Magma Poetry

I’m taking one step forward, two back, trying to work out
what it was that made me – ‘A’ stream, Latin and Greek,
and university a fixed mark on the horizon I was
steering my boat towards – fall in love with a brickie who’d left
school at fifteen and who on the night I dumped him downed
thirteen pints with whisky chasers and ended up in a skip,
who used to take me dancing, mumbled the Drifters in my ear,
the vibrations so strong after forty years they buzz down my spine
to parts my mother never talked about but I was only too
well aware of as we shuffled groin to groin and he pressured me
not to forget who was taking me home, a place I escaped from
two years later, and from him too, though I sometimes wonder
when I read about his chain of executive housing estates
if I made the right decision.