Poems

We learn how every item is its own army the day we split the house down parting lines; the bookcases ready to be divided: the little troops that stand with their stiff spines.

My lifelong friend, dear heart, these days you’re losing the plot: you’re a fish in a bucket, open-mouthed, flopping about in a panic, bereft of your sheen, all confidence gone. Examined in action on a black and white screen, every movement recorded, you’re haplessly tethered, chaotically jumping, locked into a pulse of your own. Tracked

I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred men hanging in the rigging of your hair, or a thousand men sleeping on the soft mound of your belly, if you were a river filled with drowned men met by the furious sea foaming at its mouth, by

One moment basking in the sun, the next knee-deep in snow astonished at the way these tracks must have filled to the top of their dry-stone walls during the April blizzards. To walk has been the idea since we were small, and so we go on along new paths and old, the way our parents

He said, it’s a structural workforce imbalance and I thought where’s the scope for a man of your talents? He said, it’s retargeting personal goals and I thought yet all human resources have souls. He said, it’s a preplanned executive cull and I thought you’ve a horrible shape to your skull. He said, it’s a

Invisible hand that jangles the lantern over the porch and tells the leaves on the pond to imagine they are clippers and wrenches the shed door , and makes leylandii lurch, unnerving the cat, wobbling the elderly; that viciously clobbers pedestrians at the corner, then snatches up bills and payslips put out for recycling and

(after Yoshio Markino, 1911) Colours of women, a grey-veiled pink, a bloom Fading to yellow, stippled, dust-hung, flecked Soot startling white lace in summer gloom. Colours of trees, pavements sticky with leaves Trodden to blackened bronze, a patina Attached to every twig. The heart grieves, Colours the blood with fungus, smudges all Spires, bridges, waters,

That ‘bullet hole’ in your bush hat, there should have been two holes — for the truth to pass through. I think you believed your own lies, liked how they altered the light on the bullet, as it passed through. Who fired the gun? Who died? Who prayed for the victim’s soul? So many questions,

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound

Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the

No angels listen when you cry out here, but seals rise up to see, and criticize perhaps, as you intone the omega (their favourite vowel) or the medical alpha (sticking your tongue out) for these gods of ocean. Words wouldn’t do. There are no consonants in the mouths of seals. They can appreciate only the

It came at last, the letting-go, Up over the hill and down our street — The end of time had, finally, been reached. There was comfort in it, the worst happening And it being of no consequence, since we were done for. What did it matter if our digital photo frames were lost, Our data-carrying

The mental battle over Sunday roast: mum, my brother and myself trying our best to look interested, so he wouldn’t be wounded.

I saw Christine Lagarde outside The Wellcome Trust with a trolley case. She was wearing my scarf — the scarf I had when I was thirty two: a scarf with white dots on royal blue, or should I say French navy? — the very essence of what a scarf should be, which, in red, would

(After W.S. Merwin) Because you know already if you didn’t you would have to make that appointment which means you would have to spend a lot of time talking, not to mention money you do not have, to someone who will not be listening or listening without hearing, maybe hearing without understanding, and what good