The Courtyard.

It was a secret,

one of those places you

were not aware of

until you were properly ready

to understand the significance of the change

it would bring

into your life and the preparation

into the adult that would stand bare naked one night

thirty years later

as the world became a more lonely place.

 

I found myself recalling the piece

that landed me my first part

inside the hallowed halls of the most exciting building

in the whole of Bicester and started to hum it,

appropriately with tears stinging my eyes,

the burning sensation, hot, deserted, all eyes upon me, nervous

but carrying on all the way determined

as Marillion’s Script

landed me the part of the best friend at The Double,

I never lost on any playground equipment that day

but one day

I did indeed play the boy who fell in love

with the clown

and her sweet singing serenade.

 

The Garth may have been the place to kiss a girl

for the first time, that sweetness as they gently nuzzled in,

and I was more nervous but hid it well each time

as their lips parted gently to reveal honesty in a future ode

that would adorn the back of a grey, 1980s text book,

more suited for the insanity of Maths than song lyrics

and my own feeble attempts at trying to imitate

The Alarm or the teenage anger at a world that I didn’t fit into,

until that day I crossed the threshold of the Courtyard

and like dear Elizabeth’s mother I allowed my head to

be placed on the block.

 

The Garth may have been the place to kiss a girl,

all women now and with their own beautiful stories to tell,

their planned seduction techniques now lost as we enter

the final phase,

no longer teenagers and yet inside The Courtyard, the ghosts

would come with pleasing smiles as they show me the image

of how I was taught to kiss properly, staged and acted

out for a hundred discerning adults to watch.

 

My father

only ever saw me perform the once on stage

and if it had to be anywhere, then inside the small room

to the right of the entrance, laid back as he watched me

lay on a bed of nails, the spikes leaving tiny red, open pin pricks

into my scared skin, even through the dungarees which I insisted

made me feel like in tune with a worker

in a far off country and in who I felt affection for,

despite the growing tension that hung in the air to us as kids

in Bicester, was the right place to see it.

 

The Courtyard, there was no place like it

as we grew up, but we were not welcome until

we were ready to lay down childish things and learn

how to pretend, how to act our way in a society

that even frowned upon us

spending our Saturday mornings, and perhaps

our Mondays too, in the only decent record shop

where I first learned the lines to an entire epic

that would see me join the world and feel

the despair at the game being terminated.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015