On the Spinnaker Tower

By Guy Walker

Emerging onto

the viewing platform

the world tilts

while spinnakered dinghies

sew their courses below.

My hometown

lurches at my feet.

 

I am inside the tinted eye of a fly.

A Perspex prison

Secured with titan-sized meccano.

 

A queer pelvic voltage

dissolves my centre,

alloying life

with the terror of death.

 

Imagination

unmans

on this floor

buoyed on concrete,

whose feet are planted

a hundred metres too far away

to believe in.

 

A seagull

passes level with my knees,

yawing casually

on air currents,

outraging

the quaint gyroscope

of my earthbound propriety.

 

Immobile,

I stagger.