so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel

      St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...

    What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...

/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /

and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,

Children in care do not have much of a voice, they often accept whatever is given and do not dare to speak up.

Are these the words you want me to say
about how my day became a raging river
crashing through my bones?

My room is infested with bedbugs
I’m covered in bites, not love bites