they lived
like the only customers at a funfair;
weeks caroselling
with swollen rise and fall,
like the horses forgot
to gallop in circles.
they had their own world
of haunted houses
and helter-skelters
but the stalls were all out
of candyfloss
and, as they slotted coins
into cork-rifles,
they shot themselves
to pieces
without winning
a single prize.

Although I’ve tried hard to forget I’ll always remember
With all its glaring effervescence my first ever sleepover
With my friend who was afraid of the dark and as she hung the walls of the night
With lamp light that squabbled with Sleep over my No-Mans-Land eyelids.
I wondered how you could fear something that wasn’t even a something
But a lack of something. Now I read the weather forecast
In the horoscope of Orion’s belt I wonder why we were so afraid
Of a world of muted colours. Like Light was an absent parent
That returned sporadically and left an aftertaste with each visit
And blew cigarette smoke in our faces.
Like Light was a worn-out lover too painful to label as X
Around whom we’d begun to orbit and organise our lives.
I stand in the dark we’re all afraid of and wonder if perhaps
The night is not lonely or cruel but simply wants to kiss the stars.

The best days
Are not the Best Days
Or even the good days
They are the unremarkable
Inconsequential
Days
When you take a step away from yourself
And observe the rise and fall of a moment
From beyond its swell
When you are driving fast
Through a slow-moving night
And the headlights are smearing themselves on the roads
Like they’re trying to redecorate
And the radio is singing Yellow
And you turn your head out the window
To find a moon hung there
Blue-tacked to the infinity of sky
As thick and yellow as your grandmother’s smile
Or when it is winter and the sun has set
But the world doesn’t want the day to be over
And so pulls a musty, mustardy-grey blanket
Right up to its neck and prays
That the time for streetlights
Will insist on running ahead of it
Or when the shadows grow long in summer
And they fall like dust on the sand dunes
You run down to the sea
And try to hold it in your hands
Until the tide prises it from your clenching fingertips
Or when the sunrise is pink
And the cloud caps skid
Like ice-creams on hot plates
And you can’t help but bask in
The creativity of God
The painter
Who’s masterpiece could simply not be framed
And hung on your kitchen wall
And for a little while you want to be able
To lick the colours and candyfloss
Until someone says that little rhyme
About red sky in the mornings
And a shepherd’s warning.

Six a.m. and the morning leans
To kiss the night;
The streets are full of stars
And sleepwalking business suits

The citrus woman
With peroxide blonde hair
And peroxide blonde fingers
If she spoke I imagine it would sound
Like lemon trees and smoke
Her cigarette burns holes in the sky
But when she passes me by
She smells like the Boots Cosmetics Isle
She paints the yellowed-ivory
Of her finger-claws
With crystallised orange
To cover the nicotine stains
And maybe I think I recognise
My lemonade shampoo
And tangerine hand wash
Like a setting sun over Sicily

The beer can boy
With stuffed up hair
And a stuffed up liver
He’s grey like a November playground
Once all the children have grown
And he’s hole-punched right through
I might think he was heart-broken
And trying to see how many other lost souls
The bottoms of bottles hold
If he wasn’t here every morning
Lolling down the pavement
Like a spring stretched too far
Asking for a paper
That I’m not allowed to give
And trying to drown himself
In the pooled rain under the streetlights

The coat-and-cardie bundle
With wind-swept hair
And wind-swept grimace
Like a tornado tore up
The geography of her personality
And left it with just a bike and a death wish
And those features heaped together
Between chimney-tops and table tops
For consolation
Her feet on the pedals while her hair throttles
Because she’s unlit
Unseen, unprotected
And she rides like this morning is the last
As if she knows that skulls
Crack like eggshells sometimes
And handlebars are sometimes not in front of you.

If my Dad was here he’d see
A smoker
A drunk
A dangerous cyclist
But I see lemon zest and love hearts and black liquorish
After all I’m at home
Among these mistakes
That the morning hours make

he weeps in that subtle way
whereby the crumbs of grief
shaken from his eyelids
are caught by his thumbs
and his head shakes
like a kite chewed by a tree
he's all trembles and tremors
and he quakes
like his body breaks
when tectonic plates collide
he surveys the carpet and the shoelaces
the way that all librarians know their places
the books return to their stands and their spaces and
he keeps his fear in the crook of his tongue
and eyes hook him like bait
that's there for the taking
he pulls with veined hands
at the ashen strands of his afro
they've seen more years evaporate
than they've seen tears
because his eyes and sacked and
the corners of his cornered collar
escape his clasp as he cracks
among the shelves
like dropped eggs
and window panes
and dancers' legs
and weather vanes spun too hard
he gets a should touch like
a stroke through the wire of a rabbit hutch
and he sits beside closed ears
that pretend to listen to the clutch of his fingers
on his forehead

he leaves and they rearrange the chairs
remove the water glass
and erase the marks
of where his heart has passed

You took a bath
In the boiled blood
And pathological depression
Of the body you hated.

You’d made your incisions nice and neat;
That was your irremovable style.
No chance of missing the veins
That lay beneath your skin
Like sewage works
Churning the thick, weariness
Of your existence.

It was your turquoise fingernails
That I turned my attention to
While they hauled you out
With the shower curtain.
They hung off your phalanx-fingers
With obscene prettiness.
Until your life spilled down
The crevices of your palm –
Heart, Head, Life, Fate –
And crept over the gloss paint.
All I could see was your rusted hand
And your knuckle bones.

I write poems like they are going out of fashion.

Descending
Like bejewelled locusts
Upon a harvest
Of copper rings
And incense

I'm liable to forget
That we all have phantoms
Hollow spaces
Dug and never refilled
And it was only last October
That I began wondering
Whether you miss your baby brother
Who never breathed
Your parents named him John
And I began wondering
If
Like me
You sometimes fell
Into the caverns and abysses that gaped
From the expectant space
In every family portrait
And whether you occasionally lost yourself
In the pregnant air inside your house
That anticipated an un-breathed child
An unused bedroom
And grew thick and stale
In it's emptiness.
I'm liable to forget
That we all have dropped stitches
And voids
And holes in our favourites scarves
Our brothers slipped down the plughole
But I mostly forgot about yours
Because mine was blood
And yours was always
As fickle as water.

04:14 and the shadows are long
A boy pressed into a rail-side bench
Raises his arms to shelter himself
From the cloudless sky
He ticks off seconds with the twitch of his left knee
And the jump of his unhinging jaw
He falls
He falls nowhere
But flat, back, motionless in his seat
Hands cocooning head like a heavy day’s work
And then digging up and pressing down
Trying to rid himself of the sounds
Which splice him like glass shards
Or screaming shrapnel
And mutilate
His view of a pretty English station
And a blue steam engine
Beaming like the moon for which it was named
04:18 and he sets himself straight
Like ***** shoelaces
Or cards on the mantelpiece
Winds a bit of string
Around his wedding finger
And croons
As a man inside a toddler
Re-wired refrains
Lick his lips like soup stains
       Pack up your troubles…
                Long way to Tipperary…
        In your old kit bag…
                                 I wonder who’s…
                My heart’s right there…
                                 Kissing her now…
         Smile, smile, smile…
And from my compartment
I watch him fade like
An ink blot from a pillow case
While a boy who looks a lot like him
Turns with purposeful avoidance
And takes the opposite view
Of a pretty English station
He soothes the angry creases
Of his forehead
Of his uniform
And smiles
Smiles
Smiles
And mutters to himself
And they said it would be over by Christmas
04:14 and the shadows are long
A boy pressed into a rail-side bench
Jogs his knees
With the obligatory poppy
His mum pushed into the zip of his winter coat
Drooping like a hangnail
He is busied and hassled
By the phone in his palm
It plays an odd kind of game
Where those who die
Are allowed to come back
And press *Retry

They become names
Like the rims of baked-bean tins
That have to be handled with care

They are a bunch of flowers
Tied to a lamppost
Or a bench with words carved in

They are a Wikipedia page
Or a library shelf
Or a nothing
A nobody

They swell into memories
Wilted and swimming like wax
They seem to be stood there
When the sunlight blusters
Over dust
Because dust is just dead cells
That we all inhale
Exhale
Like we’ll choke them back into existence

They reside in half-empty
Boxes of tissues
Cigarette packets
The bubbles in lemonade

They become a mantelpiece of photographs
And sympathy cards
Broken toys
Empty T-shirts that you’ll try to turn into puppets
Sat in their wardrobe

They fall into certain songs
Certain car journeys
Occasionally they borrow your tongue
To continue voicing certain phrases
Certain people
Certain places
Certain rooms
Certain tastes
Certain seasons
Certain sunsets

Or maybe they just toss and turn
Beneath the church built of handkerchiefs
Like commuters coffined into underground trains
Wondering whether they can still believe
In tunnels
And golden lights.

From the window she sees
A sponged together sky
And chalky clouds
And a trail of wisteria buds
Which dribble into the street
From the window she sees
The men who watch cricket
Scoffing at the TV
Above their takeaway opposite
And she sees the polystyrene cartons
That people leave in their gutter
From the window she sees
A drabble of changing children
A laugh, a scrabble, a sliver of a tear
A road that’s been scrubbed down grey
And little dust particles
That creep upon it and sing
And break and smile, relentless
From the window she sees
Hope
And prays she’s not outgrown it