Various people have suggested I showcase some of my poetry online and pointed out the possibility of writing pieces to accompany specific images in photography books. While I prefer not to write towards someone else's idea (there are no images on this page!), I am using this space on my website to show a selection of my poetry. Some have been published; some haven't. I retain full copyright to all poems below. Thanks very much for understanding.
We prefer your blood. My secret. My spit and whir
buzz to catch and pool. A joke
(they so small, audible); I slumber on.
A launching trick, I suppose.
Sweet anaesthesia before the swell.
Minutia’s mouthpart grips tight like a burr;
dots around my body, performing
audits of parts, advance precious casings, the conjuring
of domes. Collecting delicious, these seers
swim in my dreams. These deranged seahorses
rock, unreal; unleash, intone
some petty life line. A borrowing.
Minor collateral. Hangnail-ian fault. A self
destructive urge outside of the bone, scratched tuning
like larkspur, delphinium, after the fact.
Lean and stooped, clumped at the feet
of elephantine trunks, by scrubby roots
and washing open spaces, grow
the bluebells. Emitting
periwinkle, leaving stains
on butterfly tongues, they knit together,
their dense heads close,
soaked overnight like pooled ink.
In sun they wisp, slight and arcing
as if to say there’s nothing to see;
this is what we do. As if being blue
means nothing more than reflecting
sky. On the ground, the clouds are spaces
to be grown in, hushed, amassed; barren
blanks to be sewn up,
like bubbles linking in water.
just to the right of the blue crisp packet,
where the edge of the caravan park
shoulders and leans
towards the heath. Eighty-eight
moorland zones
are watched closely, tethered to screens. Woodlarks
and nightjars circle mountain bikes.
Up Shotover Hill, the old road to London, where
carriages were ravaged at night, tarmac
breaks up, peters into sand. A mounting stone marks
the missing link between stray gravel and masonry.
The assembly line. Fordism. One plus one plus on
and on makes many, and now we are launched and jeaned,
quality-controlled, quick and snake-hipped, gleaming in the light.
The spaces between trees meander into sun
promising plains, bluebell wash, bushes like buses, then
moonscape with a single twisted trunk at the centre
like modern art, stark, deliberate, pain staked.
A comparison of the jaw bones, hominine,
important fossils. Leads us to think
certain things.
How we spread.
The Lascaux caves, dun equines, and ninety paintings of stags.
Black bulls by bison, whose
hind legs cross in fifteenth-century perspective.
The night sky mapped in ochre dots. Geometric figures.
In being brightness it cannot speak
of timelessness, if space is real.
It cannot speak
of shattered remnants, astra,
of basic rock turned cyclic like solipsists converted, the idea
of day, plinth
and other debris.
The astronomer declares doubtless they can tell
it’s terminable, finite as string; that
while it shrinks it will hang there
darkening, tired and sober, knowing night.
Satellites. We can’t expect more
than perfect heat like hydrogen shafts
or poured neon; radiation wrapping our every rotation.
We ask our lives of it; if it will glow at our throats,
if it will hold us and for how long in lighted globes
of breath safe as minims, vital
as the veins in gold leaf. And health, a jogger
spinning light-footed laps on peat and turf.
Lost in the exhale, the space, the cause,
the interminable looseness of lung.
Underneath, they dwell hemispherical, telling
the difference; have felt an awareness of dimension,
another category of flesh. So they slither
like running prose in drifts, away
from the others, who do not know their own full flesh.
Drawn and cut, these fish slow puncture,
wanted; stalk the seas alone by day, wait out
the black night, bioluminant, then quick
quick slow, they gather, gravitate, a seeking dance;
they sink to the beds. These have been tempted,
undesigned by metallic taste; a different depth
of oxygen. Impaled but unpierced, they feel their wetness.
Up there dry, they were recorded. Beauty watched back.
Behaviour so characteristic of us higher primates,
said the metal tool, stuck in its history, inventing things.
Through the whole-sky blur, dead eyes heard
the lyrebird warn human, its own growl
and the choke of another fish halfway down its throat;
the high-pitched scream of the world. Then the splash.
She sat, under the deluge, in a cave.
Firm-lipped, the overhang dropped sounds of wash
about her feet; torrents pooled, and her chair
became her root. She thought of time as two
soaked hands, the wet pour arcing to her feet,
the fresh cut of the water ark, dank shapes;
the putting together. She underneath
was an admired maker of patchwork quilts.
Kept dry in tessellation, held taut in
non-porous rock, she uncrossed her ankles.
Nature likes to hide itself in stark blooms;
paths which seem upward and, obscure, weep
unity. She would wait for the design.
Hook eye, and see the sheet rain pour upwards.
I, a feather, have dropped to Earth at exactly the same rate
as a bag of bricks. Like the tower of Pisa, I am held
in certain gravities despite the air’s incline.
I, a father, place my knowledge in the hands of those
who can catch a ball, clean in the palm.
There was no way around it; 1610 centred on the Sun.
Heliocentrism. I observed
the four moons of Jupiter through a spyglass telescope.
Kinematics; the where, not the why. The phases
of Venus, refracted 30x. We rise in the West.
They wanted magnetism, electricity. I gave them
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
the root of tension; my father pitched stretched string.
Nicolaus Copernicus. A dreamer in a crowd of teapots
pouring out the same bitter dirt in cycles.
I reduced his problems to simple terms.
I never claimed to be a philosopher, but there are answers
in mathematics and logic. Childish honesty in clean geometry.
Autumn 1632 took me to Rome. The Holy Office.
I became a dangerous parabola in the natural world. Spun
and sleepless, made wild by truth.
It flattened my Earth. It turned me blind.
And so he died, old and full of years.
Swollen, perhaps, with language; words which filled
The great abyss. Knotted, ringed inside
like thickened tree whose upward branches grew
in lament, the years
became him. Where is he now
to tell himself. How often
did he count the sickened,
time-freezed hours as a kind
of forwardness. I hope
his eye is a twinkle, a replica
of the world in grey tones
sped-up, spinning, washed with movement
of the clouds and thoughts
and storms, which can be born any day; given
and lent, taut, strung between
stars on crispest black. Counterpoints; a web,
complex, large, rails like loosened clues.
In this room is a grid of faces.
Blank, expectant, arranged in rows,
their bodies slouch in burgundy seats.
Each has marked out their space in flakes
of blown-up starch, gas-pumped lemons in cardboard.
There are jubilant sounds of the latest family car.
The light reduces itself precisely. Deep in the grooves,
in shadows under arm-rests, things are stored
like secrets between lovers.
It is a scene: a garden, a wedding cake.
Some shouting emotion in white lace.
A small girl’s eyes widen at giant pixel tears;
at the lady, who can see her looking and knows all about it.
Afterwards, there is laughter and trumpets and certain words
Fading across the screen, left to right: produced,
featuring, starring. Too many names and curtains creeping.
People breathe. Knees creak. Couples
turn to each other and wonder what happens.
Please know that I love you
At a time when nothing makes sense
Except in sparse windows I look through at angles, or from
Banistered galleries of outer-body belief.
Underneath stories, there are pockets
Of knowledge I would tap into.
The blushing roses hold their colour
In dusty water. I zoomed in and caught their folds
Endless, wrapped, silk-edged. Introspect
Will take a subject nowhere. So I walked
Among the yellow star by the aloe path
Where the doc leaves blow a tune. I wonder
How can so much truth be left in shapes
When shapes are just the words we make?
You have taken off flesh, left deer skulls prone
On grass. Rain will drip though their sockets
And in the night collect on my pillow. Phonetics.
You have turned down the sun.
Then you stood in the half-shade, talked
Of electricity like silver, ripping out
To your perimeter like sickness.
I see it more as slow burn, a waste, a stopped clock.
When I think of December, the month of the cracking,
The twin-yolk, I knew it as change. I will be our willow
Weeping, searching for water in reflective panes. My branches dropping
Hints. Grass in light, growing not up to meet me, but I will wait.
There are times when I think our parting
would reverse nature.
(Think of Aristophanes’
revolting hermaphrodites, struck down by Zeus,
torn in two to prevent an uprising and left
in halves cursed to seek themselves forever;
There would have been lightning bolts,
a desert and blindness, like Rapunzel’s saviour
flailing; damage by thorns.)
I do not call you my other half.
We are more like two fingers, crossed.
In fact, on this wet Wednesday evening, I wonder
if our combined, doubled weight
could limit us when we’d be better off
floating untrained, paying as we go.
Or if love much cares for gravity, let
alone time.
If I am temporarily blinded by the completion
of inclusivity contracts, which bind me
in all terms and conditions, ultimately
to yourself,
forgive me.
I can take you, 2 for 1,
to the giant screen
next Wednesday evening.
This is what the cat brought in.
Shivering there, not under
but numb beside the JC.
No Jerry traps for Tom, just
itself, presented as
Dusty brown fur wrapped
round a child’s fist, pulsating
with life, perhaps
a vague notion of
inevitability.
It looks at its fingered paws, thinking
But I am the mammalian genus
second most successful on Earth
after humans and scurries
under furniture, to think, adapt.
Out again, the mouse
is watched.
A careful wash, asserts itself,
one mammal to another, as clean enough
even for death.
Cries the mouse: "Pardon, O King,
forgive me this time. Little friends
can be great friends.” The cat
visualises himself a trapped lion,
released by gnawing teeth, and purrs.
The huge cat head shakes a bell
louder than the mouse can hear its own scuffling
death-instinct on carpet,
louder even than its own heartbeat in its own round ears,
suggesting a gallop to its feet, startling.
I died, in the end, by a blow to the head.
A pot aimed to preserve me, to take me outside.
Oh, it is very cold, or else we
should be so comfortable here, shouldn't we,
you old fir-tree, Apollo, God of Sminthe?
I am more than instrumental. More
than ornamental. But she tricks my keys
into submission. Licks long sprawls
of discordance, decadent,
then comes down
in intervals
as if nothing had happened.
Light against dark, shade and sun:
This is not black and white
magic. She hears inside me, knows
what strings to pull, when to sustain.
And I whisper things to her; higher, lower;
do that again. I like
her fingers light on me, transgressive,
polyphonic,
then hammering it home, staccato.
She makes me play Für Elise
as a jazz piece.
After she has gone, I whistle a chorus...
There’s no place like far away.
So don’t try to remember it. A tomorrow
but not in time. This cliff of today, the voice of here
and now and this, not that. What glass you cover
it up with, what needles whir to stitch up a place.
How artfully you lay tomorrow down, gracelessly,
waiting your turn while plucking its very breath
from outer space like blackberries from a tree.
No place will chase you backwards. No dream
could tame its fleeting hush. It will tell you
anything.
As if it would be caught and bedded down, or
handled home, such a far away.
I am of that quark, strange, able to be in two places at once.
Also five others: up down top bottom charm.
It is a quiet sun who cannot see itself in other views.
Was the brightest supernova the birth of a quark star?
It is an exotic matter.
This mystery of existing for every possibility;
you can never know my next move.
(For a variety of theoretical reasons, free quarks can never be seen.)
Remember: all mass, charge, spin, strength and range
is only me.
Observation forces
an atom to decide
its place by moments.
Look! And look!
This table – schizophrenic, representing
the entire multiverse in parallels. You can see
me in it; RGB.
Drape square metres of colour.
Adjust it. Step back. Leave in
a wax candle, dripping.
Time can be taken, if you like.
Walk outside for a while. Think Hemingway. See
raindrops caught, acid, in buckets.
Take this rolling crisp packet, this
length of iron pipe; see
how leaves will grip the ground like
bricks. Or crêpe paper foxes.
(As hair grows long and thick, paintbrushes
will pile a creeping battle.)
Consult oil and turpentine, dip into
the masters.
Let your aches materialise in colour, cast
in clay, smooth and full in your hand.
Drop it, this built temple of rats. See
the splatter on canvas like coffee,
the conception of a work. This is patience.
A tactician by nature, an economist. Bonaparte’s horse still out to play.
Two twin-bed mattresses can be zipped together.
(Most of the way, he held her hand; she read
Pregnancy and Birth, by various doctors.)
Down in the metro, an accordionist
squeezes time. Escalators are ridden
with sounds of Wolfgang Amadeus.
Meet you under the rose window at Sainte Chapelle.
Pigalle, Montmartre: rigged to the underground
in smart tailoring, flat caps, cigarettes.
A museum
of erotic art and breakfast cafés.
Six electric-guitar shops in one cobbled street.
Toy binoculars around a small girl’s neck whisper
towers and bridges, macaroons in chocolate,
chestnut, vanilla, pistachio. La Crêperie.
Will you take me to the red-windmill cabaret?
Ça marche.
The steps to the Sackray Cwuh - breathtaking.
Long baguettes still whistle under armpits.
No shrug is inapplicable to the question. Mais non!
If ever my face looks puddled and linted, remind me:
Underneath London and across a bit, Moses
has snuck back into history, parted the sea.
Next to the wood-chipped playground, under the iron
threat of rain, we pretend tennis for an hour.
Concrete rules. White chalk and whistles tell us
where to stop and go.
There is swimming-pool chlorine around our heads, diluted
squash on exercise books. Waves of ink and
leaks in our pockets. Nail polish reeks like new money.
Inside the school shed, netball bibs, rounders bats,
hockey sticks; that synthetic smell of gym-mat rubber.
Thirty padded footballs escape in dribbles. We wonder
about next week. Year one was meditation;
tyre-swings creak in the wind. We are spiralling
out from the centre, socked, testing
luck on trampolines, seeing how far our legs can take
daring further out than the Bloody Mary tree.
In singing class we had to all line up by height.
Today is the day when Andy Meek kicks up
dirt with his racket. Sends a stone flying to
Miss Bishop’s forehead. All rallies cease as
two stand crying. One has blood, one the memory
of last winter when it snowed and we all threw
white balls at playtime, some with presents inside.
From alpha to omega there is concentrated light.
A city built on twelve foundations: Jasper,
sapphire, chalcedony, emerald,
sardonyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl,
topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, amethyst. Anisotropic jewels;
colour that flies. All else have turned to coal dust.
We feel time, know exact distances. Sense a garden
with a river washing through;
voices like light which has no shadow. Clusters
of trees, evergreen, and words, precious pieces.
These people we have known were here make
snow gods now, in pampas grass. Show us
where to pluck ripe fruit with new light fingers,
lick pips in our hands, wash our robes daily to fall at his feet.
Recall the smell of red balloons
stretched to popping, clapped in the face.
That taste of matches warm against
your breath, your sweet and sour.
So I thought I’d get me a stripper and a thief,
he says to no one, late of course,
this rocking Robin Hood all early-birdy,
waiting for the truth.
If you close your eyes, upon these stars,
you’ll wish to see stopped arrows first.
All trick-kneed and lisped, cracked at coordinates,
iced and sick of apologising.
Il a donné sa langue au chat
for another year; inhale, exhale, the candle says.
The door says open like helium
slowly let out as light.
I like you in the half light,
your head tucked under my shelf,
and your eyelashes beating shades
of spiders’ legs fallen thick down your face.
By globe-light, as you spin the world with
your finger and tell me rivers and
capital cities, I know your bones
as journeys your cheeks take.
Standing day-lit at the southern window,
a silhouette of man blocking light; your blank mass,
there to be guessed, filled in by squinting.
By 3am car-light, it is you
through the windscreen, stopped bent
to scare a pheasant to the verge
(this sapphire-necked bird paralysed,
baffled by tarmac and you, creeping),
so sweet and sober, tip-toed,
shoo-handed. You both
look up. Caught robbers, struck direct by stars.