Twelv-ish fix you, hooded,
through a grubby picture window
cocky, streetlit, pinching rollie puffs
like Scalextric rev-starts.
You were gone most nights,
lick of baccy on the pindrop landing
spray can rattle, gawky slink
up the garden path. I'm smitten,
infant acolyte, in thrall
to your nineties cool -
cig on the ear, ironic Nike -
how you play without the cheat codes.
The way you never quite
seemed to fit the space
to which you’d been assigned.
When I was old enough to know
you said there was a place in the park
the estate boys all called Heaven,
sunken storm drain stashed
inside the trees, where they lay
huffing marker pens, melting
smiles into their fingers,
doing all they could to feel anything
more than ex-suburban numb.
In absentia, it turned legend;
young life waypoint, teenage airlock,
hallowed chapel of mile-high drift.
I looked for Heaven, when shit went south,
but the town had filled it in.
Steve Head is a poet and novelist from the leafy dullness of the London suburbs. He started writing poetry in an attempt to decrypt the unfathomable weirdness of adolescence and continued when he realised that it made him appear somewhat cooler than he actually is. Steve is currently based in Paris. Twitter: @stevewrites3