A decade of cinders, charred and recoiling
like flames on ice, burning himself
into the silence of the tides
sat on the edge of the sea, cold, unambiguous
dressed head to toe in sympathetic shades
of a sickened summer
as the boys on drift boards, surf by on clouds
heading inland as the eddies and swirls
build steep turrets and walls
whilst the vast temporal cadences
offer themselves up to sly celestial forces
he writes poems in the sand
scratched in the stars
sprawled on the sand
the agonies and rusted anguish
of life burnt away, not so much snubbed
as whispered out, the petrified seaweed
clings to the salt-cloaked body
the huge canon of work, smeared from history
by the sweet rolling waves.
He has no other dreams at all
always on the beach detained and cleansed
like a prisoner on the block, forgetting his crime
like the poems that he wrote in the sand.
