I have never seen a sky so grey Like the skin of an elephant, pregnant with rain. I have never been here before. I had never imagine rocks like these, jagged, aggressive, Jutting out starkly, like the hipbones of an anorexic girl. A warning perhaps. Or nature’s way of telling us to keep away. The […]

I’ve been walking for hours in this wood where the warp and the weft of the branches matches the weave of my tweed jacket: close knit as we were. My watch has rotted off. I thought of steering by the sun but I’m sure it spins anticlockwise here. Or was that Africa? Getting lost has […]

We’re alone in the speechless house and I’m sitting at my wooden desk and My dad is sitting at his wooden desk and I can hear his pen scribbling downstairs and He can hear my pen scribbling upstairs A harmony of scratches and chair creaks He takes a call With a business associate and I […]

A sheep freezes in a field in nothing but a thin layer of skin. Its face is smeared with slobber and its buttocks with its own manure. When he snorts, icy extracts come out of his nose; his legs shake as he wears nothing but his socks. He stays there for hours on end in […]

Underneath an overturned flower pot, are Mr Brown’s keys. The windows are high, with floor length curtains that smell like they dried hanging in the garden. Fading prints hang on the walls in the hallway. She stands too close to a painting in a frame, so primary daubs of blue and red and green (like […]

I Today, we follow Mohammed. He has conjured a crumpled cigarette-box from his pocket: picking one from the row there is a click before it glows, a little exhaust pipe. We pass the water, exhausted. Despite the morning coating of sun-cream, milk-white, I am as sun-burned as the rock I’m sitting on. I sweat into […]

And I remembered, then, the cruel significance of the water around my ankles, my submerged feet; the water was clear but distorted. I could see the stones, each rock, each mineral formed at different times in Earth’s long and dark history. It was as if I had pushed my face under and opened my eyes […]

We closed our books and Returned the borrowed time. We left no forwarding address And hid our bridges Under moss and fallen branches Because we didn’t want To burn them. We settled in clearings Where the trees bore clay fruit And the sky changed colour In the middle Where the paint had run out. And […]

To the world, he smelled of white teeth and expensive coffee. Expensive coffee in a crystal cup, billowing seductive smoke over a copy of Dostoevsky. To me, he smelled of dusty mirrors. You know, that scent. He was tall, tall as a university professor with an aquiline nose, a black waistcoat dusted every morning, and […]

He lay naked in the feathered grass, Tracing the constellations with his finger. He cut a pomegranate and pricked the seeds with a needle, Watching its heather blood stain his fingers, He laughed. I watched him, Nodding carefully to the beat of the silence, Watching him clap at the waltzing fireflies. Running to the water, […]

the moon-splashed hill is calling to me. over the road’s spool of dolls (once china and now puzzle) I sing to myself in the reels of milk spill, unable to sleep. my arms crook- I am calcified in mirror water, lie stark still and sweat in eyes. in the morning the postman makes us sign […]

‘The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules’ Honeyed sun trap. Fibres of white mould growing out of the mouth like candyfloss. Vapid eyes and skewed limbs stuck at inhuman angles. A bracelet is a manacle, flame setting silver and eyes aglow. Name: lambda, Greek letter, Dream name. A beauty spot […]

These snakes are the best Natural sandpaper you can Get ’round here he said. And my guide, With a name I couldn’t Pronounce then told Me that they were also Tasty. Which was all for The best because we’d been Here a while. One hell of a guide. I should be home by now, Sleeping […]