-
A dead crow on the grass, the inner gateslocked. It’s not since we were last here,tracing the monks’ forgotten path: vigilsin scratchy robes through the long nights,a blaze of clarity at dawn, lentils and acorn bread,escape to a hum of beehives and co...
-
“Fancy a drink?” said Tedwith an affable grin and a flick of his floppy grey locks.I mumbled I would, but looked on in dreadas he whipped out a pair of green hiking socks.“You’ll need these then – and these.”And he threw at my feet an old pair...
-
An Irish bar just out of townis where I meet my dad,for him to spout his lectures onthe things we never had.“You could’a been a lawyer ora doctor all the same,”within the hour weeping formy mother and his shame.“I should’a been there for y’son...
-
It was funnyWhen her school greyHand-me-down cardiganBallooned.Catch us doing that –At fourteenWith fags and mascaraSafelyIn our pencil cases.Not that we’d ever been asked.Shoulder to shoulderWe’d risk a sideward glance –Shocked by her long socksA...
-
Mist shrouds the valley bottom.Barrack-like factories crowd for warmth.Long, black steelwork sheds,Soot and red-oxide encrusted,Squat, like dinosaurs, beside river, road, canal.Years since,A thousand chimneys darkened the noonday sky,Cranes swung scrap ir...
-
Your nightmares spilled overad sucked me in.Couldn’t wake you.No, couldn’t wake myself butthe dead stirred slightlyon the third screamand the days became darkwithout centre or sense.One visit to this realityhas been enough for mewith its ways and mean...
-
A friend’s food consciousness can make life hell,for when she plunges on a dietyou feel as if you’re dieting as well.The look, the flavour, and the tempting smell:you sit there taunting: “Go on, try it!”a friend’s food consciousness can make lif...
-
IThe man next door to me was a minerUntil the dust filled his lungs like coal-sacks;Now he’s good for nothing so he says.Now he walks in slippers and leans on walls,And eats the clean air while his eyes fix onReaching the bottom of his garden.His wife h...
-
(Trad)When jack met Bob at The Philharmonicfrom shopping once they called each other ‘la’, the weather shit, their meeting a tonicand exchanged all the news weird and wonderfulfrom their adventures in the Labour pool.Jack had none so Bob made a dance ...
-
I know not to beginbut wait for the settlingof breast and buttocks,the sorting of angles and shadowsand save for laterher thigh-sheen and deepest darks,last of all her red lips and orange hairI’ll never dare paint.I set what might be a loose linefrom sh...
-
Those early mercenaries, it made them ill –leaving the mountains, leaving the high, fine airto go down, down. What they gotwas money, dull, crude coins clenchedin the teeth; strange food, the wrong taste,stones in the belly; and the wrong sounds,the wro...
-
Among the yellowing photographs in the Harrods boxLies one of my father taken on Brighton Beach.His peaked cap, a souvenir from Czarist army days,Belies his sixty years and greying hair.Beside him on the pebbles a youngish girlLooks into his moony eyes an...
-
I was there at your childhoodAmong the cocoa mugs and melting cheese in saucepans;Watching you watching T.V. and eating grapes.Funny how I always associate you with food(And you’re a big girl now.)But you left me alone to lie with other lovers,And I cra...
-
Imaginelow-growing somewhereover Central Park,the loquat, yellowingto maturity, its fruitforever fresha mordant reminderof him, of the manliving on in the strengthin the rich tastesof woman...
-
Faintly glamorous oncewhite macs and cupped cigarettesand her with her beehiveand him with his quaffslouching to the early busThen there were kidstoo many for the houseand she lost her teethand he went out of fashionNow, a car in the gardentheir youngest ...
-
Snow is coming.An ice whisperrattles in the sky’s voices.The horizon glitters,a knifeblade slitting openblack throated hills, the moorland’s bellybleeds dark water, peat bogsand rough pastureswill soon be salted downpreserved until the thaw.Our boats ...
-
My son tells my father he sees his childhoodin just black and white;shorts too long, haystack hair anda misshapen hoop, long gone.I see my grandfather’s boyhood daysIn dog-eared sepia;breeches, a cloth cap with a size problemand sullen facewith somethin...
-
A fitful sleep eventually comes apartAmid the hidden details lying strewnAround the spaces in an empty roomThat tug in silent clutches at the heart.A curtain hangs bedraggled somewhere, torn,A broken clock disdainfully affordsA look stuck at the moment it...
-
The Gardens Party renders signal serviceby keeping our prison policies aflamewith regimented rows of scarlet beauties- even here discipline’s the name of the game.Except that bed outside the Governor’s Office,at first sight just daffodil-full, pale an...
-
Grey aisles of housescurve up to the sky.Molten dawns pourdown these streetsand coolto steel-grey days.This is a citygrafted onto the hills.This is a city of metal-fatigued faceswelded togetherin the sunset lightsof a dying furnace.This is a cityof hard, ...
