Though the Long Poem Magazine - that most Ronseal* of UK literary magazines - didn't want this homage to Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' threaded with uncomprehended references to Marxian economics and the state of the nation under Theresa May (remember her?), you do.
Disclaimer: poems are fictions and, while Sarah, Meg and I did indeed housesit for friends in Burnham-on-Sea, neither of them resemble in any sense the small-time gangster & all-round bad 'un that 'Geoff' appears to be. (IRL 'Geoff' was the name of their French bulldog - great fun, much missed).
*if you're British and over 35, you'll know
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Burnham Beach Amusements
Cash-starved companies pay scrip instead;
Poets short on inspiration pay out others’ words,
Signage, half-remembered jokes off Twitter,
Others’ poems too, though only if conveniently out of copyright;
T.S. Eliot did it, he was in publishing;
If anyone would’ve known about copyright…
You know what? Call it sampling. Think The Prodigy, The Orb,
Other Dad dance-bands of the inter-war era
The sea was calm that night,
The tide was full, the moon lay fair
Upon the straits; over at Hinkley, the light
Gleamed and was gone, you get me?
On telly, Boris Jumpstart gobbing off about Brexit again,
Personified bumptious disappointment and bad faith
It was the heatwave summer, summer of flies;
Battered by work, SATS, interior decorating, we’d repaired to Burnham
To celebrate Meg’s eleventh birthday there,
That, and England losing to Croatia, better than Iceland though, yeah?
Imagine – house-sitting an eight-bedroom beachfront property
With only wife, daughter, smartphone, guitar,
Apricot wheats, New Scientist and
Dover Thrift edition of Matthew Arnold for company
Bit like being a Palestinian desert hermit, only not.
Garage In Constant Use, Thank You says Geoff’s garage;
‘Why are you saying thank you? It’s not me doing it,’
I always used to think; My Motor’s Mucking Fagic
And I Hate People that Take Drugs – Like Customs and Police
Say the stickers on Geoff’s other car;
Those are the bumper stickers of a younger man
But I’d like to see you try telling Geoff that.
I don’t know how he made his money, we don’t ask;
He has a firm handshake and a lazy eye;
We’re always careful to leave the place very, very tidy;
Good old Geoff.
Come to the window, love; sweet is the night air
I’ve written one about you, sweetheart
It’s also about the falling-away of Western civilisation;
Listen though; you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin and cease and then again begin
With tremulous cadence Jon Snow, bringing
Regulatory alignment in.
Some afternoons Burnham-on-Sea brings
Into my mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery
Maybe sitting in that free air-conditioned seating area
For patrons eating lukewarm fish and chips did it;
Won’t be going there again, ‘Somerset Life’ or no.
Mind you, the amusements are where it’s at, yeah?
And I mean, it makes you think, I mean, I mean –
And as I fed £1.50 in tuppences from a margarine tub
Decorated with one-armed bandit symbols into the pacman twopenny drop machine
In Novichok Amusements or whatever it was called,
I thought about what Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars trilogy guy)
Calls Gotterdammerung capitalism – a spiralling turbo-charged tragedy
Of the commons in which Capital discards even the pretence
Of securing its own continuation, racing instead to liquidate
Societal, material, financial assets
Still, one thing many of us have asked ourselves
Eighteen months into the Trump administration
Is why volatility indicators such as VIX have been holding steady
With market sentiment positively sanguine at times
That would seem a reason to be cheerful
But maybe there’s a Pascal’s wager here;
Like, the markets can bet on or presage or bring about
A range of possible outcomes, but one thing
They can’t bet on is the end of the market system itself,
Whether through some civilisation-ending cataclysm
Or transition to a saner post-market social arrangement
Then, despite the occasional clatter into a receptive metal tray
Of bits of my own money returning to me like,
Oh, I dunno, pebbles being washed up on the beach or something,
The £1.50 I’ve allowed myself expires;
Gamble Aware; When The Fun Stops, Stop.
Geoff says I overthink things; says, you’ve a head for figures,
Should do what I done: got FOREX trading software on my tablet,
FOREX Foreign Exchange, yeah? I punted a spare ten grand,
Doubled my stake inside of a fortnight, nearly,
You should try; Geoff, I say, I don’t have a spare ten grand;
Five then, he says; tell you what,
I shorted the pound the night of that referendum,
It was the right outcome, will of the people and that,
Plus I made an absolute packet; mind you,
Funny thing was I felt sad during that weekend, I don’t know why
Life’s a Russian novel sometimes, yeah? Good old Geoff.
You know at Angie and Mike’s wedding, sweetheart?
Geoff had had a few; me and him were talking out by the marquee.
All of a sudden he says to me, he says,
“You know what, Mark lad? I used to believe in things.”
Then he got very quiet, wouldn’t say what he meant.
Later he got even more drunk, tried to get off with whatshername
And you know when you watch the news?
Seeing sinister-clown types spaffing on about sovereignty
Puts you in mind of what Marx said,
‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ I think it was,
About the backward-glancing, fancy-dress aspect of historical praxis
Because this ‘will of the people’ stuff is a distraction-conjurement
Away from new-tech and new-media’s ability to
Manipulate huge data sets and also to
Use narrowcasting, bots etc to prime in a calibrated behaviourist sense
An almost infinitesimally segmented demos –
A sort of always-and-everywhere focus group –
Nah, me neither, I was only joking!
You know what, though, I really, really love you,
Love it that you smoke roll-ups, believe in Jesus,
Won about ninety tickets on the horse-racing machines
Which helped our daughter towards the sparkly emoji stress ball
She so coveted from the Novichok Amusements’ gift shop,
That you binge watch ‘Say Yes to the Dress’
And once, aged 22, played Simon & Garfunkel songs
On an acoustic guitar to the lifers at Parkhurst;
You should finish that comedy script about the Secure Training Centre
Pitch it to BBC3 or something
But in the meantime hold me,
And when you’ve left off, I’ll hold you
Maybe we can hold each other in a reciprocal customs arrangement
Please do not feed UKIP, they are pests. Sedgemoor District Council
Say signs leading down unto the beach; if they don’t, they should.
Trump mis-speaking flattery to Putin; Jumpstart’s bad Latinisms;
Steve Bandwidth wading in, telling us which prisoners we should release;
Who the hell does he think he is? No, don’t answer that.
[This stanza about Piers Morgan has been removed
Because it did not meet our community standards.]
While during this too-hot presaging heatwave, ignorant armies clash on Newsnight,
A naturalist writes: to my shame I’ve not been minding my language
And the President of the United States tweets:
I am fighting for a level playing field for our farmers – and will win
And I am in Brussels, but always thinking about our farmers
And I am watching what is going on in Europe
And Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace.
Will
that include the Failing New York Times?
Please note that patrons who lean against
Or rock the machines will be asked to leave
Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together please for Matthew Arnold,
Thank you to the highminded nineteenth century guy who foresaw it all
On honeymoon beside these Northern seas. I’m only sorry
That us later poets pay out scrip instead of cash – he saw that too.
