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      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...

      Leaf On the new-mown playing field, summer-yellowed and ragged, but glistening in the autumn morning, a horse-dung gobbet amid the straw slithered grassily into his glance which focused uncertainties of glancing smoky as rainfall and caught in the...

      One for sorrow St Valentine’s Day and now it is we who are falling one by one all around in spring sunshine is the glitter of a magpie’s eye he fixes me from his perch on the half-wrecked shed auguring this week’s sorrow fresh in black and white...

      The Non-Banjo Player If I had a father who was a virtuoso on the banjo, I’d be playing bluegrass now. But he died before he had a chance to teach me anything. So, instead, I learned from this dark hole in my life. Wrote poetry. Plunkety plunk...

      Skunk I am a creature of urges that longs/ to sidle underside tail to nose/ press into you/ cup chin in my paws pierce sharp eyes through nuzzling my snout flat to merge/ our foreheads/ together/ as a bone heart/ I want to tilt your head/ run my...

      Fun in the Sun   He found himself watching the sun on the wall. The sun on the wall.  He remembered people saying that when he was young, meaning that whatever movement that happened to be taking place at that time was moving so terribly...

      Angus anhinga in my hang-glider, my ambit, my angler, the lips’ full opposite. Hungus - two gulps. Sirloin tang for my hunger, stirling catch, my one choice. A stone thrown into a silent land, the arsenal of your arrival. The headlong clang of...