(after Mallarmé) The smoke rings I cannot blow seem summations of my soul one by one by one they roll scattered with another O their trembling grey bears witness to incendiary art keep your ashen mind apart from the buried fire’s red kiss thus whole choirs of romance fly up to lips
He’s got an old truck in the driveway, Hot cup of coffee in his hands, A way of life he’s known since his childhood, First rays of the morning sun Breaking through the clouds He plans his day in the farm He knows he’s gotta give his best ’Cos all he’s got is in
Just grant me one summer, powerful fates, and a final autumn of lucid song, so that, sated with music’s sweetness, this soul may wholeheartedly die. A poet not wielding his sacred might in life shall find no quiet in Orcus, yet once I have said the holy words I came to say, spoken my
The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes later after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony, a halo of your wispy hair blonde once more against the dawn. My suitcases thrown in the boot, doors slammed, engine revved, clutch released, I forgot our goodbye
Remember those lanes he walked after work, past the weed-wormed car park at the rusting colliery to the two-street village, to catch the bookies or straight into the Oak. His days governed by dim light: in boiler houses or the single bulb rooms of boarded-up terraces – jobs no one wanted never fazed him.
for Ian Sansom Where was it written that I should measure my middle years by the great blank flowering of these pom-poms – uncanny as domes in a village landscape – whose advance has no warning (one day a sprinkling of warts, the next WE’RE HERE!!!), that love water and pacify the night? They’ve
I send you this bouquet, which my own hands just culled from the marvellous bed; if spring’s not gathered tonight, I said, tomorrow her beauty will have flown. Let its light serve as a sermon then, how your charms flourishing their fair May shall soon be invested with frost-grey and, bit by bit, become
Firm pillows stacked high for hope to rest on, each calling out against nightmare and fear. Courage has determined this towering resistance so may it hold firm and remain until dawn for the light to discover a mended nation whose cities awake from their troubled sleep.
Let me be baroque in death as I’ve been practical in life. Let six black-plumed stallions draw the black-gloss carriage wherein my black-gloss casket rests upon a maple plinth festooned with lilies – outrageously frilled and huge white lilies exploding from every crevice, their syrupy musk clagging the air for miles around. Let us halt
The end of a perfect summer’s day – we ramble down the canal path, past Pirate Castle and the shopping arcade where confetti sale signs camouflage lives mired in quiet desperation. Harassed shoppers go about their business, wearing their mask of disappointments discreetly. Everybody is dreaming of being somebody, preparing to be
Caught out in the wrong shoes, I choose to join the spiders in a crevice in the old park wall. To them, all weather is the same; all time is time to do some work. I watch them working, watch their old webs breathing as I breathe, now tilting brickwards, now tilting
and stare perplexedly into the middle distance with one crease, one particularly characterful furrow knitting my brow, not an old lady furrow oh no something about the way I hold this furrow in this ongoingly perplexed stare will imply a whole panoply of barely suppressed emotions, a gamut even, simmering away under the surface of
In summer, when light’s fled, narcotic scents are poured out from ten thousand blooms; we doze with shut eyes but ears which only half-close, immured by sleep of a strange transparence. Soft shadows and the stars subtler, less bright; vague radiance tints that eternal hall, and the sweet pale dawn, awaiting her call, seems
for Gail McConnell I How much of what we scribble down survives – Sappho’s miraculous bits and pieces, Dialect words for kitchen utensils, See-through dresses, moonbeams – somebody At a busy street corner advising Where to shop for chickpeas and mascara. II Let blank spaces between parentheses Be annotated thus by me and
In the days when I loaded goods trains for a living Out of love for you, and no small concern I felt cold and tired and clean My throat pulsed slowly with the cold air’s burn Down on the silvering frost-lit rail Balanced with risk on the oiled sleeper Pushing upwards against the weight Of
Life together began when you hooked your shirts on the rim of my bedroom mirror — I liked having someone mess with my neatness. We’d skirt the notion of settling down and fly a kite on Parliament Hill. If the walls crowded round, the smoke too thick from each cigarette we lit, we could take
Kew Gardens, March 2022 Late-winter dawns the larches start to sing their conjuring of bright green coronets like miniature elvish party hats strung along hanging shoots in sheets of song – notating, emoji-like, clean morning notes. And then you see scarlet-and-green mitres, miracles of meticulous enamel artistry, as your mist of breathing clears
I suppose you’re right and breaking up would be quite a good thing, but staying together would be an equally good thing, so whatever we decide to do it will be all right. On balance, I lean towards doing nothing, but whatever happens we’ll go on seeing each other, won’t we? I suppose it
Agnes B. Marshall, née Smith, of Walthamstow, practised at Paris under Viennese chefs, had visions of snow-capped mountains, stiffly beaten peaks, set in glassy dishes. Not for her the Penny Lick. She knew life wasn’t a rehearsal and set about chipping away at Gatti’s glaciers: Norwegian ice kept frozen under London clay. (Liquid nitrogen later
when an unexpected whirl of wind tosses grey veils of rain across the Common; gobbets of roof-tile moss and mud plop on my doorstep. The parakeets, no doubt bewildered, flung among new-leafed trees, are blown to destinations never planned for. Flowers I planted yesterday fight for their lives in sodden borders. The sky turns dark.