Wild Court

          Mephitine   You will know me before you see me, will sense me from twenty paces. I am all sour milk top-notes, that pissy catch in the back of your throat while you try, politely, not to gag. The never-fresh, wearing a coat ripe with my own history, I assail your…

        I remember   you were the first man who taught me about death. I was five years old; we were walking across the fields to my school. Do you remember, Ba? It was an autumn morning, I think. The trees dazzled us with their electricity. Po Po had died in June, on…

        Golf Behind Trees   An elegant course is exposed by newly opened air. There used to be a thick hedge, armed with trees. We would hear the thwack of their swings and hits followed by good silence or disappointing scutter. In days gone by, for all we could see, those golfers might…

        On the margin   On the margin of existence on the deep-sea floor between chimneys of boiling water and venting carbon where no life should sensibly occur shrimp-like creatures cleave to life indeed, do flourish on the edge of tolerance in a sightless world of simple purpose Here they say all beginnings…

image © Dirk Skiba         Sonnet for the British-Born   And suddenly, new language: ‘British-Born’, for kids who grew up on terraces in Leeds or tower blocks in Bow, and at weekends tied their bootlaces for footie on the lawn and went to college to study Sports or Business or Car Mechanics and…

        Arachnid: Flight After Deluge   The waters have risen; the signal has sounded in our skeletons of minimal composition. An instinct of age-old urgency has stirred our colonies into motion. Time has come for the next rung of survival, quest for the next habitable frontier – former field, farm, meadow, now stubble,…

        In an Orchard   Shall we drink a while and think of Eden, As in an orchard filled with waspy windfalls Children shout and run? Late summer sun Is angled close to term time, and the walls’ Strong yellow means the days are not so long. Something will go wrong, Slow as…

        The Village that Vanished   All the bitter day waves smash into Smugglers’ Cove and Byer’s Hole. The sky has failed to lift and a shipwright’s hoolie blows doon King Street. Sometime soon we’ll re-pack the van, lock the door, gan from here. Away from foghorn bass and herring-gull staccato we’ll wake…