What is it about the girls at St Catherine’s:  Saintliness? Innocence? Ignorance means    the same thing at that age. To know is to be guilty of  adulthood of a sort, to fall in love     simply a commitment to…

of the Damned  is a film from the 1970s  starring Faye Dunaway with her cat’s eyes  and cheekbones.    Irpinia  is the name of the ship  the producers chartered  to use as the set    Many Rivers to Cross  was…

P.S.      As Horse-chestnuts have male flowers  when a man comes into his flowering season    & hermaphrodite flowers I have wished to examine  with petals soft and tender as breasts, open to bare    their pollen,  his seed …

It’s lonely watching how the rain runs down  It’s warming watching how the rain runs down    The afternoons revive with television  The afternoons expire with television    A man obsessed with seeing what he saw  Brought out the age-old…

I hand myself up the bus to the driver’s end  to thank him. I climb off thanking him  because it’s what we do thank  bus drivers as we thank  no-one else it’s a cultural thing  making ready perhaps  when the…

I don’t still carry them on my shoulders  I think     probably    they’re rested somewhere  in the scoop of my clavicle      the time  a teacher shamed my obese body  as I pulled my shirt over my head    or the time…

Extract from Mercian Hymns   XXV Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg. The nailshop stood back of the cottage,…

Told one of the goldfish wouldn’t last the night He hid his eyes under a fierce scowl And went outside on the flags and rode his bike Round and round, round and round   But it did no good and…

Our guide (to whom Roberta has already been ingratiating herself in a horribly forward manner) has taken us to Windermere, and tomorrow will take us to Grasmere. Of course I am eager to see, first-hand, as it were, the sources…

on a lead, down the street. It makes a low-register hissing sound that is constant and gives you a sense of the weight of the dead dog. The lead is pulled tight to a straight line. It is attached to…

Your Daddy is a soldier son, Your Daddy’s gone to War, His steady hands they hold his gun, His aim is keen and sure. Your Daddy’s in the desert now, The darkness and the dust, He’s fighting for his country,…

Let it be known: no man is entirely alone No man is a man all through. I’ve seen you. Shivering. Fleeting weakness. Cold rain scuffing its feet on the beaches. Young human. You. All feeling, flesh. Brine eyes. Man, but…

The first thing they do is embrace. Fat smiles stay on their faces all the way to the restaurant.   He eats ribs with sticky, podgy fingers. She bites chicken wings with shiny lips, They have a pudding each and…

My bird since you left I have loved strangely I have been various A man came                  There was something wrong with him His eye whites shone like teacups                 He was not usual I might have conjured him                            He took…

No, he’s not. He’s just a crow, doing his crow thing: black garb, harsh cry, stiff strut. Yet it’s his lot to appear less bird than myth. Descending on the ridge of a roof, he becomes his own heraldic logo,…

From the get-go, we went along with the whopping scam. The whole planet looked like food, and all its muddy creatures our handy/cosmic pizza. We ate hungrily, because eating resembles hunting and hunting resembles love, and we just loved the…