Childhood

The station lamps hum in soft amber.

I await the sound of the metallic clicks on the throbbing tracks which
emerge like capsized masts in liquid light.

The air is tired. When I awoke this morning, not enough people had
borrowed its breath for their own.

Now it feels used, deflated.

Warm summer rain stains the platform.
I smell the wet heated tarmac that reminds me of halted play times and
damp cotton dresses that clung to itchy knees.

Nights where you lay half asleep on cool sheets, birds still singing,
voices under your window like fading colours.
The dark never seemed to come even when parents had drawn a mask across
the sky.

Tea-time under the cherry tree where blossom was confetti that
pirouetted in to your glass and dissolved.
The wilting sun drew back in to the sky or melted in to the tree tops,
the leaves dressed in the same colour to greet it, rustling as the
globe pulled the plug on the sky.

Like the hypnotic tides of water breathing in to steal the glistening
shells and out to toss the sharp ones in the path of naked toes,
the sun was just a huge light bulb in the sky illuminating all it could
reach.

And the scent of encroaching darkness came hand in hand with a slice in
the air which was to herald years later the return of a dew-eyed
dawn.