Here we are again, Bruv, at the rec
where it’s always the same time, half eight
on a Tuesday night and nothing happening
but the dusk: arc lights, and kids in replica shirts
from a dozen different clubs kicking seven kinds
of shit out of each other on the concrete turf.

*

Or else it’s three o’clock, a Sunday afternoon
in August, blonde grass cropped to a buzz-cut
and the dust lying down and getting up again
like a restless dog. Boys skid bikes to a halt,
straddle crossbars, feet set wide, then lean
on their handlebars – shirtless, baking, bored

*

or else it’s 4 am in winter, the grass as hard as tarmac
and glittering with frost, and the tarmac
glittering with mica and glass and ‘just as hard
as any of you cunts’.

4 am at the playground slide, the chain-link swings,
the creaking roundabout, where haloes circle streetlamps
with a vapour close to fog, and where nobody gets out
alive, Bruv –