Category: Poetry

Intro: up to 50 words (delete this text and enter your own)

A life unlived, cut short before reaching ten

Hand built on a hillside, people’s Pendle palace. Place for Edwardian evangelists. Shuttered stronghold. Reticent revolutionaries. Local liberals and a Socialist choral choir, whose crescendo makes Clitheroe club cyclists cleats clink, as they dance on wooden table tops and tile floor. Night Jays jig in a tempest of temperance and Marston Moor mercenaries march to the beat of a Burnley barbershop […]

  Mangan poured the whiskey MacGowan held my legs Behan laughed and poured another, I laughed and poured it down!   It was a night like any other The whiskey did a job on me. Where’s me whiskey for the night? Where’s me whiskey to keep it right?   Drunk to hell I tried to rise. But MacGowan still held […]

about an owl     my body aches, I’m sore, my knees are chafing raw trousers hang heavy from last night’s storm   I’m far from home on a quaggy pathway and it’s sunrise   I prop my punctured bike  against a hedge, my elbows on a five-bar gate   wondering, at the majestic patchwork   of fields of furrows […]

This was part of the “IS” series and comes after the Buddha’s Reply. 

  One of many occasions I visited Panama, either end… Panama City or Christobel. It was always the same, dangerous and exciting.

moving story   mum rolled up the kitchen oil-cloth on the morning we moved out and found a photograph, dad, me, and baby Cissie at the Dove Row, Hackney Coronation street party   (Cissie died later of the scarlet fever)   dad whispered as mum went to lock the door ‘there’s nothing left to nick no more’   mum sighed […]