The Beast Between the Marble and the Heap, Or: The Mammoth Between the marble wall of City Hall and the slow‑rotting heap of broken crockery and dusty old books — the beast stirred. To think it once tore open the earth with its tusks, raising mountains, or guarding the spirits of the underworld. Now its fur rotted to a brittle husk — the mammoth preserved without reason — the mammoth. Among the first of God’s works, it had been among us from

The Art of Seeing: Visions of Manchester The seventeen works presented below originate from black-and-white photographs I captured across Greater Manchester many years ago. Through digital brushes and filters, these images have been reimagined and transformed, shifting from documentary records into expressive artworks. Each piece reflects both the architectural memory of place and the creative act of refashioning, where the familiar urban landscape is rendered anew in color,

Deliquescent Bodies (Love Parade) I hope for night; it comes; it is here; it comes with rain & river, & the lights are electric. I am offered a drink & the mercury blue neon over the door catches my eye, tears open the retina, imbuing the optic nerve with cold cathode gas, ionising my nervous system to the limit. Breathing carbon dioxide, I metabolize my own body. I am a pillar of ether by the exit door. But I’m not alone. We all matter less than we did before,

City Poem Under the iron bridge, office workers, wet with rain, crowd on coaches & trams. I stay by the river & watch them go. Everything is flowing now, a hissing juggernaut of lorries, cars, buses, passenger trains – varying streams of atoms in rapid motion – racing ahead of time; streaking by factories, allotments, tower-blocks, back-to-back slums; terminating or turning at the last suburb, at the conurbation’s edge, where the sun slips down the sky, into a

Aquarius So, the routes of the city, all its paths, arteries and overflows – the scummy run-offs from sewers and roads – end or start on the muddy banks of the sallow-tree river. Water does what it knows: It coils and uncoils like a gut over decades-old millstone grit, between the crumbling, rumbling jaws of Anglo-Saxon stone; Sneaks and snakes under willow trees; runs past hospitals, factories, back-to-back slums, picking up brand new stories and the gho