PSYCHEDELIA

Miss Crowther’s ‘listening to readers’.
"Get out your Busy Books," she says to all
thirty others. We grope out, exercise books
cut down, giving ragged ski-slope edges.

Now the printing on the cover is overlarge
and misaligned. Young and inarticulate
as we are, it teaches us
all we need to know of bad design.

‘Summer borns’, my twin and I can’t yet read
or write, but we can colour. We struggle
lids off tins smelling of 'St. Bruno'. The squares
are small, the wax crayons grubby. Blunt,

they will not reach the corners. So instead
we pass the time in peeling and then stacking
their fresh colours into cross-hatched towers.
And in such ways as these, we miss the sixties.