Seaside Fairground

You were never very fond of fairgrounds,
inky birds on fists too full of fighting
ungambled goldfish suffocating
in bags like blisters,

(No I’ve never seen a blister with a fish in)

Yes, you  said you hated fairgrounds
but we walked anyway, to the pier’s end

the cockled planks had lead us there,
past the sickly hiss of the donut stall,
the rice scribes, 

and a Peruvian flute band,
floating in that English squall 
like a plaster in a pool,
loosed from the sticky wound 
of South America.

We were drawn there perhaps, like everyone else,
on a recreational breeze, aimless as the chip papers
that fluttered round the feet
of reclining pensioners,

glad of the sudden late Spring sun,
and grounded in, an Englishness
borrowed from sit coms and poems like this,
suggestive of sugary tea
sipped under urgent gulls
 
or in the quiet embarrassment of a windbreak.

I can still hear those indignant gulls,
the wheezing oompa of the merry-go-round,
and your voice saying,
 
"I love it here,"

and meaning almost all of it.