Best Steel Mill Poems

My grandfather on my father’s side, was a pecker-toothed sidle who raped his 
daughter when she was just ten. He threw down vodka from an eternal well and took my father out to buy prostitutes when he was just fifteen... It was here that my...

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Hamilton, Ontario,
Is a steel making town.
You can hardly tell it, 
When the sun goes down.

The slagpiles glow as the big furnace throws,
Another batch of ore.
Big ingots sit on the railway cars,
Behind the big steel doors.

They call this place DeFasco
One of the largest in the land.
It...

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Pardon

From dawn's early light, a gradual state takes flight
Idiosyncrasies dance in my head
Break in prayer, then back again
Could it be the past or is it the present?
It's this part of me I've come to resent
Call the doctor, no call your mother
Call on God there is...

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I can still remember
back when I was a kid
I had a friend called Millie
and we were made for each other
just like peanut butter and jelly
on a piece of crusty bread

on a Sunday afternoon
I'd go round to Millie's house
and we'd sit in the kitchen and talk
Millie's...

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I never studied the downed limbs before Sandy. 
I was savoring the muscle burn from herringboning my way up a hill or fretting over a ping in my back, the price of macho competitions in the steel mill of my youth, 
Where one didn’t just...

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Headlights messaged through midnight windows 
Curtainless glass unable to subdue the urgency 
Car obtained in street nearby was theirs temporarily
Three hour drive to ship leaving island next morning

Two sixteen year old girls barely registered surprise 
Departure in stolen car and pre booked boat tickets
Organised by...

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A wild pagan, the wind, a spectral masseuse,
  Blunt cudgel and claw dipped in liquid frost,
To corrupt and ravage the pit head columns,
  As black trees threshed and leaves were tossed;
Slapped against satanic steel mill backdrops,
  Thrust over crusty cracked fissures of...

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Fan spinning with an uneven blade
Frogs singing midnight serenades
Traffic stopping horns blowing
Drunks stagger
A man yells
Watch where your going
Horns playing jazz upbeat and in time
Smokers chit chatting on balconies with wine
The steel mill whistle sounds in the air
Pub screams loudly drinking on a dare
Coltrane plays on...

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I was born in a landlocked getaway town
Where all the colors were black, gray, or brown.
Jobs at the steel mill were ratcheting down.
It was not in my future to stay.

So, I took a long walk off a very short pier,
An unschooled, untraveled recruit buccaneer
On a...

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It’s Thursday evening, almost nine
foot-tap, fiddle, and banjo time
with juke-box tales of love’s romance
the county jail, a second chance
for bourbon belles or backroad trucks
mail-box motels, living on luck
from one horse towns to city bars
acoustic sounds that drive guitars
harmonicas with prairie dust
Americana, steel mill rust
cornbread kitchen,...

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Honesty is our soul
Our work is coking coal
Midst coarse iron foundries
And steel mill boundaries
We live, love, and labor
Sing, dance, and play tabor...!

Though coal dust pollution,
Finds little dilution
We in England's Midlands
Sleep and wake on coal sands
Bobowler, snout, and shark
Are our chatting hallmark

We've no wealth, but good...

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steel mill smoke stack
anvil and hammer
my will for sure
sprinkle the cotton
hot steam on my face
press down hard
don't beak the board
chore of the sixties...

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An eight-year-old in ’29, one of seven kids,
Living in a steel mill town when it hit the skids.
They watched the whole thing spiral down, not much else to do.
She never got to finish school. My mama was a true Depression baby.

She’d talk of things they...

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