Going Home

It hasn't changed.
The shops, the station, the queue
Of traffic stretching back from the lights,
All the same.
On the corner, the pub where I had my first drink,
But that is in the future, today.
I wish it was changed, unrecognisable,
Make the image in my head only mine:
'I remember when this was all fields'.
I glare instead at girls in my old school uniform
Passing, ignoring me, in their time.
They know too, how it looks in the early morning,
Yellow tinged with tiredness from the bus,
When the top deck was a fug of last minute homework
And shouting, charming, if you didn't know what it was.
But seeing it again, I remember,
On the bus stuck interminably at the lights,
How this junction used to look in its reflection;
An alien place, unknowable,
A different suburb under different suns,
And how I used to long to open the mirror
And step through, never to come back.