Man in a Room after Interior at Paddington  - Lucian Freud. Which is the subject? Limp-leaved yucca reluctantly dying, the foreground figure in its stony pot? Or the man with a stare glassy-eyed behind spectacles, fixed into absence or challenging...

What is holding you back from building your wormery?

You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.

…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .

Unexpectedly
 
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air

Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.

Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.

We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre  Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go

On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit.

What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know.