Wednesday 30 April 2014


Bird Strike

We need them to arrive like moving ink from the sky

We need them to gather tiny bits of us in their beaks

We need them to be all shapes and sizes, fights put on hold

We need them to grab our clothing, hair and skin, it´ll hurt

We need them to pull us up from the streets of the yawning capital

We need them to carry us up above the trees and the continuing windows

We need them to keep lifting, so that we see all those towers from above

We need them to carry us out of the smog and over our building sites, up to the aeroplanes

We need them to carry us, screaming and laughing, no doubt wetting ourselves, along through the sky-smears of vapour trails

We need them to make us hover near great twirling engines, make us hear that great noise, see a middle-aged man chomp on a sandwich, he hasn´t been lifted into the sky by birds

We need them to teach us what it means to shit over the land whilst riding the invisible concourse of thermals, waves and particles, differing slabs of curving land not as important as the sea, not from up here, no, and we forget our guns

We need them to take us up and along and through the most terrifying party we have ever been to, us, all of us who happened to be on the streets of London at that particular hour on a Tuesday morning, a party that will stay beating in our breasts long after the birds have wiped our memories and set us safely back down, sore, pecked and confused, beating in our breasts til we die

Monday 21 April 2014


Two poems about throwaway objects

Chewing Gum Wrapper

See that chewing gum wrapper
With its metallic sheen,
Its papery underside,
Its serrated edge,
See it down there on the cobbles
Neighboured by fresh dog shit,
Discarded paper glinting in the Seville sun.

If it were an animal,
It would be a kind of lizard,
One leg stretched towards the light,
Warming its blood perhaps
Or frightened by my presence,
Both standing there, staring, free of will.
A glinting lizard under the sweating sun.

If it were human,
It would be in dire need
But instead, it suggests an owner
That I almost want to hate.
This rejected scrap, baby shadowed,
Dropped by a hand that simply doesn't care-
Shoes tapped away from it, human heads unturned.

The lizard catches my eye and winks.
The humans have their money and concerns,
Their losses too.
But me, I've got a lizard.

......

Contact

'Is this a contact lens?'
The shock of seeing it there,
Curled upon her fingertip,
An approximation of sight,
A small transparent skin,
Plastic, peeled from the eyeball
And resting against the swirls
Of lines that show who his wife is.
A symbolic eye spying
On their marriage. A shock
Of memory- the strange woman
Snapping at her own eyes. Needing
To get something out. Like she was
Being bitten. The lens tells of mascara,
Splayed lashes, puffy faces on a hushed
And secretive morning. The nausea.
Lick the eye and remove the fly.
Is his wife doing that now?
'But neither of us wears them.'
Her fingertip blinks.

Monday 7 April 2014

Acceptance

The greying woman stands in the shallows, her shoes wet.
Waves play cold liquid games with her legs. Clouds curl.
A fish swims up. It wears her lover’s face.


When she awakes she puts the radio on. Voices, cold light, no music.
She showers, chooses her clothes. Imagines changing her hair.
Appearances almost matter. Her car is clean.

In the classroom her face is caressed by an occasional sea breeze.
She stands at the board and remembers numbers and lines.
There is a boy with the face of a fish. She carries on.