this is alright

when you look around your four-bedroom house,
or kick a ball with your son,
when you watch your mortgage shrink
and your salary grow,
and consider
the nice holidays,
the business trips,
the taxi rides,
the hotel rooms,
the good dinners:
then you think
it’s not so bad,
this getting older,
this grey stubble in the beard,
these trips to the dentist
to fix the crumbling teeth,
those hours on a treadmill
to fight the bulging gut.

and you think, my god
to be young again:
the chalk dust on the back of your blazer,
the spitty balls of chewed up paper
pock-marking the walls
of the dark classroom where
you watched, again,
the video about australia’s snowy mountain river project
and learned
precisely nothing,
as grey rain churned the playing fields and turnip fields
into an ocean of mud;
yes, and
the sadistic PE teachers (pick your knees up, you fucking spastic),
the shame of undressing among bodies bigger and hairier,
and more assuredly masculine than yours;
the indifferent and unattainable girls –
the fionas, the kates, the rebeccas, the sallys, the rachels and claires:
not that pretty anyway, when you see old snaps
all this time later,
scanned onto facebook by someone you remember disliking;
the not fitting in,
the not liking the right bands, the
not having the right haircut, or shoes, or trousers
or friends;
the cruel gay crush
that some sly little prick
had for your best mate,
insinuating between you and him,
freezing you out,
fucking you off;
yes, and in safeway,
wearing a clip on bow tie
and a name tag
(on the back:
the customer is always right),
bagging groceries
for every kind of dick and
every flavour of old maggot
the streets of england’s dullest town
could cough up
into your Saturday,
into your three weekday evenings.

and you remember
the chemical dazzle
of little clubs in london,
the chemically adjusted bonhomie,
the camaraderie of the dancefloor,
spreading love
all over the world;
and you remember
the surge of hard breasts
in a mohair sweater
and the fat, firm overlap
of a round arse
spilling from hotpants
onto the smooth expanse
of the backs
of sturdy little thighs;
and you remember something wonderful clicking,
wet and smooth and deep inside you
and deep inside her,
the very first time
that the act of penetration
really felt sublime and not
like a slimy fumble;
and you remember laughing,
laughing more in a day
than you could laugh in a month
here
now
in your desirable semi-detached residence,
in your office,
or behind the wheel
of your company car,
and you think
how did this happen
and when did I get middle-aged.

and you head home
from your laptop
from the spreadsheets
and the draft product proposals
and the competitor analysis,
making for the station;
and on the way
you sidestep a gaggle of shrill kids
in their short skirts,
in their ragged denim shorts,
with their blonde hair,
their fresh faces,
their competitive, confident voices,
their empty words,
their effortlessly passed examinations,
their knowledge of almost nothing that happened  in the aeons
before they were born,
with their assumptions of a bright future,
with their sense of entitlement,
with their good natures,
with their tolerance of difference,
with their open hearts;
and you think,
my god
these smiles will fade
when they know, finally,
that the road ahead
is hard
and getting harder,
and you’re glad
to be so much further along that path,
with the worst behind you,
and you’re thankful, really
for all that.

but
their legs seem trimmer
and their lips look fuller
and their hips more beguiling,
and their tits bigger,
their waists slimmer
and their ways less inhibited
(or more corrupted?)
than the girls
you remember
chasing, wanting
and sometimes getting
after the struggle sputtered
to its usually disappointing end,
and you think
yes, yes
to be young again,
to be young now,
now when the little beauties
ever more closely resemble
the bright human images
on billboards,
in lads’ mags,
and in adverts
for shampoo, tampons
and mobile phones;
yes, yes
to be young now,
with a deluge of free porn
down a wire,
through a pipe,
over the radio waves
and into your head.

as their chatter dies behind you,
the last remark
is a catty one:
they turn a knife
in the back of an absent schoolmate,
and you think
no, no,
maybe not, but still
that one on the end of the chorus line,
she had a tiny scrap of leather
barely covering her behind.

but when the door opens
and the footsteps lead you into the dark bedroom,
your good wife of ten good years
looks up from her briefly disturbed slumber,
and the welcome
is so solid,
and the embrace
is so generous:
then you know,
you really know
that this here and now
is more than just alright.