A Ghost As If        I am not your keeper O ghost who crouches   At the grave of my father.     The body is dead; it is in the shade.   ...

Death of a House Sparrow       Scraping his toes in the fine dirt,   the handsome house sparrow   lowered his whitish belly   to the...

A Strange Hatching   Into Eden fly the winged elohim    screeching like owls, scattering dark mist   and whirling about, their wings flapping shadows   over baffled beasts below.     The first of the elohim  selects an animal   on two legs & calls it Adam.   Into the brainstem a long needle of DNA   is inserted.     The second elohim  draws out a rib   from a gash in Adam’s side.   From that rib a female of girlish proportions   is fashioned & named Eve.     Grinning like an

A Dark Illumination     Once again, we are here, as we are   on this day every year,   two hearts lit up with pain.   And as day falls...

Father O'Sinner   Father O’Sinner is not his name (not quite),   Though it should be and not O’Connor,   Which was the name bestowed by his stepdad,   Who drank and killed himself aged forty.   Here he lies this foggy midnight on the cradle   Of his drears and prayers. Faith does not   Fructify; it is dirty. On a mattress   Hard his rump   Swells, bruises   His core parts, the body revolts   Amidst all this blasting and mildew.     Life gone old and fat around the waist.    

Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the  Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over  I Write down   This,  My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much   INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD  Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia remind us of Fallen Nature; who

To live this hour beneath a cold Pennines sun requires the dead hills to flow behind us. To see the mighty crow and not look back means the death of something strange. We twist and turn. Shadows drape over us – ugly cloaks of lies that suit nobody. We are mired in bloody hearts. The crow comes, picks at the pieces. I am that crow, that symbol of death. I am the one that turns over corpses and flies away.

So, descend the steep hill   Slowly, go on   Go past the lunch cart   — Scolding tea, coffee   Hotdogs, burgers   Fried onions, ketchup —   — Succulent dark odours —   Smells so foody    — Mingling   With exhaust of traffic —   That they foment in your gut   A hunger you didn’t know you had.     Go ahead, under   The railway bridge, turn right,   Allotments to your left   — Carrots, beans, raspberries   Basil, rosemary, parsley   Marigolds, sunflowers —   Big b

Making his advances in tall steps, Davie marks Suzie standing small at the kitchen sink. She drops something, holds still her breath. ‘No-one’s gonna listen to you, Suzie, and that’s a fact’. The ugly brown voice of a drunk scrapping for a fight. From him bad odours rise, smells of fish and river foam, tobacco and beer. He picks up a carver, puts it down. ‘So don’t even think about it’. It is evening, it is hot, and a dead carp’s eye looks up at Suzie from the dish drainer. A

A jazz trombone extends a metaphor, the length of a memory.   With a memory, my grandfather says,   You got to hear its pitch, its tone &...

Under the World A frog descended eighty-six radical steps to the devil’s loch. There the heron brooded at the water’s edge and the...

Eve lay down and trembled. Her belly grew fat like the moon. Her womb conspired murder. Cain was gloomy at heart. Abel and his animals inflamed passions on all sides. Cain looked up and the sky shivered grey. Sin flew out the door of heaven. It stuck in Cain’s gullet like Aaron’s rod. Cain slaughtered his brother like a goat. He trembled as wiped the gore on his father’s coat of skin, which still carried the aroma of grandfather God.

Ask her what she thinks as she conceals her baby in fallen leaves and detritus. Still-born, still-life. All that waiting, all that love unanswered. So many clouds with dark underbellies.

It is so sad the way things end like a when a plant dies and dies in a black corner and you’re done for. It is over like the end of summer. The green has dried up and the stalks refuse to dream. This is the death of light , I said, as if quotes were facts or neat sums on a blackboard. The world snaps shut, silence seeps in, lighter than air, colourless and tasteless like carbon monoxide. In here nothing moves except the shadows on the curtains and the shaking of the walls