ONE STREET OVER

ONE STREET OVER

Those not-so-mean streets one street over

Once I loitered rejected around the corner

As they all party played on without me

Russell and Simon and Michael

And Paddy and Tracy and Gill

Names from the past I never saw again

Once we uniformed up to big school

Childhood and friendships flickered out

One by one as we grew up and moved away

Not so much a lost childhood as one mislaid

The smell of Michael’s back garden tent

Deep blue on a hot summer’s afternoon

Corgi cars crashed in vices and collisions

Toys in flames as bonfires smouldered

The leather seats of an old Morris Minor

That suddenly leapt into life one afternoon

Above a precarious garden plummet

Next to Russell’s soon-to-be lost dad’s

Green Bedford van with the sliding doors

All those other dads that died or went away

I don’t remember childhood much

Time’s blind has it blinkered and buried

Some memories improve forgotten

Apart from on those sleepless nights

When the midnight ghouls want to bite

Fragments prod me awake to recall

The writing on the bed head

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in biro

Bath time games and other funless fun

Keys on chains growing up too young

Swinging golf clubs catching bloody noses

Endlessly bicycled dark nights and summer days

Secret Patrol clubs; lost darts in the long grass

Endless hours on the Bonks building dens

Muddy streams oranged by scrapyard rust

The telling off after the games in the cellar

A dark incident that got out of hand

I never see them now except in dreams

Those sometimes mean streets one street over

Maybe other children play there now

Martin A W Holmes, November 2017