Wheatley - A nest on the waves

A lost swan incubates a nest of golf balls and a stray hand replaces the flowers in the bridge-house window: red flowers. House on a bridge, I hear the gears scream, I feel each tooth of the terrible works connect and, greased up, haul you back to the fixity of empty air.

You dodge and move through liquid fixities of past and present, steer by a river whose mudbanks leave you tidal, shifty, bogged down and imprisoned. The sonic boom of the afternoon roar from the stadium tracks your footsteps, blows a dull wound in the boulevards thin air, and your pulse thuds to its drumbeat, win or lose. On the up this year then? Play-off places, blip, slump, plummet, dead in the water: the mustard cuts like fog. Cut your losses, a can kicked into the nearest gutter. Here the last of empire has meandered past the fag-end of the North Sea fleet to a scrapyard sculpture park whose remaindered Edward VII accepts a vain salute from a yawning Ford Fiestas bonnet. The December sun is a lazy eye.

No vistas you can raise will open it and you thirst for the liquid dark to bleed it dry, and so comes evening and beer in a backstreet pub by the bridge where you bank the coal fire down and a dog sips a pint, and onto your tab goes a Schlenkerla, the hobbling man; and fog on the way home, fog all round so I cant see you who are a shadow away, and there are no shadows and there is no ground underfoot for me to feel give way, and what kind of weather is this when all I want, all that I imagine, touch and see finds, not loses, itself in all I cannot grasp, in a fog drifted in from the sea?

Knots of islanders stream from the graveyard to East Town and West Town the infinite riches of if not one thing the other each soul one peg the more to stop the place blowing away with the trees (there are no trees on the island), and the lighthouse beams, blown out to sea and snapped at by Balors teeth where the island runs out. Lighthouse beam, then dash, dark, stop and wait: how it was before streetlights, getting back from the pub; beam, dash, dark, stop, wait in the Atlantic-wide black-out. The island disappears round me in mist, the pier water is transparent black. Believe with the harbours Tau cross in a faith long abandoned, granting you nothing: miss the last boat and look back on a cancelled world through the one bleary eye in the back of your head.