When We Were Kids We Bombed

Past the boarded up top shop, empty plastic jars still labelled:
spangles, candy cigarettes, white mice, pixie sticks and gob stoppers.
A chant for hands sweaty with copper coins.
Bomb it down to my Aunt’s (and the drunk she married),
my cot stillborn, swaddled in their attic; dusty.

Past poor Manny with his pornographic matchstick tricks,
too old to hang around with kids and still riding a BMX.
Bomb it over the cobbles sprouting through black tarmac like weeds in spring,
into a place our Mums don’t play, beneath brambles and beech.
We carve out our regime, our golden rules in the earth:

No girls, no kissing, no rockers, no punks, no big kids and no poofs –
except for John because he’s the hardest kid.
I have survived another term as a maniac on the grazed playground.
I want to rest and pick the scabs on my elbows and bury my blue and orange duffel coat
with tiger teeth, with full military honours. No one listens.

Lee demands to play army; John tells tales about Kevin Sharrocks,
who found mucky mags in Pigeon Park and keeps them behind his rabbit hutch
in his dead Dad’s shed but big kids come with bum fluff lips and we bomb it.
Down the backs past the girl who ate her chemistry set, all the periodic table
and died ten years later in a car crash.

Past my older sister who sits in a booth in Ferretti’s window giving me V’s
as her cheap boyfriend orders one coke and two straws
with shrapnel dredged from the musty crombie he wears all year round
and who walks at a forty five degree angle because he has a bad case of subsidence.
And nothing will shore up their relationship.

And nothing will keep back the summers, not TV, not Billy Joel, not Kim Wilde,
not The Jam because each season outruns us and when we were kids,
there were cheap comics, stickers, penny sweets and Manny and his dirty matchsticks,
and dens, and trees your Mum told you not to climb and sisters to flee.
And now, and now I can’t even run when all I ever did as a kid was bomb.