I remember the last time I saw the scrawled graffiti on the storm drain wall.

Although it was written with an uncomfortable hand,

its message would make an angel weep in frustration

and the effect it had on me was to change things for a while.

 

I would hide in that drain pipe when times got rough,

when thinking in my room about events and others

words upon my soul and mine, perhaps more hurtful,

that would scar their heart and have me scar my arms.

 

There never seems to a good place to hide away until

you have a home in which to secrete yourself into.

Your childhood bedroom only a sanctuary when you

have been deemed to have done nothing wrong but become

a place of sterile abandon the moment you cross an imagined line.

 

The storm drain seemed to run the whole length of Sunderland Avenue

and crossed the Boston Road without looking each way

until it went past the houses at the back of Fairfield close,

past an old friends house who moved too soon away

and the girl I first kissed at eleven, she two years older than I,

in the newly built houses with just our two coats to sit upon.

 

The newly built houses, her domain when she needed to think,

I kept the storm drain in the childhood divorce in ’82.

The separation amicable and even now I think with fondness

of the childhood games of question and answer in which she

invariably won.

 

One bad evening in ’86 I stormed out of the house,

the teenage hormones and testosterone pissing me off

and the sound of Rush no longer appeasing the torture

and I found my end of the storm drain empty.

No music except the concerto going round my head

and looking up I saw the words,” Ian, there are better places to hide”.

with not many kids in that area, it was always assumed

that all the adults knew the kids by sight and one of them must had seen me

forever sulking in trembling agitation

and got fed up enough to clamber down the embankment

and leave a message in part for me, down in my depths,

to take heed of.

 

I never went back again to that storm drain

as I found a better place to hide,

the inside of my head making the perfect getaway vehicle.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015.