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We played war games, imagined
armies, lined up along the fence
of the council field behind our estate.
Shot plastic machine guns
that scratched and hissed,
spit sparks when we squeezed the trigger.
Pulled invisible pins
lobbed stone grenades.

Lay down, trenched in piles
of waste gravel from the building site,
crawled on our hands and knees
along gripes, under ditches;
an American platoon, trapped
on battlefields of Kosovo and Vietnam,
thousands of Russians, Vietnamese
and Japanese shooting us.

On the street after dark
we were the I.R.A,. disguised
as civilians, planting mud bombs
beneath parked cars,
ridding the country of the Brits,
when we won we sang the songs
our fathers sang
when they were drunk.

When the war ended we played football,
the F.A. Cup final at Wembley,
Man United versus Liverpool,
argued over who was captain,
who would get the cup from the Queen,
we all wanted to be Fowler,
Redknapp, Macmanaman, Barnes,
all wanted to be heroes.

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Biography