Street Games

I
Don’t look at them.
Don’t look at their faces.
Because you’ll see there
What you’re really like.

Don’t feel sorry for them:
They don’t deserve it.
Don’t touch them:
Just leave them alone.

II
Germs in a body
Huddled in a doorway:
Germs are bodies
Hiding in the backstreets.

III
Cringing in depressing isolation:
An old man bent double over
        dustbin lids…
For what are we searching here
        in the ashes?

IV
Shadows of men playing a game
        called reality.


Glasgow, just outside Central Station, 18 June 1976

 

 

Technically it wasn’t just outside Central Station. It was on Mitchell Street which runs parallel to Gordon Street which runs down the side of the station. In my head it was in a side street—more of an alley than anything else—and there are plenty of those in the centre of Glasgow in the middle of blocks allowing access to delivery vehicles and bin men. But, no, Mitchell Street turns out to be a proper street with traffic lights and everything.

I left school in June 1976 when I was sixteen. So, nearly forty years ago. This was my first time in Glasgow alone. I was working in an architect’s office at the time. It was my ideal job and the only thing I’d wanted to do from the day I discovered techie drawing. As it happens despite being top of the year—I got 98% in my final exam—I was no good in a work setting but that’s another story. I’d been told to meet one of the architects in Glasgow and, typical me, I was there an hour early. So I went for a wander. And on Mitchell Street I encountered my first down and out.

There’s some cool street art there now but in the early hours of 18th June 1976 it was cold and miserable. And there he was. Asleep or passed out sprawled on the pavement or maybe in a doorway—the specifics are a bit vague now—but I had never seen anything like him in my life. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I ought to do something, buy him a pie or something—seriously, that was my first thought—but I was also scared. And I let my fear get the better of me and I walked away. My dad said I did the right thing and I probably did but for years I used to take a particular interest in the tramps around Central Station especially one with wild ginger hair who I imagined could be me before I hit thirty.

‘Street Games’ first appeared in Street Games and Other Poems.