Seaside Stroll UK’s shortest pier: a desolate arcade, still uncleaned from last night’s penny-worth bagatellers. You pass marine rotten timbers where weedy teens pass legal-highs til midnight. Now, almost dawn and brown seas hide and
Seaside Stroll
UK’s shortest pier:
a desolate arcade,
still uncleaned from
last night’s penny-worth
bagatellers. You pass
marine rotten timbers
where weedy teens pass
legal-highs til midnight. Now,
almost dawn and brown
seas hide and reveal from tide
to tide: always the same,
never the same. You walk
dog down wet sand, counting
Burnham’s lighthouses
with each step:
High, Low and Round -
each designed to fish out
angles with beams, smuggle
ships to safety. Light rings
vitreous vision, even in ruins,
floaters haunt, we can see,
but can never see. Like graffiti
scorched into the concrete wave
cresting this barren promenade -
FLATEARTH - and you laugh
in the limen between truth and lie.
R. M. Francis
R. M. Francis is from Dudley. He’s a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, is out in March 2020 with Wild Pressed Books, and Smokestack books will publish his first full collection of poems, Subsidence, in October 2020. In 2019 he was the inaugural David Bradshaw Writer in Residence at the University of Oxford; these four poems began during that residency.