Do you remember Mevagissy
as I do tonight?
I taste the tang of salty grief.
We ambled along blissfully oblivious
to the fact
it was both the first and the last time
we would be together in Mevagissy.

Miles from our problems;
we had left those at home,
stashed beneath the world weary
pillows of the marital bed.
Unburdened we were free,
became just us and our
2.4 badges of averageness-
the statistical sum of nuclear normality.

In Mevagissy we truly just basqued
in the gentle warmth of the sun.
As we watched fishing boats bob atop
the rippled conveyor belt
of the harbour quay.
We ate icecream
as gulls those amber eyed nomads
shrewd merchants of the sea...
demeaned they beg of sentimental sloppy eyed tourists,
Who in misguided wisdom thought
the 'do not feed the gulls' signs
were just plain mean.

Sadie threw hers in the path of
one greedy gull who waddled over
on ungainly feet not designed for asphalt
nor did he consider the danger in his path...
a car came and clipped his leg
with an audiable crack.
The gall in my throat rose
I was distraught,
I made you go let the Harbour master know
even though you said nothing would be done.
I couldn't just walk away;I just had to try.
Just as I had left the knowledge at home
that no-one cared that our marriage
limped along not even
you nor I.

Somehow to this very day I felt
I don't know why but
the gull and it's broken leg
and our fractured life
were hopelessy intertwined.

I was painfully aware that just
as the gull could only survive if it stayed
in Mevagissy as it dragged it lame leg...
round the quaint
Cornish harbour.
Our poor broken relationship
was splintered by one fine day in Mevagissy.

The gull would live out the rest of the summer
on this unsuitable diet of ice-cream and chips
he could sub-exsist,
from the contant stream of unwitting tourists
who would sympathise yet forget.

As we came to leave I was disconcerted
because when summer ends and all us
slack jawed benificeries will return
to our hum-drum lives
and he will return to the sea
and surely die.

Just know I sit and ache
as I remember us four
and how we had depended
on this old Cornish harbour
to feed us its sweet stodgy diet of unreality
but we had yet to return to a hostile yet sometimes
strange stillness of real life
that stretches beyond the horizon
as does the undulation of the sea.

I know now why I grieved so
for all of us with the broken legs
in Mevagissy...
who feared not the roaring engine
which is the approching future
nor the random trundle
that is the wheels of destiny that may come
and shatter
the fragile bones of your being.