burnham beach amusements

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.