funhouse

The Guardian's Saturday Poem was by Charles Bukowski:

I drive to the beach at night
in the winter
and sit and look at the burned-down amusement pier
wonder why they just let it sit there
in the water.
I want it out of there,
blown up,
vanished,
erased;
that pier should no longer sit there
with madmen sleeping inside
the burned-out guts of the funhouse . . .
it's awful, I say, blow the damn thing up,
get it out of my eyes,
that tombstone in the sea.
the madmen can find other holes
to crawl into.
I used to walk that pier when I was 8
years old.

From his collection The Pleasures of the Damned
I grew up in Southport which had its own pier so there's some powerful associations here for me. Here's a link to the history of this pier.