The Med is a graveyard

Crying underwater, salt mixes with the fresh,

diluting, polluting, dissolving with the rest.

My body drifts in the current,

weighed down by the cloth I hold,

a cloth sodden, golden, full of light.

The weeds, the sea-weeds

caress my puckered skin

and wrap me in their bladderwrack adoration,

gently flagellating, parting like a sad

magician’s curtain, to reveal a host,

a flock of ragged tourists, floating just above the

grey, grey, dance floor, toes describing

arabesques through the silt of a thousand expeditions,

clasping their dreams like children.

Sometimes, just clasping their children.

Milk eyes stare in blank accusation

of my misremembered life.

I never knew the sea, the sea

had so much hope, and misery,

buried deep down where

the salt and fresh collide.

Watching cars drive by

It was a very Seventies light.

The trees wore it like a mantle,

a hint, a tint, of Naples yellow,

a yellow like painted honey.

 

An old car drove by,

as cars are wont to do,

not the old that I remember,

the cars of my dreaming.

Allegro, Grenada, Fiesta, Capri,

exotically suggestive,

unreliable, constructed from

tin, hope, and disappointment,

you used to say,

when you were still here to say it.

 

I sat on a bench between

two malnourished trees,

held up by desperate grass

and angry weeds,

chipping at the peeling paint

with my ink-stained fingers,

revealing the old wood

hidden underneath.

 

Chipping, chipping,

till my fingers bled and

I had to pick out the

ancient paint that lodged

there like bejewelled insects,

desperate to burrow

into the meat of my fingers.

 

The cars kept driving by,

as they are wont to do,

low sunlight slipping

over quivering metal skin,

in that Seventies afternoon light.

Accidents waiting to happen,

you used to say,

when you were still here to say it.