Poetry: Fleetwood, a cold marriage.

Fleetwood

My suspicion that Beach and Town are in a cold marriage persists as far as beige sand and green, hairy tufts stretch The Esplanade to infinity and Knott End.

Her thistley sprawl invites lone wolves in anoraks to take their dogs to town, gazing, as Ruskin might, across deceptive, middling tides to The Lakes.

I do not have a dog, and no excuse for staring like Victorian B&Bs do – straight out to sea. They are unseeing, having long since buttoned-up windows, eyeless, bruise coloured and cash poor.

Listen! Gulls and whispering currents shimmer beside that distant cruise-liner – inviting the kind of untethered reflection which removes time, currency…that empty, depressed high street of his.

 

*

…But take a walk at sunset, up an estate, past a pub, corner hairdresser, takeaway, one Sunday in a month and find – strangers. Treading her gold skin, unaware of the couple’s local, land-sea divorce.

The Indian men’s club populates Rossall Point direct from Preston’s hubbub via a mini-bus, setting-up industry of competitive kite flying with a gusto of shouts, cooling boxes, lectern-like tripods,

You are forgiven for not understanding the nature of superior focus…nothing rests below the clouds. Look! Higher than a runner could know…five colours – a murmuration of nylon birds with long tails

transcending stratosphere in a borrowed hour before the sky catches fire on its own hot drama. Delicate, they prevail while handlers shout, urgently – a Hindi form of ‘get the ball in the net.’

 

*

Come back…come now. Now you’ve seen intense beauty rubs shoulders with grey mortar and regret. A second Thursday brings singing bowls, speakers and a shaman holding a tram pass.

There…one hundred bodies scattered by Prospero’s Rock in this exodus, on summerly loved towels, singing Coldplay in one-part harmonies – a ceremony farther reaching than sect-like or religious.

Carers by trade, a soft army of Estrogen and wet-wipes, public service and part-time shifts, search enduringly, from Lytham to Blackpool and Cleveleys, for extraordinary evening Meet-Ups.

Listen…how their song is modest creak and breath, under dreamy oceans of pink and rippling mud that join water deep as wounds, love, hope for their babies.

 

*

Go further though, in the footsteps of the old shoppers, carrying family fisher-knots, circa 1900, among plastic bags from Quick Savers, behind dunes, where her treacherous, windy beach is shirked off.

Notice…a surprise of three or so visitors, as you pace, past Lower Lighthouse, around the ‘North Euston Hotel’ to his morose parade, ‘How?’ you think, did they find this place? Beyond fashion’s reach, where the trainline stopped.

They are nice, the people propping-up brown stones on Lord and High St. on economics of buns, pies, chips and eclectic gifts you’d buy for a Nan living at a distance. How sad the fire that burnt out

…a great department store and prospects for two kids, who torched it toward heaven from a carboard box, pinched cigarettes and boredom ~ gaping as an engineless car, joy ridden and discarded.

*

Beach and Town’s reconciliation: rumoured and entertained, is co-dependent on money borrowed and spent, as tenuous as my making peace…with the tiredness of it all – desire, space and absence.