There is no question of choice, but it takes a long time. Love’s vacancies, the eye & cavity, track back to embraces where the spine bends & quietens like smoke in the earth. Your tongue, touching on song, darkens all…

My habit of late-light walking will mirror my life, how in its twilight I’ll rush out saying, how beautiful – has it been like this all day?

  Eyes panda-blacked from a ten year boozecruise. Shelled & contused – which is done-in to you. One clean day back when, took a picnic to a park in a place called Tuebrook & etched immortal Doherty into the bark….

  In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You…

‘Opinion is not worth a rush’ – W. B. Yeats Who cares what the poets think? Shelley said they were ‘unacknowledged legislators’. He made paper boats of his thoughts and set them sailing on the Thames at Marlow – much…

something that someone is saying no louder, Pip, than my ‘goodnight’ – words with a tune, which outstaying their speaker travel as far as that amazing, vibrant light from a long-extinguished star.

  It’s not a machine unless home-grown. It’s not a phone unless it types by horse. It’s not a hearse unless you get out born. It’s not a greenhorn unless it blows. It’s not a rose if it smells like…

last night you sang to my body  praised every inch of it  made it feel rare and royal  spoke to it the way you might speak  to a child in need of self  esteem     taking time on each part …

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;  Where knowledge is free;  Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;  Where words come out from the depth of truth;  Where…

The mouth of the city is tongued with tar  its glands gutter saliva, teeth chatter in rail  clatter, throat echoes car horns and tyre’s  screech, forging new language: a brick city  smoke-speak of stainless steel consonants  and suffocated vowels. These are trees and …

Like other identical twins, they can be better told apart in adulthood. One is fast to wrinkle her brow, her brain, her quick intelligence. The other dreams inside a constellation, freckles of Orion. They were born when I was thirteen,…

I was a boy when the dinosaurs dragged their dead-weight tails through the museums of knowledge: so suffocating their mass, the marvel of it was they lived at all.   But by the time I got to university, they had…

Amelia, your newborn name Combines with the midwife’s word And, like smoke from driftwood fires, Wafts over the lochside road Past the wattle byre – hay bales For ponies, Silver and Whisper – Between drystone walls’ river- Rounded moss-clad ferny…

So extraordinary was your sister’s short life, it’s hard for me to see   a future for you. I know it’s there, your horizon of adulthood,   reachable across a stretch of ordinary days, yet I can’t believe   my…

The summer’s here. Down to the beach to swim and lounge and swim again. Gorgeous bodies young and old. Me too. Just gorgeous. Just feeling good and happy and so at ease in the world.   And come evening a…

I want to be as close to you as the name San Juan de Aznalfarache when you struggle to say it. A tune in the head you can’t forget. A name full of vitamins. A word so rich that I…

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!  He is there where…