The Beginning
In my dream the cosmos was a dark room and the Big Bang was a door opening. You know how it is, when that chink of light opens its mouth...
Eleanor, 2 January 2018
She swells the sea to snowy mountain peaks, churns green murk all the way to the cloud line, tousles the heads of trees and drags empty...
House
On visiting Denis Severs’ House, a recreation of a London household from 1724 onwards. Spitalfields, one hundred and fifty years from a...
A Conversation with Oscar Wilde
‘A Conversation with Oscar Wilde’ is a memorial sculpture across the road from Charing Cross station. The inscription reads: “We are all...
Making Poetry Cool Again
They’ve been making poetry cool again, again. Poetry is hot, right now, they say. It’s been stuttering the radars of journalists with...
Speeds of Light at White Rock Baths, Hastings
A film poem written as writer in residence at Hastings Library. In this video, I read it whilst the image it is based on is shown.
Plans
Tarmacked at Gatwick, the thread that connects us is thin as a text message. It is the tring-tring of the mobile dancing across the...
Ice Well, 1896
They say you can’t buy time. Ice is another story. River cubes shuffled across the North Sea: solid time, liquid time. These stony blocks...
Another Kind of Haunting
So much talk of ghosts when we moved into this house, this time-creased mansion filled with other people’s memories. Ghosts in its veins...
The Jump
An apartment block is like a headstone hung on the horizon. Samantha smells evening on the air as the door handle takes her hand and tugs...
Organ
I unzip my chest from navel to neck, sending nipples cross-eyed as I strip my skin. I unbutton muscle from bone – pop open the bonnet of...
Arrival
They’ll find our rail terminals and shopping centres, call them cathedrals. They’ll map alleyways and motorway junctions, calculate the...
Negative
The stars look down on a spatter of smart phones, a palm-chained system tracing paths and alleyways with white string – joining yellow...
Ice Journey
A ritual sweeping of the ice, pine needles and frost brushed like glitter from jade lake-skin. The water’s shell measured and paced,...
Ice Memory
The ice could spit millennia-old stories if it had tongue and teeth. Melting prisms, these Norway-windows: mirrors within mirrors. Water...
The Ice Sweats
This is the death trade: early mornings, early graves. Your fingers are blood-starved, palms and soles of your feet white-hard. Sometimes...