BLACKPOOL
“how many holes it
takes to fill the Albert Hall”
I came to
Blackpool, Lancashire,
to be conceived
my soul already garbed
in tangerine
inland from the Irish Sea
I lived
our little river
up to something
revolution in music
to be remembered forever
there in that old, dead
slave port
swept up by voices, songs
steaming in
from a wilder West
brief Renaissance they
just had to
weed out
the fiction of Empire
in such dire need of it.
I came
to Blackpool to
get conceived
though sex, as Larkin said,
waiting for its establishment