Nightpoetry

Dress neck to sole

brogue laced

and swiftstride

alongside the saltsea battered

coastal defences

gulls mimic the ack-ack

attack-attack-attacka

from masts and the past

strobe flows across

the carpet gardens

from the balloon lined

dysfunction rooms

down to the flaked edges of oldtown

crunchleather stones are picked up

and flungtossed sidearm

into the bibberty-bobberty

light bulbs weave waves

along the length breadth

of the repeat repeat to the end

testing for a fault

resting at the fort

old words walk

along old walls

as the ritual of nightpoetry

rears up and up

like the foamsmash

at the pierjump

rushing through

my sand coated

cold iron fingers.

We know

You know

...I can’t make this walk home

without the call of your tide

flooding my heart once more...

He only wrote poems in the sand

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.

---

Andrew Franks

from Scratched in the stars, sprawled on the sand - 2009