Let His Dwelling Grow Let him retain his secret self unseen— A quiet core beneath the outer guise. His thoughts drift far, where none have ever been, Untouched by earthbound sound or sorrowed cries. He shapes his fate by sovereign will alone, And spends his hours by choice, not blind decree. Yet boredom gnaws the pleasure of his throne And drives him forth through mists no eye can see. There in the vale, he finds his kindred near, Who sense he will not linge

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. A pale figure with a sheet for a robe rises from the earth (His hair black as ravens' feet). With cold-clay fingers, He could quell the soul’s fire. As if. A seagull cries In the salted air Like a baby Calling for its parents. There is blood on the land, Blood in the rivers too. You are not what you appear To thi

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 ape,

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 into night, a little candle illumines this dim corner where we half-appear. And every flicker, like every breath, is a discrete sensation of hurt, one after the other. It is always the same. Her sitting there, Me sitting here (still wearing yesterday’s shirt). Look at the light. How can a flame smaller than a baby’s fist,

Verses on John Milton’s Paradise Regained, Book IV (“Unobserved Home to His Mother’s House Private Returned”) “Stuck in this uneasy station, what else To do but to let these words I write (Knowing that you, Son of God, Will never write anything, other than Some marks in the sand), Lift you high and set you down on a green bank Where angels serve celestial foods And ambrosial wines (Real or illusory, I discern not). And as you partake, You wait and hope for what you don’t see,

Expecting nothing but laughter and applause, Adam hears on all sides sounds of derision, Harshly sibilant. All were transformed to serpents

Pictures of Eve I Adam cultivated Eve by swelling her belly with something so potent that it could only have come from the stone of a forbidden fruit. II Eve was striding the earth when Adam emerged from a black gap. Six days passed and earth was reduced to a pile of newsprint. And Eve tore her clothes and made for herself a garment of lamentations. But Adam, sated and pitiless, scoffed her beneath the absent apple tree.

The Potato Eaters Potato eaters – five peasant women, clothed in rags, seated round a square table in a brown room. The scene is set. Outside the frame, a famous artist inspects the dim and manifold prospect… Five chairs, two forks, an oil lamp, a tablecloth, people, a kettle, wooden beams. But nothing – not a single thing – can be fully described, recorded, depicted. Every angle of vision – each perception – refuses to yield the clock’s essence, the kettle’s nature.

The Family Way 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.

One of my earliest pieces, "First Sentence," was written when I was eighteen, in the long shadow of the abuse I endured at the hands of a controlling narcissist. It has passed through many iterations over the years—including one version published in Best of the Manchester Poets, a rendition I would now gladly disown. The version that follows is, I think, the truest and most fully realised form of the poem, and I now regard it as the definitive text. First Sentence I cannot