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.

'November 1st, 2009' - the piece sighed.

On being so, your senses heighten, so much that you can sense the very animals moving hidden in the trees.
Of course, nothing is just given to you, after all, a gift must be unwrapped.
A breath of night is always the first of a new life.

I paused, as I,
Entirely myself, contented by the previous days had,
Those the last of October,
This that first night of November,
And I looked through the doors windows,
The pubs lights off now,
Just the lanterns of the streets outside,
And there he stood.
A profile to me,
His hair a-skew to the golden damp cobbles,
The moon bearing down upon him from the very centre of the parting sky.
His arms, so full yet so fit,
Holding up the umbrella he packed away to bring inside,
So I must avert my eyes, must take my body from the window.
I’m sure he sees me enough.


On leaving did see, his hesitation in fingers through his hair,
Though about me, I shall never have an idea,
He followed but he left,
And so I went out alone onto those very same cobbles,
That harboured him just minutes before.
The moon sat still as ever,
As I stood aside the bridge tonight,
It lit the sky more powerfully than even the sun,
That I never see.
For a lamplight it always more appropriate than the main.
Every cloud dashed past,
Painted softly as the lines that ink my back.

Dark figures don’t haunt me,
Dark silhouettes pass through my life,
As I walked along side the river for Novembers very first twilight,
Through the leaves, through the crunch, through passers by and bitter breeze,
I saw a figure passing in time between the pillars across the water.
Though daylight still strong, but shaded,
I could not make out this to be a man or a woman,
But it walked as I, hands in pocket, head slightly bowed,
A fine silhouette of entirely black, from hair to clothe
Our steps met at the bridge, and though it went a different route to myself,
His eyes still met my own for a moment,
Before we crossed separate roads.
As I crossed my own, I saw him pace off, hands still in pocket, a cinched in waist by his tailor,
He appeared entirely a black image,
Mute and strong
Against all those autumn leaves that dashed the cobbles of Castle Park,
Every one else had features,
He, not a trace of detail,
And yet I was drawn,
And again we walked in time,
Though this time, through trees not pillars did he disappear.
No red this year.



“You, I spent my life missing you….” Hesitation gripped her, the last three words trailed from her speech, yet carried on in her conscious mind, “And I shan’t stand it a moment longer”.
That life of the damned, so they called it, may just keep my own life from wanting him any longer.




A park lit by moonlight, soft lanterns and sound tracked by tapping rain that fell from the leaves still on the trees, and insulted those that now led upon the floor.
It’s pathways decreased by what now mostly led,
What looked like bodies of leaves on the ground.
And so I stepped, in time to old music,
Hearing the modern talk of those around me.
Oh a girl, old before her time, hath she no where to go but the leaves of adolescent trees?
Moments and memories, all stirring my mind,
To a consciousness that decides who and who isn’t in my life,
And reality, that reality
That dips in for shock factor,
And so my self may never rest,
Oh tender hooks.
On edge.
My mind, revelling now, as I near just twenty human years old,
All that has passed,
And all I have become.
For fear I spent years,
Of living an ordinary life,
But never has it been just that.

Some how I seeked happiness, and that was a wooden floored home,
Rugs, soft lighting and a family around a tree a Christmas,
An odd time to receive it,
In doses that were unfamiliar,
And yet ordinaire was my fear.

My senses so wrong as a child,
Hear I every sound a house can make,
See every shadow that partake,
In every nightly ritual of sleep.
As I slip further into nocturnal ways,
I recall being so young faced, fresh skinned,
Sat upon the padded seat of a warm family restaurant,
Busy on a weekday summer evening,
And my body ached with fear,
Ached with being sick of being in fear.
And suddenly life around me was but a question,
But a question of where in reality I really sat,
If my mother and then-step-father really sat before me,
If any of these people were really here.
Where in parallel did I lie?
And if so why, when in those arms I miss, did I feel so almost alive?

I wanted it all to stop,
And I prayed upon myself amnesia for a very long time…

Years, my years,
Only almost twenty, barely scraping it’s milestone presence,
And already my mind is that,
Of the girl who walks the city at night,
Clutching a cane,
And considering the sky,
And breathing most deeply when the moon reveals itself to her,
Whether close to the rooftops, halved and tinged in gold,
Or dead centre the sky, hanging full and ominously pearl,
My own footsteps my company,
The sounds of the earth around me.
Rustling come red come gold come dinge of the waters that travel around me.
My own gentle hum the only apparent sound.



The way the rain may make me feel,
So very early houred morning,
The way the crowd carried me that night,
And dropped me back on stage,
To the last I’ll hear his voice again through mikes I’d always known.
I’ll never know this feelings,
Unless I’m walking alone,
Glancing up to the church I live beside,
Seeing hours only I seem to know.
For spending this autumn walking along side the pale,
The ‘one’,
My eyes may be clouded,
My vision rotted,
Ignored,
My previous admiration slanted.
I must see these things, whilst I am alone,
For if the next one has me looking and only looking at so,
Then perhaps beauty will leave me in toe.

The matter will settle,
Please, please don't speak of family.
I have worn myself to the bone,
And yet the public eye feel they see not enough,
My clothes simply do not hang,
And my eyes are plump and round,
A shine of health,
But the custom, the public, they ache over the bar,
They want to see pain and they want to see hunger.
These same vultures wish to pick at the flesh,
Wish to see more than is necassary,
Wish to tear it apart all the same.

Dedication, he has ruined the melancholy,
He has wrinkled the clothing,
And smoothed down the hair.

You see, my hair was slowly swallowing,
Sinking into life,
The sink before me swirled in sea water,
And, again, she spoke of the past.
The shine, the fool, the midnight travels,
And still she hung the blame in one place.
The creature started, it stirred and with the dying scheme,
Became a foaming monster,
Long dead and yet paraded before me,
Idly and comically.
Alas! The past I had so happily withdrawn from these past months,
Has been brought up, wrenched up, again!

I meet the strange on a daily basis,
I meet the suffering, converse with the no-goods.
Beauty and foul file in and out before me,
And still I am here behind dark wood.
"Yes, I don't mind, Yes, I am doing rather well".
But still the sinking thought,
Are they ever wondering?
I should not mind, I know, not another day of guilt or worry,
But somewhere they sit, as my fingers blue,
And they care not for my name, let alone my thought.
Yes, my years were consumed by the want of them,
And selfishly I never considered it was not of return.

My eyes have opened to the present, roughly and somewhat forced, his voice brings tears to my eyes, and I survey the Manor before us. Light has never been so settling, the evening drawing in; so tasteful. Never has genuine brick built such a fine exterior, never has such shimmering paper lined the in! You have ruined my writing, but you are settling this heart. You are holding this hand, the sea may has well be rippling at my ankles.
Another deer passes the horizon, and I feel you may discover the reason for this smile.

If rain.

Delightful it is!; To sit beside a window cracked,
And letting in air as cool as is held in the crypt!
Rain does thud at my glass today,
And grey has coloured the dull blue that was.
Autumn feels closer than the month would suggest,
And a book of age lies at my chest.

To sit is absolute, and to listen to nothing but!
I have the calm and the serene today,
Of a lady who, once, knew precisely what she wanted,
Of a cat who hauled in the birds beside the mice!

I question my dreams today, I ask them why they haunt me so?
I may have taken a restful gaze toward a window dotted,
But the lingering images behind these eyes are of creatures, unsettling.
Yes, just last night I gave in to sleep,
And slept for as long as I might ever,
Until. And then dream did come. Did taunt!
It lay out fears my mind had only just come across,
And oh how well it did!

If my mind would write, quite the story you would read.
It put poison in my drink! It led him by another! It threatened at solitude of an outing,
It may as well have put fire in my sky!
I am distrustful of my mind in sleep!
Here, here I lay in a comfort I have made,
And it laughs, it gives a foul hissing laugh, as I fall empty into unconsciousness.

The sweet rain pounds harder now, it sweetens the horizon,
And my mind is withdrawing the memory,
I pry so that I may word the fears and paint the creature;
Yet it pulls back as slowly and effortlessly as the tide receeding.
My mind but sand, my fingers protruding with difficulty, clutching as if suffocating.
Only to dream again.

~

Murk has my mind been,
And just of late has it swum back with the tide.
I am aware, if at all, that such as the shadow through a window,
Of rain upon a familiar portrait, in a dark and deep, elaborate room,
Forgotten and anachronistic,
Love does begin to patter at perfection.

In the time I knew you, I hadn't a home,
We'd send two letters at a time,
The night's sweet creatures, just sweet,
You and I only just finding 'our' feet.
I remember one of the first places you took me,
Rum served by Jerry,
A piano keyed by a man in smart dress and a topped' hat,
Low hanging, off lilac net curtains,
And ornate, slim, gold and floral seating.
A beaten leather suitcase subdued in a corner.

Not a single lamp matched,
And a river ran nearby,
Small silver bats flitting off it's surface,
Back into nothing, I'd sigh.

Since you, I have forgotten story telling,
And my words linger in my throat,
Until the moment has passed.
Bitter, unfelt and sunken, they slip back down,
He never wanted my stories,
How freely I can speak by the sea.
We never went there, he and I.
He wouldn't.

Do you remember meeting?
A lugged suitcase, your cobbles,
A bar that we seeped to the end of,
And yet found another door to outside?
Im sure I drank Rum again, and off you toodled for a cigarette,
But I heard a crack in the sky,
The heavens opening with a sudden lash,
An indescribeable amount of water, as if saved,
cascading over an old tiled roof, each cobble gleaming in protest,
And another crick in the sky.

Our, Us, it went a little like a storm,
The rest of the way.
It travelled just the same, patched up just the same,
It even came the same.


Suddenly, I slowly feel myself again.
Remember, I used to describe things?
And I haven't read a book in two weeks,
That is where the space is. And why I feel so alone.

My beach hums distantly, as you used to, some where far from here.
And I hear our old conversations running dry,
And laugh at my own leaving your letters at my other home.
I cannot leaf, and so i sigh in photographs pinned to my door.
The winter's evening sun sinks into my bedroom,
And lightens the detail on a memory captured.
I'm sure I'll find you behind the pier,
The wreck and the carousel.
Do you remember how we used to be?
I am, for now, sorry I was not ready for you.
I'd adore a cafe in the south, you and I, a book or three between us.
Conversation through eyes, a thin trail of your cigarette smoke,
A linger of gin and the way a kitchen smells when a cat eats there.

Toned.

Grant me, if you will,
The ability to forget, and then to re-live.
And the possible indication of where i went wrong the first time.
Of course, i am not asking you to go back.
What a waste and regain of time that would be.
All I'm saying is, my night was sweeter knowing that the next day,
I was to visit the seaside I'd never before seen.
Now i have.

~

Sometimes passion holds me.
Occasionally gripping at my arms and cupping the flesh,
All the while maintaining it's trade.
Brushes in my hands - pens, technology and hefty plastic expenses.
-
Passion is;
My carriage now sits empty, par the man two windows thick, through,
And so my voices carries out from travelled throat,
and trails softly around the bars, eightie's designed seating and mortgage adverts.
It's barely even a whisper. And it's slightly out of tune.
But all the while this circle line train plummets deeper,
It's route set and myself stuck.
It shakes my being comfortably, uncontrollably
And I watch the curve in machinery.
It's destination set, I wait upon an exit.
But that part before doors slide,
Possibly is felt when passion drives.

Narrow, aimless, blind but sure of an arrival.




~
Daylight showed me Essex was at my feet,
My suitcase merely grumbled along behind me in an adolescent way.
The train doors scraped some sort of farewell, and in my mind only did the train whistle aprovingly as it steamed away.
For a moment my hair was permed and a netted hat sat slanted upon it.
But sepia failed to make it's appearance today,
and so a chav bustled by me hump-ily, clashing music riding within his palm.
'I'm not a fan of lazy days'
She once said.
And half an hour later boarded a train so similar.
His voice played out a blur as she sat alone on the platform.
There was no breeze disguising traffic,
But the hum sat in the air around her had his tone to it.
It wound itself into her throat,
and caused her the deepest breath she'd taken that day.

Her eyes turned inwards,
but there was no deffinate way of seeing his face.
The sun then peered out from behind the wispy clouds,
it's warmth rolled over her as did her eyes roll outward.
They ached in protest to the newly found brightness,
and squinted accordingly.
A familiar tingle hit her throat,
And the sounds of live piano muscled it's way into the back of her mind somewhere.
She enjoyed it for no longer than 30 seconds,
And then, her throat and eyes dry, she left.