Smithereens Press Chapbooks 'Zero at the Bone' by David Wheatley | Page 9

SCENE ONE
[Curlews calling, slow fade-in.]
MCALLISTER
Seventy-five, six, seven, eight, nine
telegraph poles march in a curved line
to the end of the point. The coastguards’ 4x4s
bump along the road at all hours
to the sound of the passing ships’ ground bass.
Not much else gets through the walls of this place.
A peninsula is a bridge to nowhere except,
once you turn round, the place that you’ve just left.
Unless you stay. The sand blows over the road
behind your steps; it’s shutting you in. Outside
of here a green lagoon cowers from the sea
and the wind swallows anything I might say.
And so I sit in this bricked-in cell and write:
an empty lighthouse, the light of the world gone out.
[Pause.]
One tell-tale sign you’re wasting your life
is to find yourself at the age of twenty-five
premature baldness coming on a treat,
pissing your time away on a doctorate
in staring at women’s breasts in libraries.
There goes a chapter, whistling past on the breeze.
And then to be writing it, into the bargain,
in Hull, on the poetry of Philip Larkin,
or bunking off instead to the East Coast ends
of the earth, to Spurn Point where the [declamatory.] ‘silence stands
like heat’… How do those lines go? [declamatory.] ‘Here
is unfenced existence: facing…’ [gives up.] my last beer
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