A squeeze-box performs outside: The tinny air is pumpingw Through its half-forgotten song Like a failing heart. The sacred relic’s displayed In its dull crystal and gold For visitors to inspect As they shuffle by. The priests sit behind it, bored. They are no more concerned than Customs officials might be,
Thinking on it now, it was like living at sea beneath the whaleback hills, in those blue acres of lavender. Our house was a barge, its chimneys sharing our dreams with the sky. The barns were islands we would swim to through the fields, beyond the shoreline of the lane. Here, we would laze and
Whit Sunday, blustery heat, and you in three-piece suit to read the Second Lesson. The day before, I’d excavated Arctic Rolls from ice-shelves in the local store’s deep freeze. We ate them reverently, like miracles we didn’t quite believe in. I threw up first and stayed in bed. You soldiered on through
One day, my fellow occupant of our cell, you’ll cease to follow in my steps, to tell me, looking through our single window, about whatever view you’ve chosen for the day. Somehow, absurdly, I’d foreseen collapse, my deserted body, our almost rhyming corpse, and that you might walk away jauntily singing to
One summer I’d a plague of them – they looked so pretty in their red and black I didn’t mind them fluttering round but then I’d find one on my pillow or leaving smears across the panes. The boldest liked to totter on my finger then take me under her wing – it was lined
I don’t like trains – People get on who never get off again They have given me flowerless distances and windows smashed with rain Offered me stations as big as cathedrals where no one spoke And no one sang Yet when I was a child I loved the engines for their smoke. Once they
Yes but, no but, the paintbrush seems to mutter As I swish it back and forth across the weatherboard, Going with the grain then working against it, The faded charcoal turning onyx, the wood made rich again, Less true to itself the blacker it gets But beautiful, the knots like stubborn hearts, Which
I thought about going to a support group. I looked into it in the yellow pages and other outmoded data sets. I came upon a strange group of surly Sues and churlish Chads. We sat around and made high-pitched whines for about an hour. It was a pre-verbal kind of vibe. Some of us barked.
Just poster paint on coarse paper, pinned up with all the rest by the entrance to the school hall. Miss Stephenson stopped me and told me she liked it. Or was she married by then? The class gave her a soft toy at the end of term for her baby-to-be. In Autumn we
Without friends in low-doored cottages Beside the lichened walls of churches, Or wild associates in country piles With rotting sash windows, A sitting room just for the cats And drifts of broken-hearted furniture, Or cousins who throw chaotic parties In that fine old barn beside the lake Where random guests rampage all summer
Money is coarse. Her subjects take the taint. The humble glow. They smile their Sunday best. And everywhere she goes the Queen smells paint. She’s there for them that is and them that ain’t. Toffs drop their aitches in the jabber-fest. Money is coarse. Her subjects take the taint. Some pilgrims sell their
Where did they flee to? Who wrote off their debts when, scuttled back into a gas mantled past, they left just this pair of foxed silhouettes inlaid to the depths of the shadows they cast? Their off-cuts, spiralled and coiled to the floor, were the shirts off their backs they left behind for the brilliantined
Death dropped its guillotine on my sister. She wouldn’t have seen it coming – she’s blind. Was blind: I haven’t got used to the tense. I confuse those still living with those past. What gets me through the evenings is drink. Ironic, that, since drink is what killed her. I’m guessing it’s unlikely you
They need to start believing in themselves. Like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff before the animator has drawn solid earth below they expected more certainty than this. Already out of their depth they hesitate at the edge of the sea and wonder how it feels to dive into the waves. They gaze
At first it was simply a mild irritation At his slightly buck-toothed expression. He carried on, convincingly enough, But then there was his lisp, you hardly heard it At first, but gradually it became unmissable: THs as Fs. It was tedious. He tended to begin with a slightly out-of-kilter Remark that caused you to pause,
(Poet and painter born in Bristol 1890, died on the Western Front April 1918. London art studio photo-portrait / National Portrait Gallery / 1917) The lips are full, fish-like, a deep gulped breath in-held against the body’s bitter will; bottom lip swollen, mouthy as a carp, or a trumpeter’s lips bilged from over-practice.
I found a gift-tag tailed with silver string dropped by our bed, ironically heart-shaped, gold cardboard, unattached to anything, attracting bits of fluff and Sellotape and, placed between your hairbrush and your pills with ribbon from the final gift you wrapped, reflected in a mirror that revealed With all my loveblue-biro’d on the back.
Lights turned on but the curtains not yet drawn in the dusk that lingers over hedges and scrubland bordering Langhams Rec. Here’s the overgrown shortcut to the Bourne Stream, the high wall that protects the vicarage. Here’s another mother getting supper in Neil’s kitchen. Here’s another father parking his car in Adrian’s driveway. They
– Nella Last, diary entry for Mass Observation When the Prime Minister spoke so solemnly and said ‘WAR’, I thought the shock would kill me. Eighteen months ago I was in Southsea and saw the Fleet come in. Hundreds of young ratings walked on the Prom and I gradually became conscious
Next he told us how he’d creep to the edge of the tip with a broken chunk of cistern or sink raised above his head and before letting it go, them black rats, super quick, big as rabbits, tails fat as rope, gone. Other places where they usually get and that tea time was a