Now that I’m pushing sixty, I spend time,
Much more time than I used to, looking back
Instead of forwards. Back, over my shoulder,
Down the hill of years, stand long-demolished pubs
Where we sank our first illicit pints, in streets, levelled
now,
Where we had rare, exotic snogs at bus-stops,
Or, more often, disappointed, caught the last train home.
Was that even me, those years ago?
I’m not looking for my lost youth,
I know exactly where he is, he’s prisoner
Inside flat planes of photographs,
Black and white, I know him all too well
Awkward and gawky, John Lennon glasses,
Flares and tennis shoes, back in the days
Before they got called `trainers’.
Places like this don’t help: my past’s online
As if I was already history’s exhibit. Why am I here?
Because my old school friend (now lives in Wales!)
Sent me a “link” to click on, and up pops
This photo, taken 1967; both the message
And the medium of transmission, wireless through air,
Would have seemed witchcraft to us, way back then.
Boothferry Playing Fields, yeah, there we are,
Boys and girls both, fixed in our best blue uniforms,
Like specimens in a museum diorama;
Staring out into a future that became unravelled,
Lots of different lives, shorter for some than others,
Blank pages, still to be written, tangled skeins
Ravelling and unravelling again, blood in new veins,
New names to be grafted onto vacant branches
Of the budding family tree.
Their eyes ask what I want of them, especially the girls,
With their prim white kneesocks; that’s easy answered!
I want the same thing now
I wanted then, but more so!
Though `now’ would be more difficult, for me, `now’ would
involve
Me ironing out my wrinkles, standing up (a miracle!)
And shrugging off the rucksack of the decades
That I carry, back-bending baggage,
– and for them, much
harder still,
Changing back their names, forsaking kids and husbands,
Or rising from the pages of the dead,
Pulling on tight jeans, frizzing their hair, getting stoned
again,
Wearing beads and headbands and
Coming through my screen, their virgin presence
Filling the room with the sudden scent of patchouli
- Filling my life with what might once have been.
