19th August, '05

I grew up in the shadows of planes.
There on the front lawn
of my grandmother's house,
where hide and seek
and other pastimes
would be interrupted
every three minutes or so,
by what to my mind
were giant steel birds
gliding over the rooftops.
Tiles shivered and single
glazed windows rattled
in their wake,
while I gazed up with fingers
in my ears
and wondered
what they ate.

I grew up in the shadows of planes.
There in the back garden
of the house where
my first memories
are still stored
in boxes in the loft.
Every so often I climb
up the ladder
to when I was eight,
and look at old black and
white photographs
take on a bit of colour
(yellow hair, a sepia chair)
before decomposing.

Other treasures are there too —
now brittle baubles
of my boyhood;
board games,
passive action figures,
and the once-white police cab
I spent countless hours in,
grazing my knees
as I furiously pedalled across
the gigantic lawn,
which inexplicably shrunk
to the size of a scab
over the years.

I grew up in the shadows of planes,
and live in them still.