The truth rings out
an unwarmed bell on a winter morning.

You, dear, were never really here.
And whenever you returned
it was only for a fleeting moment:
in selfish pursuit of a long-lost ideal.

Being crushed agrees with me:
a seven-year cycle of rebuilding
renders greater strength,
in my fibrous, defiant heart.

You alight only to assuage
a need for reassurance
that I’m still as pathetic
as I was back then.

With glee you recalled
my anxiety and shyness,
and recounted scenes
I failed to remember.

You wrote a script
into which I never stepped.

Twenty-eight years later
I’m free,
unshackled
from your passive aggressive *******.

You’re looking older, finally.
Trust me when I say:
there is no glory
left for me to discover.

A bell is silent
for the greater part of its life.

To dream of you, my nose bleeds
I smell metal as I wake
another feather pillow wrecked
another day to ache.

I should sleep on only earth
give my essence to the ground
another link uncouples
as you the couple found.

She doesn’t seem so much to me
as a photo can but tell
gritty-featured, highlighted -
send me straight to hell.

How comely of you, darling,
to pick an Essex girl
it’s where I left my guts for you
mixed in with cockle shells.

I see you don’t yet trust enough
to picture your accord
trust that I shan’t murmur
the bile I can’t afford.

I shan’t waste time to wonder
at the steel of your affair
curse my spiteful stomach!
I cannot help to care.

It twists me to oblivion
and sunders me to tears
my lower lip is bloodied
as my pillow, so I fear.

Cast the feathers upwards
into the fatal blue
caught on gentle thermals
perhaps they’ll find their way to you.

(descent)
Hindered by progress, or the idea of progress:
evolution-in-waiting bellows me to hide,
tattering becomes ruination.

Animism creeps,
not-yet hands pushing at dim velvet.
Peeping one-eyed through the past
where had borne such potent promise
immutability lain intact
flumped into snowy thickness
and thrown hard against Georgian glass.

Here comes the stealth of unillumination
thankfully blanketing
they were tied at the hips
and neck,
then wrapped as old mirrors.

That door went nowhere
it always does
those Victorians, forever meddling,
will folly themselves into any trouble.

(resurrection)
You haven’t changed one bit!
I say to myself,
showing you their brand new niceness
***** as copper pans.
Go on, spit in my fire
the hiss is the thing that’s real.

We drove, down to the place where a ghost-forest slumbers as fossils on a silent beach.

To the tiny house: two-up, two down, only one way in. There may have been a piano. There was definitely a small, hard narrow sofa and the kind of paintings popular in care homes.

Playing ‘house’, we nested, in bed by eight with the portable TV - ignited into life from its hiding place beneath the stairs - balanced on a rickety, ring-marked side table, the varnish long worn through.

Watching Saturday night game shows, but not really watching.
Acutely aware of the space between us, your arm touching mine, tiny hairs meeting nervously before began the careful rituals of first interaction.

And. I never did ask you, how or why.
All sense of purpose faded with the dusk as the scythe of May’s cloudless moon unveiled herself to keep watch. Our chemicals clouded and mixed together.

Those mornings were fresher than any since, feet dappled in dew to collect the milk, with a sky so clear my heart aches to think of it now. A sense of something breaking and spilling warmth.

Flatness surrounded us on all sides in an absence of remarkable geography. A view of forever, greenly laid and pocketed over gentle Sussex’s motherly folds.  

I don’t recall us faltering upon the path, laid clear and ever-lasting.
It was to be for all time and, for nine-and-a-half months, it was.

Secrets abounded; what became of those diamond rings we shall never know. Great and glassy, boiled sweets of riches that vanished years later under a dark and terrible history.

Back then, they rested. Hatchlings of a future wealth that eventually eluded us.

I regretted every second of our hiding in that place. Each little step of second a tiny slice of time disappeared of holding you, of holding onto you.

Whenever I hear an old bedstead creak, I remember.

When hung in that moment between sweet spring and the blast furnace of summer, I….

And when the curved bone of May’s dying moon slices the speck of heaven high above me, I sleep with the curtains wide open to her voyeuristic gaze.

The fleeting, yes, my heart’s desire

the barely-there, a wraith

Ephemera, whispers on the wind,

impermanence my faith.


I tremble before the eternal

faced with nature’s stand

Beneath a soaring mountain,

being scoured and withered to sand.


In the shadow of mighty forever

I teeter above the abyss

Toes inching and sending down trickles

the landslides remind me of this.


I sleep in perfect hollows

and cut my teeth on bone

The glory of calcification

rolls in my mouth, I am home.


Cascading the ones gone before me

throughout my own blood by their dust

Absorbing a lifetime in seconds,

turning my fillings to rust.


Temporal consumption thus rendered,

my heart winds to stillness sublime

How quickly we flash to our endings,

how rapid the animal time.

The smell of the foundry surrounds you
abounds and wreaths around you.
A man of ore, born of the earth

I thought of you as Roman.
Alive, shuddering with the stress
and exertions
of recent war

The thrill of hardship
fresh upon you,
made ever-stronger by violent work
your fibres stretch then relax
to gather in quiet, resting power

Glittered in sweat,
you have raced through history
to arrive, tattered and magnificent,
heaving, and worn like a mountain

I have melted into you -
piston thighs greased with excitement!
As your black-ringed fingers
chase a whitened path,
through my pebbled steam

Our minerals mix:
salt and blood, tears and love
and the hooves of legion drum in my ears,
outpacing a gathering storm
as little death overwhelms me

You are home,
hanging suspended in a grief-cloud
above me.
And I invite you, with a succession of imagined dilations,
to rain down.

Breathing in the dark,
Chemicals cloudy
Aged and coloured,
By the breaking down
Of skin, soft tissues
And dreams.

Animals dream, too,
Here in tubular palaces
Captured and floating.
Each footfall vibrates
On singing parquet
And they stir,
Timed by my movement.

Breathing in the dark,
Heart settling to a rhythm
Swaying in time,
With these spells of ages
And a Blackbird caws
At the centre of my brain.

In dim-lit netherworld
Songbirds feast
On plastic berry Bacchanalia,
And the owl eyes a mouse
Who has yet to discover
His second death.

A fox cub
Curling infinitely about herself,
Shows a varnished bacon tongue.
Cutesy and hot-headed in her starring light.

And I…
I stand as still as they.
Suspended in this spirit lab.

A player just as beastly,
Mentally reanimating
Every twitching nose,
Lightless eye
And curious, scratching paw.