We used to play in the park by the highwaypanic and laugh about the cars,carry our bikes across the railroad tracks,throw rocks half-heartedly to try and break a signal-box window,then run and run and runhands sticky with blackberries.You smoked cigarettes, I didn’t.You knew more about motorbikes.We both talked about girls.Talked porno at what we didn’t knowwere pre-recorded messages in the public telephone booth,laughing to ourselves so sensationally.Yeah we were champions of the secret life,could sit in trees and squirt passing carswith water pistols so nobody knewwhat the fuck was going on,promised to return to our secret carvings among the branches in ten years of endless time.Our playground around Broadmeadow was the storm-water drains we loved when they flooded,sluicing our ‘pushys’ down through the fake rush of a tide.‘Don’t go near them now’ instructions were never listened to man!‘Styx Creek’: I couldn’t make a name like that up and be serious.Yeah that was where we hung out, grey and furious and free like the sky.So Tony where did the boy go?How did you bend down into madnesslike a peaceful sleep that wrapped you better than a blanket from the southerly’s cold?Man, I sit with you at the club over a beerand we laugh about your passing fits and playing smoke on the water.You say, ‘I tried to baptize myself in those drains when I thought I was Jesus!’Then you smile, one tooth missing, drastically fat:‘Been getting myself off the medication -I don’t want to have to live with it.’Some living man.Where did the pretty boy that you were go?The one that blonde girls chased through their blue, cool polaroids,listening to ‘Young American’while we dreamed of being you?The whole thing snapped.You gave away your watch to her.There was no replacement.Your exercise books were filled with tiny wordsthat you told me you were ‘learning’.The one that kicks in television sets,runs naked down his street,says his prayers at traffic lights:who is he in the stop-go scratchy dawn?Hey Tony, there’s still another way…on our bikes, out in the rain,you riding with a broken leg in plaster,Thin Lizzy on the record player way up loud,the shimmer of ‘Still In Love With You’on your bright red buzzing guitar.…God it seemed to burn from your fingertipswhen you let it run.Tony, where did the boy in you go?Now these crackups of yours that come about once a yearto rest your weary soul,it’s like some escape clause, I just know itbut it gets harder for you to come backfrom the white and wordy shuffle of your mind.Some living…It has to end.And sure enough I make a Christmas call to your mum,Raving at me in her Italian rosary of unreason,she tells me: ‘Tony, he is gone to hospital. He is finished now. He won’t be no good no more.”Click. The dial tone death.The nostalgia for a life I can’t properly rememberwithout you talking too.Here, it’s all through me, what I have of it.Oh man, where did the boy go?Do you even know it’s summer now again,that twenty years have passed and our branches are bones,that our names are still there like wounds healing?That a dry sheer curtain pale as a ghostjust blew over me as I sat slumped beneath the window, its blurring frost burying my face like a bride.