when I was an angry young man. Now I'm cynical and jaded, and things are as bad - if not worse - now as they were then. It was originally based on the village where I lived in County Durham, which had been a pit community, but was struggling in the aftermath of the decline of the coal industry. Now there seems to be a deeper sense of desolation, not just in the old industrial heartlands, but right across the board. 

Welcome to the New Third World.

…And God sees this neighbourhood

the run-down houses, the dead-end streets

the doors need fixing, the weather’s been blowing in for weeks…

broken windows, plywood curtains

in the darkness a starving hound

howls for Joshua to blow his trumpet

and make these walls come tumbling down

…And God sees the factory

the girls all wishing the hours away

and Maurice in his convenience store

changing the years on the sell-by dates

and down at the bakery, Yvette’s packed her bags

she’s gone again –

‘think I’ll head for the library –

anything just to get out of this rain

The sun comes up and the sun goes down

another day slides away

so we take in our arms all the dreams we can hold

there’s no tomorrow – just another day after today

and a long walk down

this Jericho road

We’re just small people

small people leading dead small lives

we wake up in the morning,

we move around, then go to bed at night

and the time in-between – that’s the time we try to forget

we count every minute of every hour of every day

and at the end of it all, we’ve run out of time

that’s it, it’s over, there’s no time left