Ten Years Ago Today

-----
.a foreword.

This was my entry to GRIST 2009, a poetry competition and eventual compendium being judged by Joanne Harris and Simon Armitage.  I'm not sure when we are made aware of what's included and what's not!

This poem is extremely personal, and the closest I feel I've got in encapsulating the dreams and whims of my childhood while comparing them to the relative solemn normality of my adulthood.  I used to live in a row of terraces in suburbs cased in by a small forest, and a railway line which ran through it.  You could see the line to Harlow from my window, and you'd hear it every hour.

This poem is dedicated to that unique, idiosyncratic experience, and how I'll never get it back.
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ten years ago today
...trains flew through my neighbourhood.

in my room
cacophonies of speed, orchestrations of efficiency
but for ten seconds, and for every hour.
each train a machine, an angel from the city
slicing through the wind, storming through the peace
we thought we'd cultivated.

i would grow accustomed to her storms, but never bored.
grinding herself up through the forests
and the trees that thicketed my brick igloo
from the silver city beyond the suburb.
i would get there, she contested.

the train was an omen of wistful promise
ever-present, ever-visiting,
flinging fleeting glances at a future to come
a future i wanted so hard, and so passionately, and
dack, dack, dack
the train moved on.

that ten second glimpse of glory
pressed hot, and hard, into my young heart.
like fists of pressure into a rubber tectonic;
sweet, rounded drops of acid
that singed the most supple of skin, but saluted the scent
of a locked Utopian powder-box.
beyond experience, unfiltered, unseen.
undreamed, unrealised, unimagined.

the angel from the city beyond, when she called
would whisper to me, as loud as she bellowed
to unwinch me from the real
just to pay audience

come night,
she tore a gale through standing water;
a booming moon, shattering into a slumberous, monolithic earth
sneaking beyond the silence of nature’s foot-soldiers,
pushing and pounding softened steel kaleidoscopes of anticipation
until i happily cried myself to sleep.

things change.

funny, really. 
i only remember her now, ten years since our last goodbye
since i'm coming to terms with her lies.