This is the place
where the road ended and holes in the ground began.

Conceived by international interests
and a worlds hunger for certain metals,
the holes spat out a small dusty town...
in the middle of no-where...with that one road leading in

that one road
snaking through bog, scrub spruce and rock, on a cheap asphalt line
all the way back to the world.

Certain interests conceived me as well...
and in 1961, around the time the Quarrymen played the Cavern,
for the first time as the Beatles...
I began wailing duets with shift whistles.

In a company cottage hospital, in this company cottage town
the dust of the latter was soon upon me
and having never been able to brush it all away
it still brings to mind moments...

like these...
my own mother lode,
memories, mineralized
clear and sharp
crystalline and perfect.