Semi-gothic, and 1910 incised
in the stone arch which existed,
in the mind of the teacher,
as the guillotine point for
his aristocracy of words.
The old desks were a braille;
that summer afternoons blindness
afflicting the classroom,
where the blunt penknife of
your mind hacked at the minutes.
We could all have been
the mythical Kilroy;
that universal absence
where my balloon brain
bobbed across the fields
of daydreams, burst with
the thwack of a ruler.
We got our Wordsworth
in winter, the slush of
school milk and the pot belly
stove popping, apoplectic,
like Mr Sims, trying
to instil wonder with decibels;
with bluebottle droning
as the class wandered
lonely as a cloud,
waiting, in that pervading grey,
for the first, fat, snowflake.
This is the place experience goes to
to forget it ever happened. Where
sound is suffocated at birth; a sea
to give you distance from the troubled
land, the high valley that rumours of
the ocean do not reach. With all the
latest security measures; alarmed, no
eye contact or distress of skin. It shuts
like an eye, ceasing the world. After
death, before birth, there I would be
while they turn away, weeping and
forgetting. Or where some mother
that I crouch within, eases an aching
back and wonders at my reluctance.