In the early hours of the morning, we embrace the shapes of yesterday, thinking the other is asleep. With our first breaths proper, there are cigarettes washed down with coffee. Dust enters through the open window. With it, sand from the Sahara that swirls around the floorboards before escaping beneath the bedroom door. Against our Read more

In the early hours of the evening, we smoke our cigarettes on the steps of an Italian restaurant. It’s a rough area, but it’s okay. I’ve got tattoos. Through an open window of a passing car, I hear a song that reminds me of the dying days of disco. All the days that ever existed Read more

After the drudgery of work, I retreated through windswept streets to my bed, where dreams pulled me under the second my greasy head hit the pillow. I dreamt I was a whale. A small one. There were many of us, and we swam in circles upon the tongue of our mother. We were by the Read more

Rolling in bed like a grenade, this fever knows no end. Tightened throat. Throat of glass. Eyes blinded by the light. Palpitations brought on by promiscuous senses. Getting up to piss with blurred vision and the subsequent horror of feeling the piss missing the bog and hitting my toes instead. Little tears escape my eyes. Read more

In the bath, I blink away the bubbling bubbles that taste of champagne. They pop and make my nose twitch. The bubbles contain images of bones and feathers and the eyes of a lover who washes herself in a biblical river. She’s not biblical, as such, but her bones are soaked in religious verse, and Read more

They knocked down the old magistrates a few years back. Nothing there now but a patch of glass-strewn land the gipsies frequent on their travels between towns, along with the ghosts of chavs wearing ill-fitting suits pleading their innocence to crimes they delighted in. Then you’ve got the remains of the library where I did Read more

The residues of other people’s lives wrap around my bones like a second skin. I don’t know where they end nor where I begin. On my way to work, I walk past my childhood home. From age four to eighteen, life was poetry without even trying. These days I get blue so easily. There seems Read more

Not long after waking, I walked her into town. It pissed down with rain. Didn’t stop the entire day, which somehow eased my soul yet drowned my heart. Returning home avoiding the main roads, I took the longer way back through the winding alleys and side streets getting soaked to the bone. Drying myself off Read more