My right eye bled
and I could not fight back,
if I had, I may have ended up
in a worse condition, one that
surely would have had me
as close to death
as the day my appendix
no longer grumbled
and instead shot poison
into my system almost to the point
of no return.
My body stretched out like dough
being rolled out to make bread
for the hungry teens
on Cooper School field
and my battered face, sharp elbow dented
How will it feel to see you again?
Part of me is terrified, not of you, but
of the memories you will bring to town
and lay at my door mat as you knock repeatedly,
Time your ally as you surprise me with a giant
version of pass the parcel, my layers since leaving you
regretfully, in some cases with genuine tears of affection,
stripped back, the me of now, just a school boy in bigger
trousers, longer hair, still angry at the world;
regressing through Time until the music
stops.
There were many who I held a candle to
in a world full of chalk dust, well aimed projectiles
and the despair of being told that you
were not good enough to breathe the same air
as the teacher’s favourite Rottweiler,
snarling, punishing with savage artistry
and then finished off with the red pen death
of being
wrong, wrong, wrong.
There were many, my diary attests to this unhappy fact,
who in one way or another made my life more bearable
when not in English, History or the love of the drama
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,
The teachers, the tutors,
the staff, the head, the unpaid support workers
all bend their head in silent prayer,
know that the God of school simply doesn’t care
about their plight
their lot in life,
their unsaid collective fear
that there will never be a person to emerge from any year
who will make the school stand out
give the badge and crest some polish and stout
who they can hold up as a shining example,
the one person for whom they can, with gushing pride, let new pupils sample
Oh dear God, we are back here again
on a Monday morning, the routine the same
put that fag out, get ready for gym
who’s kissing who, the chances of an A received so slim.
Dear God, the pupil’s friend
to whom unbreakable excuses you do send,
give us this day our daily bread
and let not the science teacher ruin our hard fought street cred,
let not our own personal bully, be it fellow pupil of sadistic teacher
see us today, let them not use us as a bottom feeding creature.
I have spent the day with ghosts
and the twighlight
with spectres from a time I never wanted to let go.
I remember you all, I have felt like a bookkeeper in my heart
as each memory grows sepia with time
and the sadness I feel at the names of fallen,
hurt and punish my thoughts, deep
unyielding and untimely ends.
The pain of memory is such that in the light
offered by the shadow of a single forty watt sun
and the dim illumination of a progressive typewriter, begrudgingly
There is a shelter in the park that acted as a goal,
the football aimed squarely at whoever was unfortunate enough
to act as the keeper, imagining they were Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence
or in my case the great Gordon Banks or even
Bert Trautman.
Not that I often went in goal, I didn’t like diving
on to bare concrete and seeing my T-shirt
ripped to shreds in a strange, weird way of portraying machismo.
I made allowances when some of the girls that we knew
If I could have had anybody as my first drinking partner,
the first one for whom the tempting taste of
bitter
in a dimpled handled glass, offered over
with great ceremony from a woman with biceps
protruding, bursting out from underneath a starch filled blouse
more obscenely than an unsightly black tar mole covered in three curly grey hairs,
who suspected I was underage
but knew I could control the art of a pint without making a scene
in the Bicester darkness and in the company of pre-cancer darts players cussing