Selected poems
The small crises
In the night or early in the morning
I have terrible thoughts
matted, conspiring against you
It's the part of me I tried to quell, one
that lived against faith in the
reasonless grooves of my mind
because we'll get older, year upon year
the sum of floods and age
Limbs strange, and docile
I'll transform, growing out of fashion
I'll run dry of my slurred and
fanciful rhymes; cracked tiles; torrential
rain; half-hearted goodbyes
Life with its throes, dialled back
and torn asunder
Could it be that I lean too much
counting on your name even in the dark
I'm honest and uneven and my
passion runs left when I try to let you
see me for all that I am
Ageless town or shire
I’ve seen how you struggle
yellowed wallpaper slinking off the walls
unfashionably situated
between greenery and high street launderettes
and girls with laddered tights and schoolboy cadets.
What joy it is to be outside of the city
all stale biscuits and feeling marginally shitty
about the old man with an accent, laughed at
by vape-wielding crimson cheeked tweens
and the lady bus driver with her face worn in
There’s Great War memorials and disappointing home games
and church congregations and half-hourly trains
Ageless town or -shire
with Jehovah's Witness halls and the smell of fire
loose-tongued pint sippers who can’t wait to retire
to their grey cushioned living rooms, croaking verses for the Empire
Take a round trip and visit the defunct roller rink
the repair shop the bingo hall
under lights that half blink
and chat to a Nike-clad uni lad who just got done
throwing his strawberry milkshake back at a McDonald’s worker
He’s just wasted a sleepy summer in Tenerife or Ibiza
The bastard. He’s drunk and he’s singing God save whoever.
Fruit
For a moment there,
I thought it was you.
It's a sore sight to see
a man and his hunger
So I gave him my time
in hopes that those
worrying eyes would appear
His face would transform
under the pale shade of another person
I wanted it so terribly
my sentences sputtered
He vanished when the light changed
And here I stay
in the core of a common tree
swelling with the hunger he left me