Winter Beach 3 by Mickey Williams

Protocols of the Superfluous Immortal

A god long since retired to the seaside
Checks the post and tuts at the barometer.
Some dirty weather in the offing -

Freighters in the channel battened down,
The green wave-walls remote and terrifying as his youth.
He re-reads Hornblower in bed. He never sleeps.

An egg, please, and The Telegraph.
His constitutional, the bandstand,
Out along the pier; the wintry courtesies

Accorded others of his solitary kind.
Then afternoon. No weather worth the name.
The day extends toward whatever.

It extends, forever, and the god
Applies himself once more to thirteen down,
The only word that rhymes with breath. But it’s no good.

Sean O’Brien