1
I remember the pier at Southsea
where a few old men, stuck,
hugged fishing lines.
You flipped your hand in the fog
over the Solent at
the Isle you came from.
2
I got you pissed on Merrydown
in a pub on the Camber,
an Old Portsmouth dock,
and then touched you up
in a Sallyport arch.
3
Forty years on
I pad anxiously
in a fruity bathrobe:
your voice a rainbow
of dead herring.
4
Your agitation was like
migrating birds in a storm
minced by a jumbo’s turbines.
5
Even your nicest mood
was a gale—churned you up—
never a rest.
6
How did you keep it up, love,
when in that Scottish tarn of a heart
you were exhausted?
7
Perhaps you had an amulet
in the clutter you clapped into each day:
lip-gloss, eye-liner, jars.
A plastic figurine?
That’s how you were.
8
Still are, I guess. You must still
bend in acacias and kiss at
soft-gaping carp;
chase in evening heat
through hairy trees
and fling out your arms to capture
the inflamed awnings
of the Camber hotels.
9
Into your sooty wet
still honk launches.
But the basin
is an honest glass
which tells a story
of laid-back nights—
the snaky pleasures of boys
no rubber rubbed out.
10
In photos you live in the stares
of tossed-off lovers.
Weak beards, pony-tails.
I hear you on my sound-tracks
late at night.
11
You exist,
though Southsea cannot,
and though my ferocious worship
distils poison....
No matter what I want or ever wanted,
you never gave in.
It is late. Very late.
