Village childhood

Village childhood 

Terraced from infancy in a hand-stoned cottage,

warm-palmed, sash-windowed, green door

to the womb’s dark passage across 

the scrubbed step inside. There, the more 

he stares into the black-leaded grate,

the more the fire disabuses, and as

the blowing-down smoke genuflects,

it carries his dreams back up the chimney,

and his eyes close. Out on the chapel-pubbed street

the accepting night creeps the corners away.

The same dark that, as he gets older,

stumbles him unsure-footed across the slag-stone

back roads towards that which lurks around

every corner furthered farther with his pals

as they purport ‘it’s no big deal’. 

This blackmange of testosterone

on loan from time and again 

they push daring to the limits of

the village’s turned gaze. The dark 

that allows the flash of a chip shop,

an oasis of chrome and a sweet
‘tweet now?’

Rediscovered, it is an empty sarcophagus 

blown of tattered bandages and dried tears;

toasting-fork love in the indoors of days, 

and all the ways he meandered blasé,

to make his way out of the labyrinthine

kaleidoscope of villagers, and the wicked 

ways of boys running in their full sap. 

The dark lodestone from the cradle

of his awakening to the drooping of

his final eyes wandering back there in

thought as soft as the deft of sleep,

deep in the radiance of his last goodbye.