Fourteen minutes Simon Maddrell

Simon Maddrell

Fourteen Minutes

# Circular saws mark my route, roofers next door hammering & tongues like long-lost friends scaffolding them in empty windows & doorways when months before they filled with cheering horns, families lined up on balconies just as I imagine a photo on their kitchen wall # I catch a wind-swept leaf, I think about staying for thirteen minutes to catch a bag or wait ‘til winter to fill sacks on the road buses gush, cars harrumph as delivery scooters sew, the seagulls circle # when I stop by the post, an NHS Priority Box, their gift claps as it drops # down the hill the Grade I church is no longer a life of worship but they stage rehearsals # on the promenade, the Angel of Peace homage to nurses in a way statues should be in a past forgotten # wind turbines swirl through mist and I wait a minute squinting at the West Pier’s skeleton that seems to spell NHS, they keep saying it will be repaired one day # the autumn spring tide washed swathes of pebbles over the railings, I pick one up and know my place # at a defunct water fountain from an age it was free, the place I normally circle the square with its hedges & shrubs, nature’s prism, a hundred greens, one red, one yellow

# when it’s dry, instead I walk shoe-less, grass-toed past the chattering sparrows in a restaurant of trees but it is seagulls walking this time looking for lunches, packed, alive or both # unlike Lee Harwood’s dead bench suitably wrought with iron slats and plenty of gaps or space in-between where I find a broken key # in BRØD+WOLF I buy a pair of vegan coconut & lemon slices that save the planet two-by-two but not my waist # and there’s nothing eco-centric about the main street when my health and wellbeing centre is shut, I feel my breath as if I had a mask on but my glasses fog with rain rather than steam up # the dentist is open to national health patients, a relief to my broken front tooth that chews on stuff too much, a buddleia has lost its smell and I wonder how big it will grow and whether the family knows # the roofers who reminisce about videos, how one has a free feature film now the shop has shut and how the clunk, clank of ladders marked the end.