Council House Ghost

There are no headless horsemen, White Ladies
or rattling chains in this ghost story;
he died in the chair from black lung, coughing;
the coal dust that did for him, and the fags.
In life, he’d been a nasty piece of work;
like those blokes at the pictures my grandma
warned me about in their fetid raincoats,
Brylcreemed hair. We played Ouija and asked him:
who are you? I’m a G. H. O. S. T.
On Christmas eve we saw him; sports jacket,
flannels, crouching over the gas meter.
At night he seethed; smoking phantom Woodbines.
Enough! I brayed. He slammed the cellar door,
and threw a bin across the kitchen floor.