Back to the old house

I am transported there
My heart and head
Is where my home is
Nothing has changed, everything has changed.
The shops shrunken and shabby and stuck
I have moved on but they remained forever
The kids on the street meaner, nastier, stupider
Or am I just getting older?
And those words
That spelt the name of the street
That I lived in for eighteen years
Once as important as my own name
Now unfamiliar.
I walk walk walked
Past the dead end alley
And the berries crushed
into the ground like brains
As a child
I tried to avoid them
But now
The street is a photograph
And I am a giant
So I step and step and step.
Finally I reach you
My heart, my mother, my father,
My brothers and lost best friends.
Home.
It could have been then
The cat skitters by
Crying, left behind.
It feels like you were my lover.
Behind my doors and windows
A new family lived
The plaque, ‘Roseland’, prised from the wall
I see me within you
Ghosts
My dad throwing my mum out of the door
My brother punching a hole in the wall
I lost my first tooth
My glasses, my braces
My virginity
And my mother between these walls.
Inside
We were still inside
The five of us inside
The golden lion knocker on the door
I remember a time
When I wasn’t allowed to cross this road
Was I ever that small?



_______________

Observatory

Ian showed me

a ticket

ripped, with a phone number

on the back.

Might have been

thrown out weeks ago

But now eerily kept,

Preserved.

He showed it to

me like a prize:

World Trade Center

Observatory

September, 2000

‘How big was it?’

I asked, with the

naivety of one

who has never seen

the like

of a skyscraper.

‘Bigger than you could ever imagine,’

he replied.






_____________