Mossend (incomplete)

I was brought up in a town
Made of steel and built on coal
Work with which my forebears
had spent their lives and play'd their role

My parents are not workers they're a dawning middle class
Standing on historic effort in the shade of someone's past
We work as if we might try to restore our self respect
While knowing that it's tiny, insignificant in effect
Even a mite upon the total of their endeavour and their forfeit
So that I may live oblivious, living careless, spending surfeit

And now when I return, I see that tiny little town
I see the spec of mottled brown, with tiny houses clinging round
I see the track-marks linking specs, the fact'ries rusting in the wet
and pitted pock-marks left by fathers who mined for family bread

I see the broken white goals standing where they dug their hole
I see school mates and their kids, all, on the dole
I see the scarred grey hill with the steel work's blood red bones
I see the foundry that cooled in monstrous nightly groans

I see the school standing in the shade of the local priest
I see the railway line pervading and providing the release
The escape route, the getaway, parochial-puncture
The booze, the music, Glasgow capital of culture

And yet,

Nostalgia works in mysterious themes
the things I return to, that appear in my dreams
are rarely the city and they rarely inspire,
instead it's coal and the foundry fire

So will I return, to the town where I grew
Did it do me good? Should I expose my kids too?
Will my bones reside in the coal and the rust
Does it matter at all when it all goes to dust?

And what about my partner and her family past?
Is it mine which takes precedent, should my line outlast?
Or rather, let's go, pioneer a new line
and perplex historians in a thousand years time.