WIND ON THE BEACH

You can shout and be shovelled away

in this swarming.

You sense you can shout whatever you like

in these snakes and ladders shot through the sky.

You see sand in a cloud while you are walking

the sunlit pavement rising towards the seafront,

the stage full of a bright rage launching

lace after lace into the open.

The swarming stare of the air where tracks fall apart

like the infinitely torn ventricles of a heart.

Smithereens of a god’s cheekbones who enjoys

being endlessly blown up in rumbling ribbons.

It’s an unframed huge breath on your face

that makes you sooner or later lower your gaze

and you think of all that’s lost at once and swarms

and there must be, must be something of yours here,

in this lashing of selves, forgotten, torn, or just being born,

in this rushing and crashing of nothing into nothing,

this throaty, hollering announcement of air into air,

or stares expanding and exploding into stares, lizards

stopped by in an aplomb of sky, gazing motionless

for a second - time stopping, time never ending-

and in the next just dashing, flashing away.

A tail scuttering or, so much for that,

a tale plunging beyond the edge of an odyssey,

or a heart in the wake of a perpetual lightning,

or hope in eternity of sun breathing through sail.