"Why do you live on your own/without any children?"

        

Bare feet slip into pink Crocs,
then, the task of balling her socks
which I suggest she bring with her
in case of change in the weather

to the park. The hallway is dark,
crammed with half-seen things— Daddy’s art,
Mummy’s shoes, the baby’s pram.
And this new miracle: small hands

rolling socks as perfectly
as morning surely
opens into deepening noon
or the sun segues to the moon,

the learning of it forgotten.
Stuffing her spotty cotton
socks in my pocket as we go
she takes my hand, and I know

love, like water, will find its
level; that it all somehow fits
together; that it’s not so far
to the park or the morning star.

        

**

Published in Antiphon, issue No. 1

http://antiphon.org.uk/

Ebbing

       

I longed for you once
like the shore thirsts for the sea.
Sitting here now, while you sip your tea
and I complain that Barthes is far too difficult,
I realise I’ve been watching the tide slowly

recede – only without the certainty 

that it will turn again.

Published in Moodswing

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/index.asp?id=119

Close

       

It's like a sauna inside our friendship:
there we sit on the smooth slatted shelves,
personalities undressed, intimate,
accustomed to each others' naked selves.

It gets hot in here, but we never sweat
the small stuff. Prolonged heat produces great
hilarity, I theorise, then stretch
yet another tall story out of shape

while you flex your intellect. I reveal
that my bedroom door and windows vanish
while I sleep; that the bus conductress' heels
and ruby lips are out of sync. You swish

an old jumper from your bag (mine, mended
by your hand with an 'invisible' knit)
and wordlessly you cup my cheek. When did
we get so close? I can't see a single stitch.

Published in Moodswing

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/index.asp?id=119

Sestina No. 1

 
Eating sourdough toast, half spread
with yeast extract, half pumpkin seed butter,
                                    we hover
             on tall wooden stools
         (knees not quite touching)
an inch or so above your kitchen floor.
 
It’s a wet August morning. Backlit fluor-
escent rain soaks next-door’s lawn, newly-spread
over tumbled clods, but it’s not touching
(not yet) that deeper thirst. I'd better
go, I think, as Portishead's 'Pedestal'
oozes from the radio. I hover.
 
The rain stops. In the distance, gulls hover;
ancient creatures move across the seafloor;
wobbly feet in rolled-up jeans share rock pools
with spiny urchins and starfish— limbs spread
out under a sun the colour of full-fat butter;
lovers’ hands form steeples, fingertips touching.
 
Who’d have thought that last week, touching
down in São Paulo, I’d see humming birds hover
and squabble over Honeysuckle buds, drink butter-
milk from a cowboy’s palm, ride out a flaw-
less gallop – the stillness at its centre spread
like sunrise through my chest. Oh! but it’s too
 
long since I’ve felt so much myself. A heart’s tool-
kit needs only love shaped in the touching
of another heart, I muse, as the sun spreads
light across the counter-top and you hover
in the doorway of a new thought. The floor
rising a fraction surprises me, but
 
earlier, eating toast and pumpkin seed butter,
                 perched on these tall wooden stools,
                        I do recall a feeling that the floor
                                           was not quite touching
                   where it should. Somewhere, high over
                                 the South Downs, the outspread
 
wings of a lone Kestrel, touching
nothing but air, throw shadows across a valley floor
spread with buttercups and deep red toadstools.

Published in Obsessed with Pipework

http://www.flarestack.co.uk/obsessedwithpipework.htm

Mulch

         

Families fertilize our lives.
Like compost heaps
they tend to reek
of rotting household matter:

that Topless Snog in '85
(never ever to be pardoned)
those sticky lifelong labels
('Brainy', 'Pretty', 'Nutter')
sibling scraps (about the latter)
the empty wombs, the break-ups.

Layer on layer of earthy hurt
each stinking heap unique.
And us: the worms
that keep them turned.

Published in Orbis, Winter, 2011

Economics

       

This wanting more
of what's hard to get requires

trade-offs and a knack 
for picking stock:

scarcity is everywhere
it roams with choice in packs;

where there's scarcity

and choice there are costs.

Want, long-boned and lean,
hunts alone.

   

Published in Orbis, Winter issue, 2011

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/index.asp?id=52

Archive

After I finished, you stayed:
the darkening room a mess;
coiled heaps of celluloid
unspooled, and you scooped me up
unspliced and uncut; labelled 
each canister, carefully.
While you thought I slept, I watched
myself replayed and wept.

Published in Other Poetry, Series 4 no. 4

http://www.otherpoetry.com/series_IV_issue04.html

Somewhere

far away, a bell — barely audible —
calls across a bright September day
from a steeple on an unseen hill
where a short-eared owl inspects a new-made
 
sky, neatly tucked along the wide horizon's
edge, then flies into the freshly laundered blue —
its shadow moving fast below — to find
sleep in the boughs of an ancient yew.
 
Here, a seagull taps at my window
with purpose, braving the broken sill
on which it sits; and as the hours grow
quietly all about, I hear it still —
 
that distant bell, a single note; clearer, bright,
ringing now across this ink-spilled night.

To be published in the Frogmore Papers, March 2012

http://www.frogmorepress.co.uk/

Carbon dating

Nose pressed to pillow,
she breathes him in: her first man.

He smells of campfires after rain,
burnt toast, freshly dug peat. 

Brushing the charcoal from her breasts,
she marvels at the sudden roar of piss –
black, no doubt, as molasses;

admires the boldness of his line
through the bathroom door:

a shorter pose,
so no time to go too badly wrong;
imagines their lives together--

what he saves on clothes
they’ll spend on materials:
erasers, A2 portfolios, paper;

arguments will erupt over the hairspray
- but I’ve run out of fixative, he’ll whine -
and his burnt-to-a-crisp meals

but the sex will be great
between sheets
the indelible grey of a winter sky:

there are advantages, she realizes,
in technical limitations, her disregard
for (absolute) anatomical correctness.

---

Slipping back into bed with a sigh,
he arranges an implied thigh
along the length of hers.

Published in Purple Patch

http://www.purplepatchpoetry.co.uk/