Ode to Southend-On-Sea

Oh you always seem to find me,
Don’t you, the moon?
Oh if there is any one I am in love with,
I do think it is you.

Oh the thought does drift about my brain,
As did the sea air the last time I felt it about my hair.
How I miss those leisurely days beside the pier, or sat upon the sunny rocks.
For it has been almost a year since I have seen any real sunshine,
And whilst I prefer the grey days…
And much prefer the night…
There is nothing like the warmth of evening sun on your back,
As you read Murakami on the rocks with your feet burrowed in the sand,
The sound of children laughing around you,
And parents wishing to go home.
Knowing that Rossi’s ice cream parlour continues to modernize up beside the hill behind me,
But as ever serves the same delicious menus,
How I hear no cars but am ever aware of their rolling by,
As if they are sorry to be a break between the parlour and I,
And a cut in this beautiful scenery.
Such does the sea lie before me,
Does the industrial views of Sheerness.
I see the towering chimneys from here, and all the miles they lie away are nothing when it is all but water.
How the sea dips into any part of the shore it can,
It laps back and forth, each time growing closer to my toes,
Until it cannot go any further,
Until it slowly laps back as if rewinding itself.
All to show are the creatures and stones it leaves behind.

It is so very similar to the way a mind whirls about it’s memories.
How things roll in and out of your mind,
Further and further away,
And closer and closer.
When your current thoughts recede, lie all the ones that merely drifted beneath the surface of your consciousness. Misplaced or still alive in your mind,
Though perhaps not in life.
I adore my nights,
But please do not take away from me, my evenings at the seaside.



Oh, just this one more song,
May we stay?
As I hear Vera sing and you smile in the dim of the bar.
I know the sea is just outside,
And the stars sit happily in it’s ripples,
This fine, sweet, sea side night.
Oh I hear no more gulls but they shall return by morning,
And here it is all the clinking of glasses, the moving of trays,
The sweeping up of the end of a night,
And here plays that final song.
That one I asked for, to myself, just this one!
And here, still you stand, in that fine, fine suit you wear so well.
This is my favourite dress, oh won’t you dance with me,
Just for this last song?



A sweet melody, that brought you to me,
Vera sings.
And so you take your hand to my waist,
The other scooping my hand up into the air,
Stationary they hold,
As we dance, sway in this seaside bar.
Take me back to Brighton I cry,
Oh but this time,
Let it be love by the railings.
We’ll do the sweetest waltz across the shoreline, me and you.
The lights scoop the end of the pavement, and illuminate the pebbles of the beach.
And here we are, just us.
Oh where is everyone else,
Oh let’s just pretend they are all dead.
Just for tonight.
It’s just me and you, dancing beside tonight’s black sea,
And it’s just what love should be.
Oh why can I not see your face?
My sweetest figure in such fine attire!
What love will be but I cannot see!
I just feel all the adoration and returned love I swell with,
Released only in a smile to your ear,
As you ask me how we might get home.
And I tell you once again,
Just this one song more.

I might be something, dreaming.

Suppose I write a new, for the old?
My dreams have been so tell-tale lately!
And so unco-operative as I attempt pen them down!
Blasted, unrelated, unrealistic sub-reality of one's own mind!
But so realistic! It is the problem, they are so!
For I feel in them,
Feel as you might breathing in the rain on a routine stroll to work,
Feel as you might on that first dive into the cool of an outdoor pool!
The people in them, I have seen, mostly, I have!
I have grown with them, I mightn't have all of them any more,
But they have been here, in this supposed waking world.
And growl, have I, at waking on occasion,
To find they are still not here.

It is proof of my time-walking?
It is certainly proof of my dreaming!
And it is all of the dreaming, it is all of the mumbling in my sleep,
And the constant logging of dreams!

Suddenly, I awake and am onto something,
Suddenly writing is as writing can be,
And I've a beginning to that story I never finished,
And mightn't finish if I should have trouble sleeping again.
On all these notes and the above and below, I return to my dwelling, I return to the screen and pen my endless papers! It might just happen, I confirm, it might!
I may have stumbled onto what a life I am supposed have,
Or at least the same road.
Well, same city at most,
But the same nonetheless! On the map it all is!
I can be something,
Can't I?
As awkward as I am in daily situations,
As dull as my voice sounds,
As vague as I ever am,
As unshapely as I may be:
I might be something.

I might be.

'Write & I...'

"You spent it beside the sea..."
"Can't say as I remember..." She responded, with time. It seemed she was delving as far back as last week, and yet the deep of her eyes forever remained. Not once since arriving had she looked to him when speaking, yes, her eyes had turned upon him if he mentioned any thing of a romantic nature, and any thing of home, but it was only these glances which he had been given. She was 'away', as ever she had been all the years before.
"The scent of the sea would creep through our window each of the mornings", he tried, "The evenings would shimmer against a black ocean, the sands would turn unnoticed and laughter could be heard upon the pier from our garden. It was quite a beautiful time."
"But I cannot smell the sea, not now", she offered, gently, folding her hair behind her ear, of which half of the strands immediately escaped back to the pale of her face.
His hands clasped dryly together, he studied her for a few quiet minutes. Glasses touched in the building, the simmer of quiet conversation around them faded in and out, the occasional rush of a car passing by below audible now and then. A woman laughed quite heartily for a few seconds, and this event was the only thing that seemed to stir the girl sat before him. She had returned to a shell from which he had once extracted her long before.
"There was lightening one of the nights", he almost sighed. "It shook even the oldest of the coastal buildings when the thunder arrived, you had noticed it coming long before I, almost as though you had sensed it's damp in the air. We never heard of any disturbance on the news, in fact, we never really watched the news. We just watched as it rocked the ocean, the poor ocean that had been delving sweetly into the evening horizon. The boats clambered about upon the waves, the gulls took from their perches and disapeared into the coming rain.
You and I, we remained as others walked to the dry, walked from the noise. I remember... the cool of the salty air, the damp at our feet and clash of the rain at our inappropriate shoes..."
"We never spoke", came her voice into his trail. He looked to her, and found that the browns of her eyes were settled upon his cupped hands.
"We rarely did", he responded.
It did not pass between them verbally, it was not heard by others eating nearby, nor did the cars passing below ever know they were up in that window together; They had both known then in that moment, that the sea never spoke, that the sea never cared for their sitting beside it and whistling to the bay, it never felt as she had dipped her feet into the salt every so often.
It had only been them, and because she had left her memories on the shore and never looked back, they were no more, and never to be seen in her mind's eye again.
His hands dropped one another, and with this motion, left in that resturant the hope that she may ever see what their eyes had once seen together. Like a worn book left to the sun, she had faded. Like the rose, she had wilted before him, parts of her gliding to the sand. He had never known more of a love, and she, she had never remembered a day passed.
"It is as though you do not have a face, not in my mind", the easy cool of her voice let, finally sounding as she had once before, if just more careful, "I have not forgotten the words, my dear, they have settled like a white feather on the water. They have lined my heart, bled my veins, that clatter of letters. I see nothing, but I read it all. My mind is only pages, not a camera. I've only the feather, not the shutter, and in word I may still love, as inhuman as it may seem. And I have never before known the love I do!".
The image of her rolled before him, her mouth did speak and sound did once rumble the silhouette of heads about the resturant around them, the lights passing below did ignite her complexion now and then, her eyes did still shine in his mind's eye.
But he never wrote it down.

Ocean 2009.

Like wandering the streets at 7pm,
Looking for breakfast in this bustled city.
People in business suits walking along side folk with their heads shaved on bikes.
Who else could create such thoughts within me?
Sitting beside it, or glancing over steep walls into the water.
Records you can see through the lake and streams of grass for us to lie,
Summer wasps in the air,
And lack of obligation for our adolescent stares.
Slowly giving ourselves the summer out,
And slowly we begin to show ourselves the lives we want.
Somehow tearing us apart at our joined hands like pulling paper from its rings.
The letters I wrote you and your right hand in mine.
I see your careless mouth but your thoughtful eyes turn over the scenery,
Just as though you never did see it.
Within your head you think you'd spend day after day with me,
But within the miles between us we could spend a dozen other lives.
And don't you fear missing that?
Cold to think I may leave you, yet missing,
and miss,
Are two very different words.
Explanations you just didn't want to hear over a cup of coffee in the cafe on a rainy autumn afternoon.
Trains that don't take me all the way to where you live,
And buses that run me off the beach sides.
Standing on the pebbles, undetectable in the darkness of the summer night,
Each one as damp as the ocean that threw itself upon them.
And my shoes wearing thin and through them, bare legs and a horror dress,
And my darling in his suit.
Watching what he can see of me darting about the ocean side, down by the burnt out pier.
Safe in the knowledge my feet are still on the ground as the pebbles are forced into one another.

Oh of all the other lives we could be leading,
The different clothes we could be wearing and the people we might know,
The jobs we may slave at and the social we may partake;
But tonight, that night, in the past we, you and I, stood together on a breezy well-known beach.
And we knelt in the stones,
Each of those a part of the mountain that held us up.
And the ocean collapsing black upon itself, the stars overtaken by floating fires.
Shadowed faces almost as haunting as the skeleton that emerged from the sea.
No horizon or cut in our skyline,
Just constant darkness at our feet.
The black that continued rolling threateningly toward us, then pulling out softly as if a tease eternal.

Perhaps sleep should come? I wondered almost as much as Trevor's wife did the keys.
Rolling images and music that no longer is made nor sold.
Footsteps between us on the pathways of a seaside town,
And our bodies beside walls of religious B&Bs.
Not wanting to part the us that was between every one else.

Tonight I see summer breezes I once detested that remind me of moments I once missed.
Meaningless teenage romances and conspiracies,
And faces I no longer care to see nor fears I no longer emulate so powerfully.
You came into a life that messed itself up and attempted straightening out a few kinks,
Before falling for them.

I came across this piece dated 11th August 2009. It is not a love story.

Hole.

Depths, oh how it is found and discovered!
Stumbled upon, oh trod around.
Since I read words so similar has it been reoccuring in the sweeter parts of my life.
A hole.
Just, and as is. A tunnel into the ground, or a depthless pit.
Always out and in the unihabitable,
Occasionally larger than any building,
Often thin only enough for one regular sized human being to slip into.
And then send in the ferrets!

Just as there always seems to be fire in my sky,
So does there seem to be,
the holes in my earth!
Just two years! Just two! And down by the sea the illuminated balls flew into black sky!
Just two, since Murakami warned of a hole never seen, a well to be lost down.
Oh imagine if you didn't die when you hit the bottom, she had warned.
Undiscovered you lie, in pain, amongst the bone you sit!
When did dark depths suddenly edge to magical,
Oh when was it that a rabbit tapped at his pocket, the slight of the clicking?

When, oh when did I fall?
It would appear I have always been here,
In a hole by the sea.

Little one sent me away
little one. So i can't sleep
Said she knew the time in rome
and i couldn't try, and stop her from seeing past the bathroom door
and
oh no, she didn't try
to pry with eyes so bitterly dry from all the ache of
adolelesence
and all that i knew
was how to turn clocks to present time.
She wrote a few things on my wall,
covered up by papered paint
and all the sweet calenders.
Her eyes were softer after that, wider yet still full of
substance.
Some one took her away, after that.
He told me, he told me that i was wrong
To try, and keep a bird inside.
Inside me.
So i let her fly i let her be
Didn't she know that roundabouts always come back to me.
Motorway child and
Dual carriageway birds
I left car running on the drive to detatch the frost
I yearned for some sort of release, from captive wings and skeletal beasts
But his etches in my skin formed the outline of dictation.
I saw beaches at night, and i heard people's voices against the night time sky
Sided with the crackling of wood becoming prey to fire.
I tried to turn my head to face him those miles away,
but i felt a clutch around my face that kept it straight.
Did i become worse to bare the mornings?
Holding six glasses in two hands, i hummed a tune familiar of him.
And the scabs on my back ached in the dull way that his voice still led in my mind.
How could i think of any one else this week?
I found more productivity in writing all night than to have sex.
Did any one else feel the wind change?
he could never miss it, as i led upon my drive at Two.
My back arched over a corsa,
the stars lied to me with their presence dotting the sky above.
Subtle chords bought me lyrics from a voice i thought i'd heard before.
I knew he'd forgotten me again, because they stopped coming in from the shore.
Lying awake
on the beach late at night. My eyes begged forgiveness for day time's pathetic frights
and he hung over me
like a towel draped in water.
I couldn't say no to such a, dealt sort of character.
Kiss me, I'd sigh, and pray to make up his mind,
but all around me the soft sounds of morning approaching made it awfully awkward
and sullenly dull.
And my eyes lulled back again, glazed over with daylight's presence.