Stood Here Like A Lemmin’
Rain drops fall like they used to, each one a wet train
into an adolescent’s bedroom.
Waiting for it to stop, wanting it to start.
Borrowed vynl and homemade compilation tapes,
listening to The Wonderstuff, chosen by you.
Songs to catcall together without tone or tune,
like gigger rabbits left out from a warm hearth.
To the wind; throw caution in its eye,
hedonism is teen rocket fuel.
Do you yearn for these times in dirt water skies?
Standing in piss pot rain for a ghost bus that haunts
empty roads; the mind’s apparition that doesn’t show up.
Scraping bus fare and nursing a pint like a midwife
as though incubated enough, lager will grow in the glass.
The little money for a chip frying job,
caught by the boss for reeking of last-night’s-swiped ale,
pyjamas and please-phone-in-sick-for-me crinkle voice days
for twenty-four-hour parole whilst owing out a full month’s wage.
Or, outside the headmaster’s room because you laughed-out-loud
at the banana-moustached army recruiter who could never
replace an estranged Scouse dad, we had Grolsch bottle tops
on Doc Martens, singing Stan Ridgeway’s Camouflage,
chanting; ‘you ain’t sending us to another jungle, no ‘Nam, Sir.’
Now the rain has stopped, everything inside is dry
motherhood has replaced you.
You hope we can relive it again in Minehead,
a lets-have-it-large 1990’s Butlins weekend
dressed in grunge clothes. Dance mental
from kitchens and small children with mortgage arrears
smuggled under good coats because it is us;
all fur coat and no knickers.
Helen Harrison is a new Liverpool contemporary poet. She has had poems published in Lancaster University’s Flash Journal, Bare Fiction and Prole Books. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative writing at Lancaster University. She lives in Southport with her husband and two children.