As the Taliban surged back into Kabul and the international correspondents looked more exhausted with every broadcast but not as exhausted as the refugees I thought of my young second cousin Matthew, one of the four hundred and fifty-seven flown back from Afghanistan in sealed coffins to Wootten Bassett and then, in Matthew’s case,
Each morning it is there. A cocoon of memory visible and invisible waiting for me to stumble into it. I feel its viscid grip. Its symmetry of silken threads spun into a tensile trapeze that bends in the breeze. Day and night a cobweb of neurons always firing whether awake or asleep trapped
Across the great divide… They kept them hidden till I stepped inside One for a birthday card, Puzzled at first by what was there And what was not. And what was there to hide? Huge glossy frozen packs of pig’s feet, tripe, Hog maws
Years of working weekends, cashing in his holidays, dossing in loveless digs beside arterial roads or in vans to pocket his expenses. He’d earned it, kept on how soon he’d be in Lido di Jesolo, a linen suit for evenings; us lot wouldn’t exist. Back three days later, rubbing down skirting boards before
The door is broken! The door is broken. A Polar wind squalls and flings it open. The bloke behind the fish fryer with a rag thrown over his shoulder tells me to leave it; wipe-clean menus skid across the floor. I’m always somewhere like this in winter. Trawlers queued at the Wyre light for
We trudged the grounds of a country house under a featureless sky as stark trees bled out with morning rain and what light there was started to die, and every time you grabbed for my hand I felt a little thrill, unmentioned, ineffable.
There are no headless horsemen, White Ladiesor rattling chains in this ghost story;he died in the chair from black lung, coughing;the coal dust that did for him, and the fags. In life, he’d been a nasty piece of work; like those blokes at the pictures my grandmawarned me about in their fetid raincoats,Brylcreemed hair. We
A canny cousin taught me the handshake trick. I was ten or eleven. Small for my age, but quick As a flash, after a smiling approach, I could duck Beneath my arm and get the affable chap Locked in a Half-Nelson. Thing about tricks is You shouldn’t use them too often. This I learnt
‘I Remember Arras’, a sequence in four parts corresponding numerically to the four stanzas of ‘Adlestrop’, imagines Edward Thomas as having survived the war and looking back on his experience in France. The sequence plays fast and loose with some bits and pieces drawn from Thomas’s writings, including his 1917 diary. I ARRAS I remember
After breakfast, our bonuses in the bag, time sheets collected, the weekend begins. Down by the battered garages near the burnt-out Escort, our apprentices go for it: first to find one gets chips for his dinner. Stanway says to take it behind that steel-shuttered house, top of the estate, and for all of us to
Summer in the suburbs, Its wealth confined to a bedroom Where a tepid waft disturbs And strokes with silver gloom The long beast with demon eyes Who, stealthy as all cats, will come To tipple from the vase of the anemones.
My soul, my shadow, the dreams I stare into the night are wounded. I kiss my mirror-self. The lips with which I bite are wounded. I am a year filled with venom, every season is autumn: leaf-filled evenings, the snaking twilight are wounded. The signs of the stars – my Scorpio, my Libra,
Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s
In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.
Cleat hooks glinted on the window wall. We checked again the spotless parquet for paint flecks, even the galvanised conduits and trunking, the suspended lights. A song of an American summer played low. He slipped in ahead of schedule, mild, beige, miles from his reputation. From a chrome tin a telescopic aerial deftly linked to
Placed on a pile tenderly as if to encourage brief sleep, or easily torn from a tiny fist – a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand companions and twice the number of unseeing eyes made of glass. No child parent came back to reclaim their mannequin infant, no sudden cry, no crouching down to draw them
Metaphysics took my mindoff things. Now I’m coming to mysenses, An astronaut with his headin a washing machine. I stink, therefore I am.It’s a good start. The pure is sterile; thesterile is unclean. The stepwell smells like aswimmer’s towelling. That Euro coin’s aconsecrated host. It has travelled frombum-bags through tollgates To a church with apay-view
You hide behind dark glasses in a privacy of thought that when you take them off looks much like wisdom or so one might suppose from the light returning with such concentration to your steady gaze. An eloquent silence hangs in the air between us as it seems to contemplate becoming speech but then the
I’m not the kind to fidget, fray or fret.I’m truly a soul at peace – ask anyone!The savoir faire for which I’m widely knownhas optimised my odds in life’s roulette. Am I the underdog to back? You bet!With equal yin and yang, in union,I have a personal hotline to the Zone.I relish risk, I rise
In memory of David Best (1952–2021) I’ve savaged with my fork weed after weed. My lost hori-hori trowel, if it’s here – this is my hope – might smilingly appear again, old friend, from its green dungeon – freed! It’s heartbreaking to have the sheath alone, as if shrugged off by death, and not the