My father was a skilled contractor then;
if it wasn’t metal dust, nauseating welder fumes or cigarette smoke
it was the pervasive odour of fish boxes piled high in lorries,
the scent of their deaths mingling with the exhaust smog.

(Engine grease, grinded down screw heads and black fingerprints on sausage baps at lunch.)

He mostly maintained the machinery in yards
and factories, where fish rolled on greased up conveyors.
The end of the century was gritty in Torry, Trainspotting-esque menageries of
fish merchants, rogue traders and petrol huffers.

(Industrial scraps, methadone queues with chipped teeth and school beatings.)

Growling frozen goods lorries, pacing up and down yards
eager to collect their pounds of (fish) flesh: all the while blowing smoke
in the face of pedestrians nearby, like their drivers did when they left the cabin.

(Coloured phlegm spat onto blackened kerbs like arbitrarily sprouting bracken.)

Sometimes there’d be a problem with a machine used to cure meats,
at factories that produced more than the seas bounty and you could
walk into a thick, sticky soup. 

(Meat brisket and smoked pork sausage, haddock slices dipped into chicken gravy.)

I was a child, assisting my father in handing screwdrivers and carrying materials,
under the premise I would be drafted through experience; remade from a troubled youth
into a productive worker.

(Like ice poles left in the sun and refrozen brittle.)

Twenty years later I can only recall the filth and fear, a dying industry
spitting its furious final words out over silver streets.
Granite sparkles like fish scales shorn from their hides,
stuck to your jeans for weeks.