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Bad Biography<\/strong><\/p>\n His home town had glory *<\/p>\n One side of his childhood was the sea \u2013 brown, sometimes green, never blue \u2013 <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Craig Dobson<\/strong>\u2019s had work in Agenda, Antiphon, Butcher\u2019s Dog, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter\u2019s House, The London Magazine, Magma, Neon, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, Stand, The Rialto <\/em>and Under The Radar.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bad Biography His home town had glory holes poked through its park\u2019s bog walls. Outside, a granny in a tartan coat rummaged bins and fed club-footed pigeons for hours. Old fridges and sofas loitered the streets. Newsagents sold single fags to kids, and mags in paper bags to solitary characters in macs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20659"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20709,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20659\/revisions\/20709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nholes poked through its park\u2019s
\nbog walls. Outside, a granny in a
\ntartan coat rummaged bins and fed
\nclub-footed pigeons for hours. Old fridges
\nand sofas loitered the streets. Newsagents sold single
\nfags to kids, and mags in paper bags to solitary characters
\nin macs. Gangs hung round betting shops and cafes where
\ntattooed men rated tabloid tits and rolled smokes one-handed
\nwhile playing fruit machines all day. Their wives waited for pay
\nback home on bleak estates, and their skinhead kids kicked their
\nway from glue-sniffing playgrounds to giro nights in pubs and strip
\nclub bars, setting light to joy-ride cars in wasteland on the edge of town.<\/p>\n
\nwhere jobless men fished for nothing and drunken couples fucked at night.
\nBy day, lonely nutters wandered the prom, mumbling the hours away,
\nwhile bad-tempered tourists scoffed ice-creams from the rusting pier
\nto the games arcade and back again, in drizzling summer rain.
\nThe stone beach was clogged with gobs of tar, used needles
\nand dead crabs. Hunched on outflow pipes, thin gulls
\neyed the dog shit and windblown litter, or scavenged
\nscraps of fish and chips. Crowding the seafront,
\nsingle star hotels and paint-peeled B&Bs
\nannounced in rows of faded signs:
\nSea View, Zanzibar, Atlantic Breeze.
\nUnderneath, always, \u2018vacancies\u2019.<\/p>\n