The Last of England

Cross-Channel ferry;

bright-lit bar, empty.
Just the acrid stench
of stale cigarette smoke
and half-full ashtrays.

Even the thirstiest of desperate drinkers
has abandoned ship tonight.

In the corner,
screwed firmly to the wall,
a black-and-white TV
flickers silently
to no-one.

The show must go on, though.
And trapped behind the screen,
unseen and unseeing,
fixed-grin idiot dancers
- all sequins and tat -
flounce and flap
for their very lives
to the sound of muted muzak.

Pleasing no-one –
least of all themselves, it seems -
they dance and prance
and the band plays on
pointlessly

as, unacknowledged,
an invisible perimeter is breached.
Now, beyond the border,
England bleeds into blue night.

Its electronic purview powerless here:
mid-Channel, wavelengths weaken and waver.

A chaotic choreography commences.

On screen, the over-eager entertainers
visibly quiver and shake as,
for the first time,
they sense their violent fate.

Torture follows,
live on TV,
as their figures are stretched and squeezed
into impossible, alien shapes,
like in a hellish hall of mirrors.

Yet, trembling, dissipating,
they defiantly dance on

until finally subsumed
in a shivering unseasonal summer snowstorm
of shadows,
white noise
and static.

The nation’s final, tainted transmission
(little to be proud of)

decays,
surrenders,
fails.

Nothing now remains of home.

This is the house

Scab