Remedial
‘Intended for school students
who have not achieved the level
of necessary attainment’

He couldn’t play rugby – the oval slithered away
whenever he touched it and he fell in the mud
or more often was pushed with some viciousness.
One match as hooker and he was quickly unhooked,
dumped like a take-out tray chucked from a car.

He wouldn’t play cricket, knew the brutal sphere
held the force of musket bullets from Cromwell’s army
that once splintered the stones of Trinity’s church walls.
He’d seen the hard-red slam into a boy’s forehead
and drop him like an infantryman shot on the Somme.

All that was left on Friday afternoons – since his flute
playing was too whistly for the rump of an orchestra –
was ‘remedial basketball’, a sop for the sport-dumb
who would grow up to be lavatory cleaners, or poets,
yet still the ball was too heavy and the wrong shape;
it slipped from his hands like an oiled watermelon
and he was still pushed, still unhooked, a boy-mouse.
When just once he hit the backboard with the ball,
it missed the net, dripped like custard to the floor.

He’d heard of the Globetrotters, men taller than transit vans
with splayed hands that could slap stallions to the ground
so he trotted around, and once or twice feebly bounced
the black-veined orange monster, till it was time for the bus
and he could avoid balls of any shape or size for another week.

Adam Strickson has been published by Valley Press, Graft and Wrecking Ball. He has also been Poet in Residence for Ilkley Literature Festival and lives in West Yorkshire. He is a writer, a theatre director & a puppet maker, currently working with Balbir Singh Dance Company.