Leaving Home at Eighteen the real promise arrived in the warring oranges of that late-August sky. we came to the windows to watch the light that flamed like burning pumpkins, mandarins, ochre & squash. behind the glass our skins ran the colour of erupting orchards. soon we would leave here, this unmerciful here; the border town with its walled courthouse, its Sunday football team, its outskirts of marsh, its rain. soon we would leave the flat row upon row of family home- those little studied boxes of pain and history where people float in and out of rooms, saving up for wooden floors, spitting in sinks. soon we would leave for the blaze of citylife & sex, & Red Stripe beer. soon we would leave here for the night club, the sleepless people, the hard-won kinks and the first heartbreak- the first beautiful bone-crushing haemorrhaging heartbreak- which groomed us tearfully into militants obsequiously devoted to the terrorism of love. Eugene O’Hare
31
