Poetry

Time to share

Cherry

Our friendship died today

the stubbled hegemony of your stench transporting me back to the time when were still able to drown out the static and sleep

A year before I became a high wire trapeze artist

A year before I became a high wire trapeze artist and a year and two days before the whole, every bone in the body broken, coma thing
Poem of the week

Atom by atom

it is as if you are being disseminated atom by atom like the febrile mist rising from a battlefield
Cherry

I knew she was corruptible

I knew she was corruptible I just didn't know how

Tortuously delicate embraces

It had been less than two weeks since he had slammed down his pint showering me in coruscating petals
Cherry

Why do you fear me?

if you had not been way-laid by the memory of a face of insufferable beauty

I am met at the crossroads by a horse of dangerous beauty

It is not the horse I fear, nor the crossroads, nor the rare beauty of the moment, but that she will never return and gone she will be lost to all but memory and words.

Our garden is full of pornography

you are another blade of grass so much less than the little men that stow away in its branches in nests lined with simplicity and impossible laughter
Cherry

Love in a time of riots

Shards of broken glass fell upon your shoulders And into your hoodie Like glistening amethysts Flecked in their reflected hearts With the blood orange glint

Love in a time of hope

know that with every ounce of strength and spirit I have and however lost I might be I will always find my way back to your side where my piece of the jigsaw fits
Cherry

Korn

I had intended to book Korn Korn are an American nu metal band unfortunately I booked Corn Corn are a Hungarian brother and sister duo who single medieval agrarian folk couplets
Cherry

On the night when you threw and I ducked

my keys on the kitchen table beside the dent from the frying pan on the night when you threw and I ducked

When he pulled the telephone out of the wall and slammed it into the filing cabinet

When he pulled the telephone out of the wall and slammed it into the filing cabinet an inch from my left ear I asked him why he thought it was acceptable to humiliate me so publicly

Dirty little footprints

I must not dig any deeper for fear of where the footprints might lead
Cherry

Killing little England

We are the benefactor and the begging bowl the mountain and the avalanche

The gods of violence

we are the fury and the verisimilitude but we are prisoners trapped in a one bedroom Council flat on the 34th floor of a tower block in Kennington and we can never leave

You are the last of them

I went to you and I held you in my arms and gave you my heat, would have given you my blood I did not realize how could I have betrayed you to the cold?

You terrify me

There is a coarseness to your languor and sometimes a certain slant within you words which coils around my throat like a serpent without a face
Cherry

Tiny threats

You brush the tiny threats from my shoulders and find new places for me to hide
Gold cherry

Of rain and of shadow

She was made of shadow and I of rain and neither of us were worth saving
Poem of the week

Humbled by darkness

So I called it nothing and that became its name
Cherry

The business of war

You had seen active service in Korea and your eyes drank cruelty from the veins of thieves
Cherry

I am running

to touch that extra second as the miles pile high and cruel upon my ruined chest
Cherry

This is a place of turpitude

It began to rain, tiny waterbound crotchets
Cherry

Insert coin and squeeze

there is face powder on the lapels of her blue jacket and in it there are tiny footprints that spiral upwards towards her throat.
Cherry

You are killing our fish

stolen the teal petals of air with which they gilded their lair and plunged them in to beer brown stillness
Cherry

The recipe for making bees

She wore an Alcatraz orange skirt sullied grey by predators
Cherry

Four reasons to fear love

buried up to my neck in the husks of a billion taciturn stares
Gold cherry

One Direction

the taste reminds me of my music teacher's endless, porcelain fingers
Cherry

My name is Destroy

the saloon bar was a seething caldron of contorted proboscis and antennae
Cherry

You will not age well

as if love was a quantitative thing like a group of pensioners huddled under a rain blasted shelter on the promenade in Eastbourne
Cherry

The tear collector

You plucked the tears from my cheeks with a pair of entomologist's tweezers
Gold cherry

The day before the day before you died

Such random acts of attempted murder were considered to be character building in those days
Poem of the week

Her eyes belonged to infinity

Her voice was grey green like the bruises the rain leaves on a forest floor
Cherry

I have come here for your name

She had a half completed tattoo of a rose on her cheek which was red raw.

Attack Monkey

I am an an attack monkey There is no end to me I am both wretched and feted I have only kicks and punches My epitaph is worthless graffiti It is a...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Her 64th boyfriend

I was her 64th boyfriend they came and went like heads of corn in a thresher terrifying in their insignificance so now she was keeping count She...
Cherry

Other trains

Her voice was like the Siberian air masses which chill the eastern slopes of the Urals She worked the tables in the kind of bar which claims to be in...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

My mother was a cyclops

My mother was a cyclops which made her hard to love she had the patina of humanity but the hues of light and darkness which billowed and susurrated...
2 likes
Cherry

The beekeeper of Manhattan

It was 7.38am when the beekeeper's right eyelid shot open like a parasol snatched up into the maw of a hurricane The eye consumed the interior of the...
Gold cherry

She had not aged well

She had not aged well flora and fauna grew within the rift valleys below her eyes and a legion of tiny ailerons dragged the corners of her mouth into...

A mouse in a world of cats

Today I did not sit at my desk in the office, crying in a violent and catastrophic manner, losing all emotional regulation. I did not smash anything...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Doubt is my mistress

Doubt is my mistress she has taught me to trust my enemies and despise my friends she lies with me in bed at night squeezed tight under the billowing...
Cherry

Her eyes became the future

She was 6ft 7 and did not know what to do with it when we lay in the bathtub together in her apartment on afternoons when the bar work was slow her...
Cherry

Where people only go to work and from which they come away again at night

He threw his newspaper and seasick green rucksack on to the station concourse, grabbed the knot of my tie and slapped me across the face with an open...
Cherry

Her father was a thunderstorm

The years rained down on her like a child's spiteful playground punches. She was brutalised by the time in which she lived, a time, when those who...
Gold cherry

The Whale Cafe

This is the cafe in the park where the whales come for breakfast, between the hours of 8 and 9.45am. It is waitresss service only and each whale has...
2 likes
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

I have an imaginary daughter

I have an imaginary daughter whose age is as malleable as the particulates of frost which freckle the eyelashes of snowshoe hares ‘Don’t stay out too...
1 likes
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Tangerine static

Butterfly kisses of frost
Cherry

The duplicity of witches

For my 35th birthday we lay in the shed at the bottom of the garden of our two by two amongst a cornucopia of rusting metallurgy. You wore your...
Gold cherry

The pig nest

There is a pig nest horse eye violet and threaded with wool and steel in the upper branches of the lurching night willow The pig nest is invisible,...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Everyone remembers everything eventually

Our first encounter was as moon slugs slavering through the glass tilth of the regolith, confined to parallel trajectories the earth sun baking the...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

American Diaspora

On the drunken filigree of midnight, some time between 1987 and 1997 (a decade I have disembowelled and entombed) whilst one-shoe shuffling beside a...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Mars

'I am going to live on Mars’ she told me, schoolgirl shoe-scuffing at the planished patina of our marriage ‘I am to become a Cosmonaut describing a...
1 likes
Gold cherry

The emergency bassoonist

The emergency bassoonist sits in his huddle-flat on the frayed edge of functioning cradling his telephone in his crumpled lap, waiting. With each...
Cherry

A naked boulevardian

This where the fire engineer lives, in an elastic bedsit in the interstices between Beaujolais and Thunderbird the tactical skin wince-flexing around...
1 likes
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

All the lost places

I moved the bed last night and found you underneath, reading. ‘Don’t mind me’ you said, making a blissful violence with your mouth ‘I am neither...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week
Pick of the Month

Iriecat

First garden tremble on kiss soft paddy paws to spine shake yawls I held you, I hold you your father You circle chased a squirrel, roared with joy on...
Cherry

Sandcastle

I live in a giant sandcastle which is conveniently positioned for schools, shops and other local amenities There are no other giant sandcastles in my...
Cherry

The highwayman

When summer’s fingers next caress the nascent earth I will become a highwayman, weaving a great dappled stallion between the tailback of camper-vans...
Gold cherry

The ghost king

He didn’t believe in himself. In his own existence. He did not believe in the existence of the other ghosts either, whose numbers were legion, which...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Old

This is a different kind of old. Not observed in the street scuttle scrambling on to a bus or shivering under a mountain of blankets in a wardened...
3 likes
Cherry
Poem of the week

The bridge of Sante Fe

Behind a dirty sunset near the bridge of Sante Fe she sat alone clutching her passport in a hand that had waved and punched and pointed She left...
1 likes
Cherry

Even in peacetime no one can dream

On that day the valley was flayed raw by sunlight It was shortly after a truce had been declared between Winter and Spring Children were in the...
Gold cherry
Poem of the week

Muscle memory

My father never went away he just became a yesterday he told me people swing the bat he wasn't willing to do that his father taught him to be free...
1 likes
Cherry

Sea swimmer

Plunging blind into the brutal ether jagged, tangential all-consuming and caressing a cold I cannot describe swimming in the direction of emptiness...
Gold cherry

A different way to measure time

When I arrived in the park, the autumn leaves had formed an auburn duvet on my usual bench. Moments after I had begun sketching tree skeletons in...
1 likes