Everything you’ve dreamed of is just around
The corner. It’s right there, through the wardrobe,
If you can be young enough to get there.

Ten years. Ten whole years. I can barely
Stand ten minutes without something to
Keep me distracted from how closely the place
Resembles my idea of hell. Perhaps you found
Something I always missed; perhaps you
Lost it again, or merely mislaid it
Somewhere in the mess of ideas of home.

It’s a human quality: yet another
Man made complication to
Make us spend a lot of our precious time
Wanting to be somewhere else.

*
All I can remember is that there seemed
To be a new face every year; another one
To go with all the unfamiliar faces
In the photograph. They were people
I’d never met, from a town where I’d never been,
Yet somehow there they were, among
Pictures of family and friends.

Was I a strange face in your family album?
Did you see me grow up in annual stages
And wonder why?

*
Lately I have found a renewed interest
In the playgrounds of my youth;
In the declining industrial city
That’s still a town to me.

Perhaps your run down seaside resort
Is the same to you. Perhaps it, and
The life you remember there to
Various levels of accuracy, are
Things of which you need to make sense
To see where your future lies; to know
Around which corner to turn next.

01/14/2014

Posted on 02/12/2014
Copyright © 2025 Richard Vince