poems

Unstable

Quite unexpectedly this morning
I splashed my inner light
on the hallway floor,

its liquid rolling like mercury,
dangerous in its beauty.

I know you will step in it later
and disturb my gravity.

published in Snow Child Pindrop Press, 2011

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Room

Tonight you are spare – on the threshold
of being old and new. Two walls
stripped bare, blue paper giving way
to yellow paint beneath.

The room’s split in half. Where I’ve been
too heavy with the scraper I hit concrete,
gouge it, leave it dull, grey. Tonight,
in the electric light, it glisters, winks

becomes a map of continents surrounded
by a yellow sea. Somewhere across the room
I’m bobbing on a buoy too far out.

I step round huddled furniture so I can run
my hands down the world on my walls,
feel life beneath my fingers. They graze Greece –
draw the heat from our nights there, freeze

when they reach Scotland. It snowed five days
on the trot and when I sank in a white ditch,
you peed yourself laughing.

And then there was the time you died
and I moved rooms, tore the paper from these walls,
emptied the chest of drawers. The wardrobe’s
slack,hangers clanked when I closed the door.

Everything in this room is spare
now you’re not here to claim it.

First Prize in the Didsbury Arts Festival Open Poetry Competition 2011

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Clouds

Some mornings my flesh wakes before me
and at that moment I am split in two.

I can slip my hand into yours,
really feel it, making me believe

I did not see your coffin,
that you are there, somewhere, unforgotten,

drawing back blue curtains;
the ones in the sale you said looked

as if clouds had rolled over them.
I knew it was water damage, but you saw

dogs and clowns and people’s faces
in the Stratus. To you, Cirrus painted

the tongues of lions. You watched
them lick the walls at night, never asking

why some cloud formations are called
Cirrostratus. We never thought

you’d get that high.

Published in Snow Child Pindrop Press, 2011

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Cry Baby

As soon as nobody is looking
she will sew the tears

to the hem of her coat
with thread that doesn’t match

so she can watch their wounds
bleed along the stitching.

She will sew them in pairs
so they can hold hands.

How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, 2009 Cinnamon Press

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How to Pour Madness into a Teacup

She hangs her tears at the front of the house
cuts the rain in half and puts time
in the hot black kettle. She sits in the kitchen
reading the teacup full of small dark tears;

it’s foretold the man in the wood
hovers in the dark rain above the winding path.
The man is talking to her in moons,
she is laughing to hide her tears

and with little time, she secretly
plants the moons in the dark brown bed.
She shivers, thinks the man is watching
as the jokes of the child dance

on the roof of the house. Tidying,
she carefully puts hot rain in the teacup,
sings as she hangs her tears on a string
and watching the dance, thinks herself mad.

in collection How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, 2009 Cinnamon Press

978-1-90709-000-4;

published in Orbis#142 Winter 2007, The Spectator, November 2008

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29 George Road

I don’t expect you to understand. It was the bus,
its movement. The getting on and off.

The stopping at places I didn’t recognise –
the people pushing, bags bashing.

That’s why I got off. That’s why I found myself
in Finsbury Park in the dark, gone midnight,

too late for another bus to take me home.

The sign in the chip shop said Pukka Pies.
I crossed the street where the Crescent meets

George Road and stood outside your window, knowing
the light in your room was more than ten minute’s old

and wasn’t turned on for me.

Published in Snow Child Pindrop Press, 2011

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Against the Rain

We need to die a bit and pull death over us,
over our open mouths, so we can’t call out -
but we can slide one hand, just one hand
over it, and feel its chill on our fingers
as they linger on its cheek.

If we die, just for a little while,
we see ourselves running onwards,
we can close our already closed eyes
and watch the white in the light of our lids.

We need to die just a little bit,
to step beyond ourselves
and watch our past come to meet us,
running shadows across the field.

We need to die for a moment,
and watch our present greet us
like a stranger in the street
mistaking us for someone else.

First published in Other Poetry, Series 4, Number 2
Published in Snow Child Pindrop Press, 2011

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Family Album

On the scan you are tiny – a whiteness
in a dark sky. Your breath steams in patches,
ghost white strokes on the photograph.

(I want to step into the picture to see what happens.
I want to go between the blackness and the clouds).

You stitched yourself to me with fisherman’s nylon,
sharp needles where your nails should have been.
But even in my warm belly you were unformed.

When your breath left, your eyes were still closed.
You would not have seen a thing. I turn the page -
nobody moved, nobody smiled.

(I want to pull the dark over me and find you there:
you at two, at five, at twelve).

My tongue wraps itself around you, grows limp
when I speak your name. There is urgency in my loss.
I want to unwrap it, to see it, to release it.

My body yearns for you at night. It cries.
At the end of the darkness is the thread of my child.
I carry the weight of the dead.

(I want to place my hands around your face,
my fingers stretching as you smile. My child).

The Frogmore Papers, issue 77