“At any given moment in the middle of a city there’s a million epiphanies occurring, in the blurring of the world beyond the curtain.” Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos I once saw a woman peering at the world from behind a net curtain in the middle of Venice in the middle of thick fog. […]
Category: Poems
Memory of Scent
It comes to me through autumn smoke, the burning of damp leaves, that pricks the eyes and chokes the breath, the funeral pall of summer’s death: a hint of you drifts through the trees, teasing on the goose-bump breeze, the scent of Coty powder on your face, always just a trace of you in me. […]
Broken Compass
Vincent van Gogh once wrote: ‘The conscience is a man’s compass’, but humankind’s compass broke and we have lost our way. We are drowning the planet in a mass of plastic, choking the rainforests with palm oil, sitting by and watching as the polar icecaps melt into the background of inane selfies posted on social […]
Sweetening the View
Someone has gathered a bunch of monochrome moons and tied them to a grey bridge, beneath a grey sky, where they collect grey city dust, when all they want to do is drift away… At the end of the day, sunset splashes paint across the cityscape, reveals a rainbow cloud of balloons, no longer moons […]
Bridges
They explored the bridges of Madison County and each other, body and soul, to a soundtrack of crickets, rustling wheat fields, tyres on dusty roads, and jazz. Days were filled with sunlight, longing and an evening of candlelight. Heaven’s persuasion in a bullying downpour drew her eyes to the truck, cross swinging from the rear-view […]
Unknown
It’s there in the depths of midnight, swimming in the shadows, feeding on the frenzy of fear and the lees of nightmares stirred by moonlight. It’s in the chill of the floor before you find the bedroom light switch, check under the bed, remember what was said in the heat of an argument, even if […]
Song of the Ornery Oak
I am an old oak bowed by years, knee-deep in my fractured limbs, leafless, bare of bark and splintered, destroyed by lightning in a storm. I am an old oak fraught with scars, and here you are with saw and axe already stained with another tree’s sap – I’ve anchored my roots to thwart your […]
A Pair of (Still) Blue Eyes – final draft
They have retained their lustre, yet it is dark beneath closed lids. They filter light to conjure colour in dialogue with the brain, resonant as Shakespearean actors. Tired after years of looking and seeing beyond words, they require lenses, windows on blurry landscapes and distorted Giacometti figures. They are prickling thistles, friable pillows of delicate […]
A Pair of (Still) Blue Eyes
We have retained our lustre, no vile jellies, and yet we know darkness. We orbs are oratory with the resonance of a Shakespearean player. We have a direct line to the brain, filtering light to conjure colour. But we need lenses, windows on blurry landscapes, distorted Giacometti figures, aliens in our owner’s ocular world. We […]
Cruel Paean
For the past few weeks I’d caught it echoing across the village, a lazy iambic chant. When you heard it too, we smiled together at the rare sound of the cuckoo’s two-note song. We forgot that it’s a cold-hearted parasite, hatched and nurtured to the tune of another bird’s lullaby. We were oblivious to its […]
