Assortment But he watched me eat the chocolate, One, two, three, four, cordial lime, he Sat while I settled on this bridal pebble, and then on the monopoly hat filled with chew, He was only a boy, who could unmould my thoughts just by waiting to...

      LAUREL She keeps a vigil by lake Kournas each evening when the sun and moon are on an even keel, before their alignment shifts and tilts one upwards and the other into the arid ground. She lights a candle and recalls the chase as the flame quivers...

      High July A sunset walk in the high blue, one of those days that stretches so far you can’t believe the morning belongs to the afternoon, or that either could ever become a night. I would have been here sooner but I was busy cleaning up the mess...

      Ian in the Student House Palmer Park Avenue, Reading, c.2003 I remember this entrance hall, long and painted darkly. There’s a cat, too, somewhere amongst the bins or out in the park across the road. The view from the bay window is not much...

      Happen Yesterday the sea was at our shoulder but we couldn’t see it. Long after the fog had drifted over us Wolf Rock Lighthouse was still reminding us in its old fashioned, diaphragmatic way to take care of sudden precipices and overhangs, as...

      Prayer Shawl My friend handed me a handmade prayer shawl but the truth was I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. The garment was thickly knitted like something my grandmother would have made. I put it around my shoulders immediately feeling safer...

      untitled dreaming of donne’s saints and becoming them in a world that urinates money to live is a torture standing on sticks and licking clocks with no time to hold each other’s’ faces planting cacti between our teeth to smile and say yes to doing...

      Into the Furnace Show us your metal, they say as if I was threaded through with a girder of steel, a strut of unbending resolve. Times are difficult, they say: babes without silver spoons, the unalloyed pain of those without jobs, income. It’s a...

      Semerwater Open water. Before the crowds come with their floating crafts and litter – I prepare myself. I wait for you to find me, hide within the scar of a fell, secret cavern flooded from the hills. I know you’ve long since stopped believing,...