There’s A Bug Doing Backstroke In My Pina Colada
Our family holidays meant
mornings that smelt of mushrooms,
kagouls and damp cucumber,
meant furiously studious diaries,
valiant crusades against legions
of midges, minute Houdinis,
jumping in mudpuddles and getting
slaked in sludge and getting told off
and then doing it again,
meant late-night plasticky B-movies
about vengeful man-tree hybrids
and ginormous misunderstood squid,
if we had a tv at all.
Breakfast was a fry-up, guaranteed;
lunch was limp edam and beakers of tea;
dinner was fish and chips, caught or bought.
We ate like crazed horses, and were
still hungry, because we walked.
We walked like there was
no tomorrow, like medal chasers.
We walked through beaches in hailstorms,
on rickety Spielberg bridges, over
Venezuelan waterfalls, we walked
up and down lurching zigzag horizons,
up Ben Nevis where Dad got vertigo
and we kept on walking.
We walked more than we talked,
communicated in winks and warped gestures,
because we were usually stalking
fellow hikers who ambled ahead,
oblivious to their impending fate
at the hand of lethal laser-sticks,
and chanted curses cobbled
from Beach Boys lyrics.
The holidays are long gone.
My parents split, we shot up and out
of schmaltzy English weather and teacakes;
and I’m sipping tepid liquid
and sweating pins and needles
on a striplight of sand.
Page(s) 121
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