Anyone ever told you that your leg folded on the story mat looks like a vagina?

Ian had always smuggled in words, hot as custard
and just as sought after. In the gangway, forgetting
our Ps and Qs, we ecoutez'd et repetez'd Cs and Fs
where the echo let us glimpse our own toughness.

So it was no surprise when Ian drew the comparison
- whispered as interruption to a story starring goats -
your leg looks like a vagina
and from anyone else I wouldn't have believed it,
but Ian's eyes on the clammy cleft of my folded knee
were the eyes of the first boy in school with Seventies porn:
the gangway again, admiring muffs like hedgehogs
and clam vaginas ' this was the animal kingdom for sure.
Worst of all, these women had our mother's haircuts
so we gurned and urghed and wanted our mothers
and then only felt worse at the thought.

Later, with Ian, we stripped a boy, four of us,
each to a limb, and gangled him across the playground,
dumped him in the gangway, his concern to cover
his face not his penis was the realness we hadn't expected.

We all blamed Ian ' he knows too much '
and the headmaster sent us away. We knew he'd been expelled
when the steel bins by the gates, as big as fuel tankers,
were set ablaze one lunchtime. We evacuated, strangely,
to the playground in full view of the spectacle. The smell
was potent: bananas, plastic footballs, newspaper.
Ian appeared on the top railings, yelling his latest
lexicon of plosive swears. We cheered him on
while secretly hoping him gone by morning assembly.