Friday 21 August 2015


        Don’t Go


When I’m with you
I feel I am whole.
Captured and completed.
Engulfed by you.
When you kiss me
all my fears disappear
in the kiss.
Where do they go?
I don’t know.
Do you wrap them round your tongue
and swallow them whole?
I don’t know.
I only know the comfort
I feel, such peace.
So don’t go.
Don’t go.
Please,
don’t
go.




http://writingknightspress.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-squire-page-day-poetry-anthology.html

Friday 7 August 2015


In The End

In the end 
I’ll be like you.
Dust with
flakes of skin and bone
wrapped in long hair.
Teeth chattering
With no voice.
No sense of taste
or smell.
No reason.
In the end
we'll be invisible,
impenetrable,
anonymous,
figments.
But then, we always were
you and I,
we always were.

http://www.typoetic.us/latest-issue.html

Perfectly Imperfect

It started when we stood hopefully, 
with our thumbs outstretched
by an English roadside.
We were heading towards Italy and Yugoslavia
without maps or money, 
or sense of direction.

And we made it to Italy. 
and swam off the rocks, 
with a man we’d met in a cafe,
because he said we could.
And we swam and swam until two policemen came, 
(one very stern and one very twinkly),
and said we couldn’t.
Nor could we leave the rocks without clothes on,
or with clothes clinging to our still wet bodies, 
or lie on the rocks until we were dry,
in case we disconcerted the traffic or populace. 
This being the main street in Trieste.


And we made it to Pec and lived 
in a house ‘typique du Turque’ 
with a water pump in the garden
and a toilet, also ‘Typique du Turque’, 
which made us very ill indeed.
But the parties were good and 
the conversations interesting,
Even though no one spoke English.
And we learned to speak some Albanian, 
which was always handy.
And we survived to sit thirstily by a hot, 
dusty roadside and fantasise 
about the ice cold mountain water 
streaming through the streets of Pec,
and even about the water pump in the garden. 

And we made it back home.
We had got lost a lot, 
but hadn’t got raped or murdered. 
So far as we can remember.
What perfection.


First published by Silver Birch Press, Perfect Vacation Series, August 2015

Saturday 1 August 2015

On the Edge

I’m standing on the edge,
on the rim 
of the perimeter,
on the outside, looking....

I’m not sure where I’m looking,
outwards over the horizon
or inwards to the inner depth,
the inside of something.

The inner void or the outer space.
Face or about face.
But there’s no confusion.
Both faces are the same,
I think...

Can somewhere be full
of emptiness?


First Published in Calliope, June 2015


https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=calliope+magazine+june+2015&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjL3YCVpofMAhVBfxoKHWbxCwYQsAQIKw&biw=1659&bih=828#imgrc=WUWyGcLCrMeEWM%3A