
burnt down in the 1970s

I stare out at the gangrenous remnants of a burnt-out and buckled boardwalk.
I once walked along here in my long white gown to my wedding reception at the pier’s head.
A teenage discotecque, held every Saturday afternoon, paraded the latest fashions.
Mecca Ballroom danced the night away, and in the early hours there were women
Weeping over fights among bouncers and drunks.

New wooden jetties, hoping to entice wealthy yachts and bearing ‘No Swimming’ signs, have become diving platforms today for sunburnt disobedient boys in trunks.
Diving through oily green waves of frothy seaweed, they wiggle down with the pipe fish and grey mullet to boat wrecks, over-stewed and stuck in the bed of blue-grey clay, razored with cracked cockleshells and broken bottles.
Here is the underworld city to hermit crabs, sea slugs or the occasional murder victim anchored by heavy slabs of concrete.
by Southampton Old Lady – August 2013


‘Kuti’s Royal Thai Pier’ in 2010