Robert Verdon, #120, The Sky is Low

… and then I thought the park wind said:

when I was 22

(but not for long)

I passed over

school playgrounds

of long empty silences and

slippery-dips and monkey bars,

and adults who still remembered the school,

often in a state of inebriated velleity.

I could not put their ferrous music into my words,

nor the smell of

wet tubular steel and tanbark and blood in the mouth,

nor the stolen sky,

the flashing blood and tawny port,

the sudden bright blast of the siren

the shattering of flagon glass into constellations and the

devilish bevelling of the self, through sleeping rough

in the old school grounds,

just the universal aching

… and then it dropped again.