Beachy Head
James Byrne reading Beachy Head 1719.3 KB
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The watermelon slices glimmer in the light.
We chomp into their green rinds and talk between
spitting pips over the pier’s edge. You mention
how your sleep is out, how for weeks on end
you’ve woken terrified in the middle of the night
certain of spiders in the bed. You’ve often felt them
skitter down your spine as if someone were tipping
salt under the duvet. It baffles you. Each morning
you notice a new dartboard hanging from the rafters,
but no spider fills its web. For a while we sit in silence,
the pair of us marvelling at endless creases in the sea;
where windsurfers dart confidently as if propped up
by the inky shadows beneath them and further out
a lonely freighter moves along quietly in slow-mo
towards Beachy Head; a deep smudge of sunlight
pasted onto its corroded hull. I turn back to you,
yet your eyes lock onto the stanchion of the pier,
where a spider scrambles upwards, its wiry legs
held together by a backpack the size of a thumbnail.
You watch nervously until it makes the summit
and then belt the spider with your melon rind.
Its chassis falls from the pier. And with that
we leave, scrunching along the shingled coast,
returning to the lives we have yet to become.
poetrymagazines' note: recorded at Southbank Centre on 9th December 2006.
Page(s) 38
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