A bird lands on a traffic island to inspect a dropped chip, and by the end of twelve lines the speaker feels hunted. That shift from a scrap of street food to a brush with death is the poem's central idea. Fear is a great exaggerator, and the poem lets comedy and menace sit side by side, so we cannot tell whether we are laughing at the speaker or sharing the fright.
The opening is deliberately flat. "It was a chip" is the sort of sentence you might hear at the start of a pub anecdote. The details are almost aggressively ordinary: ketchup, mayonnaise, a traffic island, the dry-cleaners. The word "simple" appears twice, first for the "simple french-fry" and then for the "simple strip of potato," and the repetition insists that nothing important is happening. Yet the language is already restless. The chip is "revealing itself," as if it had intentions, and the pronoun "it" slides between chip and bird. The gull arrives only as "Wings pulled," a body part with no name attached. We do not learn the word "gulls" until line seven, so the creature is a presence before it is an identity. Even its movement is described in cold, bureaucratic terms: it "assessed" the food, like an inspector.
Then comes the poem's turning point, the blunt confession "I have never liked gulls." Until now the speaker has been an observer, and this is the first appearance of "I." From here the bird grows. Its "wing-span" becomes "the length of seizing arms," and the wings turn into human limbs. "Seizing" carries a second sense, since it also suggests a fit or a loss of bodily control. The bird then loops "the circumference of my / scalp," a geometrical phrase that makes the speaker's head sound like a target being measured. The line break after "my" leaves the word hanging before "scalp" arrives, much as a swooping bird seems to hover before it strikes.
The verb "would" is worth noticing: "It would take what it wanted." This is not a description of something happening but of something imagined, a habit or a possibility. The poem therefore never confirms that the gull attacks. The threat may live entirely in the speaker's head, which is where the next phrase lands: "a chip; my mind." The semicolon sets the two objects side by side as if they were equal prizes. That produces a jolt of bathos, but also a real flicker of panic about losing control. "Poker-face" adds to this, because the gull's blank eye gives away nothing, and the speaker fills that blankness with calculation. The final line, "it circled for death," makes the bird a vulture, a creature that waits for corpses. Whose death is unclear. It could be the speaker's, the chip's, or simply death in general. The line is absurd and chilling at once.
Structurally, the poem is made of six unrhymed couplets with a loose, conversational rhythm. Without rhyme, the voice stays casual, as though we are being told a story rather than handed a performance. Enjambment drives much of the movement, pulling sentences across the gaps between couplets. The dashes after "pulled" and "Poker-face" act like held breaths. The last couplet is the sparest, and it ends on a hard, end-stopped "death."
The title, "Barnstorm," points to the idea of showy aerial stunts, since barnstorming is a term from stunt flying, and it also contains the word "storm." Judging by the poem's imagery, the gull is cast as a daredevil pilot, a performer swooping over a very small audience.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy. In a dozen lines it shows how anxiety scales up, how a harmless scene can be rewritten by a nervous imagination, and how humour can be the doorway to something darker. It does this with the most unglamorous materials: a chip, a pavement, a seabird.