Grimbeau

Ramona, can you hear the Dockyard calling:

She nods, coy, distant.

Clanking, drag chains clamour, trailing frantic

Sombre empty vessels grey steel hulls

Slide into the salty sea

Growling heinous savage asides

Pledge revenge to be wreaked on distant

Raiders who may ask no mercy from on high:

Old footpads, pickpockets, chancers, wizened rouge

Consumptives retreat.

Cloth-capped shipwrights puff butts, feeling high

Looking hard, keenly noting blemishes, repairs,

Defects, work to do, and slow stare

behind at the crap strewn, broken,

dust clouded, scorched slipway

Mass observers congregate dumbstruck,

awed on the wrecked slipway

gazing in sombre wonder, muttering as Klaxons screech

The dust clears and the naked, absurd hulk flops

Quite near distant, adrift, buoyant.

Water spumes from tyred tugs jet,

Spray polluted tears from on high

Drenching squabbling gulls,

who craw and repair

to the dry side of the hull.

Ramona’s smiles, shining apostolic, in the dull

Room, barely heed the clamour on the stairs,

She undresses easy, I sigh,

Another Liberty Ship underway

Waiving the rules of the wolf

The racket distant, now less frantic

The crowd disperses, now less antic

Fleeting ecstasies, comparing, admiring

Nifty clips of the hull:

The news of recent street

Melt in stealth, frantic

To avoid the attentions of the rugger buggers

Muscling raucous wild things, corporal bulwarks

Flailing, clubbing, brutes culling

Conviction for conviction’s sake