Sea Change
The sea hoards broken drink dispensers
and bones sinking in hot dog rolls.
It’s been stained with red sauce. I heave
my burger cart over sand dunes, shatter
plastic spades and mollusc shells. All I believe
could rise from the water, to brown in
the sun, and won’t stop the drowning.
The cart would be metaphorical
but you can hear it clanking, gasping
under unexpected weight, gearing up
to break apart like quicksand or a heart,
its wheels squeaking, hidden in snakes
of bladderwrack, smoke still lisping
from the grill, the fizzing as two cups
spill on a bump. This heavy cart
is my tinnitus until the sea talks
over everything. Every beach memory blurs
into wooziness. And waves. I imagine
a stranger watching from afar,
catching sight of a man pushing
a burger cart over an unspoiled
tidal flat, not seeing depressions and grooves
I have to negotiate, the pooled
trenches and bumps. Whoever moves
fast hasn’t lived long enough
to have enough strength to push
this cart. The cart would be
metaphorical but my aching arms
strain under the tension, heaviness,
my skin burning. This mini meat farm
all day has smelled alien to me.
I should have taken up cleverness.
The high street misled me, washed
with paths which were solid and flat
so I couldn’t feel the exertion.
The railings, at least, forced me to think
before blundering into a splat.
The wheels squelch and sink
until I have to heave my burden
a few inches above a wave’s swash.
My trousers are drenched, shoes ruined,
sweat and spit falling off my skin
like the raw burgers and sauce bottles
falling off the cart. It all splashes. And floats.
Either my weak, tearful body buckles
or I choose to drop the cart. Thinned
in a heartbeat. A tiny bit of sea drinking
what controlled me. I turn back. Without the padded coat.
Carl Griffin is from Swansea and has had poems published in Magma, Poetry Wales and Cheval. He reviewed poetry collections and for Wales Arts Review. He was long-listed for the Cinnamon Pamphlet Poetry Prize and the Melita Hume Prize.