I took Sadness to a boxing match. He pushed the door open slowly with one finger dragging his feet, it sounded like a snake hissing as it died. With his face light blue and his clothes faded grey, his eyes showed that something he’d loved had gone. Others looked, but ignored him and carried on. […]

The clouded mind is Kant without his hair extensions, his eyelash curler. We met last night and he was like Christmas, sad, a tree. Kant told me to toss my arms in the oven, think of the world as a big wound. Kant is Japanese and has a cremated heart. He asks if I’m married […]

Staring through the mirror-glass She primes the wreck to be, Marble-eyed and mobilized To scorn philanthropy No accounting for the sheets Hard-tossed with sanguine love; Preening as a courtesan With kohl reminiscent of The blackened air around a flame That gutters in the breaths Of would-be lovers, half and half, Where only one bequests A […]

I felt like I was drowning in an endless shingle of X’s and Y’s. I wanted to build a fort of cereal boxes in between me, and them, I wanted to hurl text books at them like a noisy hermit. Instead I gave up, doodled on school desks, ruled out engineering as a profession. Is […]

Everything is ugly. Dull light consumes The evening’s heat. Cityscape. Sundown. Cockroaches are alive in the skirting-board. Domestos swirls in the cistern. Suburban children Sniff glue and smell of deodorant. Photons Oscillate through the atmosphere. Skin cancer. Maybelline. Lazarus. The truth is somewhere Else. Men without jobs make love to women With many children. They […]

Steeple like a swear word. I’ll never say (Amen) again. Library like a turtle. Book spines, shell tiles, thick. Beach like a boomerang. Always, always, always. School like a snake. Barely escaped. Bit of venom in my blood. Boys like buoys. Apartment like a lobster trap. Don’t have to go in. Area code like a […]

Ice man. Ice man. I sought you on snowy days when I was a young boy. While my family played with sleds or warmed themselves indoors, My purpose was altogether more serious. Ice man. Ice man. I would call, inviting you To enter my garden, so frostily emblazoned with two- and-a-half inches of snow. You […]

It is our night, so we buy chips and grin guiltily over the greasy wrapper at each other, crumpling yesterday’s paper in our sticky, unharnessed hands. We are fools for love and salt and we see that it is good. Our feet scatter stars in the inky black, with the click-clack clatter that’s classed so […]

I want the words to gulp me like a Fine wine: Drink me drunk and dumb, numb; Sink me sunk. I want the words To carry me like the sea, Buzz me like a bee Help me flee for an hour or two, or three… I want the words To take me out of body, […]

touch-texting typing microcosms of what we mean. abbreviating our names. writing them in pixels. unfriended my friend the other day, walled her off my wall; snapped in my limbs like hinges and minimised myself.

When I move the compass in its lazy circle Like a leaf, spiraling, Seeking to connect the lines of longitude over Russia, My hand becomes encased In an errant snow bank. I’m off by an inch, (and a season or two) And in preparation for an avalanche, I push two fingers Back against the mountain, […]

I can be beautiful. Intricate; gently seek out my soul. Yet you etch a pattern in the sand. A double cross. Yes I can be beautiful but I can be brave, bold and bad. Keep you here so please, please don’t stray from my hold. I blame myself sometimes, then I blame you. So these […]

sweetheart, the flowers cut in the shape of your name won’t cure your bleeding heart. the trainwreck of your face. i found god in the supermarket aisles and he reviled me. i am not his little girl. death is all over you. crawls down the lonely motorway of your lower lip. breaks every syllable you […]