It was lunchtime and we
were walking around
the new school block
when Bobby Philips came
up to us to talk about
conditions on Venus
and what was weird was
nobody thought it strange
that one of us talked
his strangeness away by
saying he came from Venus.
There he was, striding
at the top of the playing
field talking to himself.
What he said, the details
I can’t recall, but I do
remember the yellow brick
for the new school wall,
the same they used
for the Phelipps estate
and a thousand like it
all over England
in the 1970s.
How fragile the new
equipment looked
in the science block
all of a sudden. I was
only nine or ten,
Ziggy Stardust
was in the charts
and Bobby Philips
and the Venusians
were ordinary to me,
we’d just ask him to get
a reply if we wanted
to find out what life
was like on Venus.
Tim Cumming