The lighthouse was somewhere in the south of his country,
that stood unused in the wet smoke that rose from the sea,
maybe no more than ten metres below the candy stripe,
that looked no better now, than as the day it was painted.
No longer a boy, he works twelve hours a day, with two
cigarette breaks, because he is lucky. An Atlantic oil rig
with cold fingers that reach deep in to the earth, dredging
the old bones of what’s left. I don’t know what else to say.
So much of nothing can be said, and is said. Words like
a substance can spill in to the ocean of myself like a secret.
Give me something. Twelve hours a day to forget everything.
Two cigarette breaks and the smoke that might rise from the sea.
Give me all of what you cannot drink and should never taste.
Give me the taste of your cherry pierogies, and the name of
your sister who cooked them in butter. Tell me how she left
her life of turning down bed sheets before she left again to die.
Tell me about our board of yellow wood, our father’s boots
resting together on the tools of someone else’s construction;
where we’d work in the rain, and in the sun, and in the winter.
Where we’d wait for the engines to melt the snow in to ice.

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Alex Mazey ’s poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines. He has helped facilitate workshops for Writing West Midlands, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation created to support creative writers and creative writing in the West Midlands region. Alex began writing poetry in 2008, under the guidance of Irish poet, Kathleen McPhilemy. Between 2010-2013, he studied Creative Writing (BA Hons) at Staffordshire University before moving to the University of Keele in 2015 to complete an MA under award-winning poet, James Sheard. He was a guest speaker at TEDx Keele University in 2016.