A Summer stay at Hove (poem)

A pebbled beach that glints like broken glass.
It suits me just fine.
The sun, reluctant to leave, lingers
until ten, painting the sky in streaks of marmalade.
A humid hotel room, with a view of the pier,
the distant hum of arcade games,
and the feeling of being part of it all
an augmentation of my reality.

The air is thick with the smell of barbeque —
charred sausages, burnt onions,
the faint tang of beer spilled on concrete.
Below the balcony, a group of teenagers
laughs too loudly, their voices cracking
like the shells of crabs left to dry on the shore.
The sea, warm and lazy, licks the stones,
its rhythm a lullaby for the restless.

Above it all, the seagulls —
their cries sharp, insistent,
like nails scraping the surface of the day.
They wheel and dive,
claiming chips from unwary hands,
their shadows flickering over the pebbles
like fragments of a darker sky.

It fits my mood.
The summer of 2009 stretches out,
a postcard fading at the edges.
Wherever you look: sunburned shoulders,
melting ice cream, the faint ache of something
almost beautiful but not quite.

And there, among the millions, one pebble —
smooth, oval, the color of storm clouds —
slipped into my pocket, a quiet theft.
Now it sits on my bookshelf,
a fragment of that endless evening,
a small, stubborn weight against forgetting
A home away from home.