The Old Boys' Silver Jubilee Reunion

So,

 you came all the way from Silicon Valley

Just to attend this? See our greying crony there

How much the classic absent minded professor

Of the English movies he has become

Forgetting our names, our faces, his own home town

Making sad efforts to remember

The bylanes of yesteryears. Ah, Alex, baldy

Big shot in the International Academy of Pure Sciences

I still remember your thickly sprung coiled jet of hair

As you wept in the class dunce corner

Punished for your diarrhoea flowing down nay blue knickers

In History class and we called it

The Great Plague. Hello, old pal shaking hands with me

You were our squirrel. You sneaked that to the Principal

Got us all flogged in the assembly sun. We christened you again.

Judas.

The name stuck. Those were the days.

Those were he days, friends,

When our little sticks used to sniff up every passing girl

Stiffening like red needles in hot valves

Tuning into faintest beeps

Of smiling pig-tailed stations. Remember Jube

Hit by a military truck, thrown into NDE

And calling himself God? Handsome David

Whose sister threw acid all over his face

‘cos he blew up her lover story? Where is he now?

Gone. Disappeared with his disfigured face like a sad river

Leaving just a wasted bed of dry sand.

Well, cheers.

Beer turns topaz in gleaned ice

Held together in cold comfort.

Now, in spite of his busy schedule, our handsome Rector too

Is amongst us, off his priestly overalls

Sipping bloody Mary, staring at the 3D wall poster

Lighting Cindy Crawford in the nude. Rev. Sir, boys will be

Boys.

Together again, those left of us, huddled together in coloured

Wreath

This dead of night

(As stranger-time still wears us like loose rings

In raining fingers of hawking clouds)

We stab a little harder into leftover chicken steak

Standing upright never quite mentioning

Our bright little pricks turned to hurt greying cocks

Dangling inside torn over-wrung briefs

As burnt wires in long dead homes.