DEAD PIER

On a seafront in late Autumn

among whistling washing lines flapping,

like waves on a coarse sunset

playing with the winds of red earth.

I sat near where I played as a boy

among the time dunes and sand monsters,

I smelt the vinegar and candyfloss

blemishing the air with the ocean’s salt.

I gazed at the tide and its slim waves

slapping the brown suits of damp sand,

and a dead pier isolated from touch

like a burnt asylum set adrift at sea.

I captured my first kiss in the shade of a blue shelter

on a pier painted with the Summer’s blush,

while the tone of the coughing breeze

caught our kiss like a paused canvas.

Under the splintered belly of the dead pier

close to the salted rot of its buckled leg,

a moored boat coated in dark crispy seaweed

like a leper’s skin swaying in the distant water.

The pier glossed by the derelict moon

memory drifts in ghosts of sand,

where black-veined clouds taunt a gallery of stars

as a vast view through a gaze that blinds.

ALL POEMS WRITTEN BY M.J DUGGAN.

This poem is being published in ‘Graffiti’ poetry magazine ‘September ’11′.

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