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.

Bridges, And Real Bridges.

The light and wintered cobbled streets,
That hold our name,
I cannot write of the beauty that I see with you,
Your arm at my waist as we scour the Cadbury centre.
And the white sunlight against the windows of the olde shops.
The history we discover as we attempt the memories we make.
And I’ve no longer words, but I cannot write nothing!
I long to unleash terrible things to you,
Unimaginable future that hold us both!
I stop myself at the empty walls we pulled down,
And I wait for you to join me.
Hiding at the bottom of a cage,
We lie in wait of another day,
For another may be the opportunity we seek,
And the other might be the binding fear,
With light-hearted tear and want!
Want of it all!
You, I saw you across that browning street,
And I thought I saw her horrid silhouette,
I thought of your waistcoat wavering undone,
And I felt your hair in my grip from afar,
And you entered a door I assumed I would never see open again,
Once more I had turned,
And missed your returning.
But I met you on the bridge,
Oh how I met you on the bridge,
How alcohol lingered in my breath,
And every sense I had was mine,
For it all felt like nonsense.
For I wanted to reach into you,
Into the nothing I thought we would ever become!
I looked into the kindest eyes of blue, I gazed and perhaps never gazed away,
For even then I did not know what I would do with you,
I did not know if I should see you in my home town,
By my sea or at each smile or frown.
But I never, in wake, touched another I never glanced back.
The moment you managed a kiss unto me,
I could not climb back over that wall.
I waited on your words far from me,
And I let my heart leap about the page from which I deciphered,
All the unimagined feelings you portrayed!
Now I may even make up word!
For I have nothing to say to you,
For you feel it all.

A quiet wait at the end of a working day,
It would see you having already returned,
A stationary silver car beside a bank,
And summer threatening at the backs of the walls,
But the scent was warming.
We bought a few things together and we took a trip back to my place,
Idols on the television,
And you but metres away from me.
But hours away from me.
A rush of hours, a mind of weeks,
Trips in your car and the music, it speaks.
The sun above and the night all about us.
‘Your voice, it keeps me up at night’.
And you finally return your kiss to me.
You return your delicate hand to my face,
As if you had never handled so precious a thing.
Than corrupted little I.
I needn’t have even wished that I had never felt another touch,
For I hadn’t. Not like this.
And I wondered then what I would do if I threw caution to the air,
The waters from the docks,
If I dove into nothing headfirst.
If I couldn’t see a metre in front of us in the fog and yet I pulled us through it,
A speed of which I slowed,
With the beating of my heart,
As I first felt yours, beating against my chest.


And I do believe, that had you not crossed my path,
I would have crossed yours.
And we did meet , at all times and never the same,
We did speak the same mind.
I discover, still, why this place has a purpose.

Lightening heart of yours,
Always takes the darkened; mine.
And bleeds into it,
A sort of golden blend,
A feeling that bares renewal blind,
But forceful.
That puts a hand in mine,
That lingers a gaze in mind,
And only with eyes as yours,
Do the crystal seas seem true.

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.

And suppose my love, makes no sense for you,
Every bitter touch and all that lays between.
I began to waltz,
I felt the wooden floor beneath my feet at the lights spun slowly above us.
Feathers hung from the faces masked,
Our own eyes only familiar.
I heard the sweeter sounds between the stair case and draped velvet.

I heard little laughter, I saw the weave between the bar,
Oh only one in white,
She disapeared between the dark of the crowd.
So smart, on several occasions he asked.
And why I ever denied, oh how.
I lived out a childhood dream last night.

Sweet turn slipped through glitter,
Must I always feel this way?
So simple it seems, to arrive gracefully.
My one night on the marble.