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      John Clare on the Tube Frit by the crankling train that storms the brigs of Harrow clock-a-clays & woven twigs are soodling passengers - theyre sleeping tight clothéd in rawky natures faded light & younkers maul & lease their mothers...

      Professional Crier My sister’s a professional crier. She cries on cue, lilting, soft cries or wails as anguished as a cantor’s song. She makes money too. They hire her to cry at the ballet, at dinner parties, Episcopal Eucharists, even at...

      An Early Lesson in Fake News One paper said that my mother, The Venus of Vodka, was blonde; another that The Russian Doll was a sexy redhead. A third was certain that the nude model, From Russia With Love, was brunette. She planned world...

      Tenant Tides rise as I sleep. I wake up to a desert mouth and the sound of drilling. Panic shooting up spine. The scaffolding holding the building together usually blocks out the feeble Berlin, February sun. But a ray reaches my forehead today....

      Each Rock is A Potala Palace The sunshine is mellow wine and there are golden palaces inside the sun. Where a giant is its master, he told me that I was his shadow on the earth. I will still be much greater, like a mountain, each rock is a Potala...

      Weak Core I have hauled laundry, sucker-punched Tuesday, bent, switched and twisted, and my spine despises me. You have a weak core, she says. Should be pulling up and in, she says. Imagine a stuffed burlap sack half-hanging from a squealing...

      Bellissimo at the Garden Party Spiked second-cousin to a daisy, All the joy and twice the size. I like your pincushion roundness and the plump solar illusion at your centre while all around you clump ragged rays of deepest pink, close packed as a...

      Six weeks after I could taste it for weeks after the birth - the metal rust, wet earth, smell of the birth I bled mountains of glistening rubies so the walls of our house swelled with the birth I waited in bare blue hospital rooms to see if I was...

      She goes to Germany I go to Germany and spend time with Klaus but he doesn’t tell Sue. We sit outside and play cards, we take out old photographs. It’s the time of insects, like wasps, which persist and make me nervous. Picture his older sisters...

      Something Sometimes Waking up I remember Exactly nothing Forget who And what I am, Forget why And when I look out the window See a blue sky A few clouds Go about doing Little of much And it's good Great even But slowly Memory Starts to crawl over...

      Gethsemane You tell me that the Vicar had said that God wanted your child for his garden, as I sit making careful notes in your wife’s chair. I always sit in the chair of the deceased like a macabre party game, though the music never stops for me....

      New English Phrasebook My psychiatrist suffers from low self-esteem. I only cut my forearms on Saturdays. I have no friends, just followers. We offer a mindfulness approach to social status readjustment. Your kiss tastes of micro-plastics. We have...

      First Proving A puffball lump of dough kneaded warm like flesh swells in the bowl, drugs our lungs with yeast, pops little bubbles to keep us hooked promises a feast of crust parcelling a whiteness that fluffs against our tongues, then trails a...

      Blue We roll up our trousers and wade into the city river, down a sloping bank of cool mud which soothes our cracked feet, the water now up to our waists, now over our heads, down into a valley of silt like the hull of a giant wrecked boat...

      Nativity Play Wattle Park Primary School, 1969 I’m a koala in the play. I get to hide inside the papier mâché koala head Mum made. My ears are cotton wool. In here, it’s hot and smells of glue and newsprint. Eyes peek through two holes, the rest...

      To the Occupier I have been leaving ghosts in every house for six years, which makes six houses – seven if you count my temporary tenancy in your affection. Nine houses if you count the ones I lived in where I had no right to do so. Arguably...

      Fullwoods End (Roseville, West Midlands) Subversion of a name: you may be led to picture foxglove strand and windmill sail. The proper truth’s one more ‘Dunroamin’ vale where, way ahead of snow, the trees play dead. A no-place, linking Bilston’s...

      The Remote Controlled Car A prized possession of a toy-starved childhood: one of the first remote controlled cars, chrome still gleaming, Dan Dare curves, tucked up in time-capsule coffin from the 1950's. It appeared by accident, landing from...