Growing With the Shadows

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It took giant steps from that Spring,
when the waddling child,
like a rubbery doll screamed in excitement,
tongue wagging inane language.
At times he seemed surprised,
and halted to listen to his own voice
emitting sounds like the many that came
from cages in the zoo.

His skin, like a wetsuit,
warm, cold, or flaming,
even in Winter's draggling shades,
when old witches were tied to wheelchairs,
as if grounded following confrontation
with the fairy godmother's walking stick.
Angel's wings were in his feet,
at the sight of a gap-toothed mouth
grinning evil in a wrinkled face.

The teacher's shadow on his desk,
her powdered face with red lips
he'd have liked to kiss
towered against a dark blue sky;
she sat on her chair, legs slightly apart,
white laced panties and suspenders showing.

The fall came with tramps
lighting bonfires to cook chestnuts,
an aroma of burning wood
that teased his hunger;
the coal like lava in cauldrons,
an aura of flickering red and orange,
announcing Halloween and Christmas.

The green colour of fields
became brown, then tinted white,
many times, over and over again,
until the scenery existed only on video;
the bulldozers and cranes came
to abolish the fir trees,
to build concrete blocks
that seemed to have grown from marbled roots.

The days of the bogyman were over
the house of the cruel witch lay in ruins --
strangely there was no evil there.
The only signs of the fall
were in the garden shop,
littered with brown paper leaves
decapitated from indoor plants
trampled by a grown man.