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Artwork: Waking Up at Sea by Will Jacques

Pier
Gina Wisker

Baroque merry-go-round with its painted mermaids
and the over-exuberant, tinny sounds , so flashy and garish they
haunt my long dark hours.
The black water at the edge of the
Ghost pier lapping or lashing, there’s
careering starlings seeking shelter against
a grey slate sky and waves of predators.
As evening’s inevitability tells us of
the coming threats of night, far from the funfair, grinding to a halt,
the sickening streetlights are ghastly in the yellowing evening air.
Along the streets of rollicking revellers,
you’re seeking something that would free you. But
there’s others planning, lurking, waiting idly
in the shadows.
Among this sea town’s myths of endless partying, fun, this
dark underbelly of chaotic glee, your sudden newfound friends
are jovial, watchful, promising.
                                      ***
The party’s over.
On the bleak beach now with the encroaching tide you’re
vulnerable.
Daytripper, tripped out and tricked you’re calling and calling
until silenced.
Until the waves take your body out from the pebbles, out
from the link between land and sea
entering that Other, shoreless, wild, vast , water world.
That dissolution.


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Washed up in Brighton
Gina Wisker

She washed up there that morning out
on the unforgiving stony beach beneath
the blackened twisted metal of the
Ghost pier, her flimsy clothing
no match for the sudden late winter.
Frozen out in turquoise, once shimmering, a little gaudy
daring perhaps a last fling.
A broken heel and one shoe lost.
No card, no name, no future.
So what long planned trip what
last ditch foray into the bright lights the bars and laughter of the Laines?
What deceptive will o’ the wisp promise of some late and extra youth some
fling some flurry some new chance
elusive
has left her here?
A broken investment.
Little more than silly, self-deluded, desperate frippery
led to this: sea-drifted, tangled, dank and rotted against the
dull green brown sea and the brown stones, the blackened struts
of the abandoned, burned out pier.
Down among inquisitive sharp-beaked, relentless gulls picking
the small fish and the seaweed
from her tangled hair, she’s stranded,
drowned, washed up, beached out and dumped.
The cold, the dark, the channel sea
recedes, rejecting her body.

 

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