How to let it go Pick it up. Feel the weight of it in your hands. Pinch, roll, squeeze, flatten, slap it like fresh clay. Own the reactions of your body. Pinpoint the lump in your throat, the knot in the lowest part of your abdomen. Coax the howl...

      Nothing ever happens A familiar slideshow of picture postcards sidle by through the bubble of your train window; trees new in leaf and freshly-printed lambs, fractured stonewalling clinging impossibly to hill, separating off precious little from...

      Earthworks West Kennett I migrate back to this farmland where the level of the corn field has been distorted by the earthen mound facade of a house that swallows the dead and has for centuries. On a ledge inside the entrance, in the human-summoned...

      Some things never change Before I went to school one day I hid it under the bed, forgot about it for years. Then, when I met you, something triggered so I dusted it off, placed it in the centre of the kitchen table. You hardly noticed – just...

      Charge Sleeping in doorways, they huddle against the cold; plunge the needle tip. Searching for a vein, while others crave a socket; plug-in heroin. Waiting for a plane, they hug the corridors; hooked to the drip.     Peter Bickerton is...

      The Machinist (Put Something of Yourself into Your Work) The hum and buzz of faster machines buoy her. Decides brightness should be her default. She unwraps a blood-red cuff from her wrist, smoothes it onto the metal bed of her Jones Imperial....

      Rocks without names I watch the silence out there through the hurly gush of Atlantic and tide swashing at everything I mean, if I could find words. I keep hearing it say nothing to me.  The moon shining on white flecks of rock in the cliff face...

  *   The syringe should never vacate The arm it pierces Growing into white blossom, tied around A finger, it displays its own idleness A presentiment Pulling up a fruity plasma Of the unhomely     John Vickers has published over 60 poems in...