Old Den Day
I remember my old den,
1 I had at 7 or was it 10,
anyway back when I were a lad,
sugar-rush-subsisting on Blackjacks ‘n’ Fruit Salads...
O I wanna desert the unticked boxes of women and taxmen,
live more simply thru emotional regression,
sprint like a prepubescent in plimsolls back to th'ol den.
To my oldest den, givvus a seaty or a crossy
on a time-machine,
t'where the doorman's dividend
was a sticky-fingered Panini sticker.
Now, I'm no cod-bucolic evoker
of lost rustic youth
bittersweetly down the zeit-chute
à la A.E.Housman - th'ol den weren't that sylvan.
Suffice to say, those were the days
when a Snickers bar was known as 'Marathon'
- th'athlete's choice of choc, if said athlete's an arrers man!
Has the old den been forgotten by Hooknose Horan,
him and his cretinue of foetal footie hooligans?
Child hoodlums long before hoodies
became the in-thing for politicians,
Horan and his henchkids were budding
hootball fooligans,
such bittle lastards that years later their victims
sic spoonerisms on th'abhorrent children, already rotten,
who routinely trashed our den (tho’ to be fair,
was bit doddery in mint condition).
But gaps prechavs gratuitously bashed
me and my gang as routinely rethatched.
The two wooden pallet 'walls' we'd propped
'pon oldden modcon burl and jutting chaparral
the Council left to feral fallow, these we stood up again,
insulated anew with brushwood, with rubbishwood,
deadgetation and also
vegetal vandal fistifulls, fascicles
of thicket and false-oat-grass.
Proper little humans,
we had whatever we could uproot and dismember
from derelict plot copse, from crumbs of rus in urbe
only brats and cats might deem dead ringer for Nature,
being of sufficiently small stature.
A child's a cherished imbecile,
whose thinking, mistaken, magical,
is that 10ft sq. woods
of wasteland weeds,
a weedland waste of public space
be playground pastoral. All summerhols,
we urchin woodsmen
terraformed ‘n’ pleasuredomed
a strip of bric-a-bracken and hairy brome,
but olddenners got older soon after,
and each went their separate ways
(on solo scavenger hunts for bongo bushes,
by same preteen pangs presaged).
Been sc'autumns since then,
and tho' th'old den survived Hooknose,
obsolescence and yobsolescence
spent out in 80-odd changes of season
is certain demolition. But I'm gonna bivouac
at the old den site tonight,
like a big kidiot/ noble savage/ tramp/
sex-offender Akela on the lam.
Just hope a phone-mast ha'nt been mount
atop the old den's old spot,
the green green grass of home
radioactively sallowed into a sickly straw,
unfit but for feedbag of Pestilence's fleabag steed.
Kids are flids indeed: I assumed I'd grow up a whitebread
hero, a debonair dibble and worldfamous nonsmoker,
married to merry widow, Queen Di,
but I'm ghettoised, Aldi-Lidl-and-Nettoised, in a bedsit
the National Trust wou'nt even bother to blacklist,
injecting ephemera into peepers that don't even feel
the lidl prik of TVquik. Yeah, when Time's simpleton in short pants,
I took it as given I'd court the Lord Mayor's daughter,
and rake in billions doodling for the Beano,
but now I'm a man, my masculinity's in doubt
coz I don't care whether Worthie let Greeno
go, or Fergie Keano...Waitabout,
my manhood had fell into disrepute
even as a boy: at th'86 boomerang campaign
of Browny's Canaries, dint go cock-a-hoop
and hoop-a-cock and back again,
nor all handwringy when Stringy whammed Steve the Bruce
on transferlist (no snip, but future Sir Hairdryer bungdabung,
topflight travail and tired'n'emotionals yet t'turn Fergie's phiz
tomatone as 'is Red Devs' kit). But I desist...
Those were the days when we called Starburst 'Opal Fruits',
when I could file manhood under 'Future Point, Moot'.
O Mum, give me my tetanus then drop me off
by bitty boscage on Notridge Road, and into Bowthorpe
undergrowth will I redelve
- I'm rebuildin'! Given it a few decades,
but I don't fit in. More my own master then,
waybackwhena olddenner, more my own master when
I was looked after, when it was de rigueur
that I be looked after,
coz kids can be feeble leeching dreamers
without blame. Arduously unshed crying shame
adults unlearn easy option of crying away shame,
coz conscience as constant culpability corrupts,
till, as if our own conks, we cut out our ducts!
Why earth of our ubiquitous probation's scorched!
Mischief moist in the eyes of our early days, decried
dries out into short sight - the right ice, left drought
- that sees sere any throat whose cold comforting's croaking
the croaked commandment all ears hear first,
'Thou Must Play Nicely'. O I can't adjust
to everyone else's loss of innocence, so backta th'ol den
I'll rebeat Lil'-sander's track.
From the Big Boys' world I abstain: growing up's a cunt's game.