Anthony Wilson

Balls

When Yaffle touched me
cocking his finger running
it up my body beginning
at my balls Charlie and Joe
were with me we ran off howling
with laughter unable to contain
ourselves unable to believe
what we’d just seen now
we knew what we’d known
all along what he was what
his eyes on you meant
those requests like courtship
for early morning runs
it’s as though your feet kiss
the turf Tony he said leaning
into me with his minty breath
or tutorials over Horlicks
what he was what that
meant how we couldn’t stop
laughing the sheer balls of it
that he had lived among us

Anthony Wilson is a boarding school survivor. He is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Wind and the Rain (Blue Diode, 2023). His prose memoir of cancer, Love for Now (Impress Books), was published in 2012. 

Anthony wrote the following about ‘Balls’:

I wrote this poem quite quickly after a period of intense therapy where I processed the trauma of attending boarding school some 40 years previously. I had only spoken of the events the poem describes once before. I chose not to use any punctuation to try and mimic the breathless outpouring of words that the therapeutic space can afford at its best.