Thorny (One Sided Conversations No4)
after seeing Akram Khan’s Giselle 18 Jan 2026
to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars
if your mouth was an envelope
I’d lick it shut
you can push all you like against
the wall between
the living and the dead
but it won’t give
yet I hunger still
cannot forget the taste of you
your honeysuckle heart
is held in my grasp
and there is nowhere on earth
to put it down
Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick poetry stanza. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).