After Hogarth
Chalked up in white, his plans ran all in Cool blueprints: our house was just too staid. Then lines curved under my tools, sweetly Etched into edges that became snake-like. Right-angles baulked. We hooked fingers in Mingling Cs and recut hard doorframes Into shapes more sinuous. But then, Beh
Dandy
Mr Guillaume brought Paris to London His fingers anchored him to earth with their varicoloured jewels – He told me he once found a pearl shucking oysters And had it mounted on his littlest finger. When asked “how do you like your eggs?” he replied Fabergé. And his fizzing champagne chuckle ho
A Concert in the Ante-Inferno
[Inspired by Inferno, Canto III, where Dante and Virgil travel through the Ante-Inferno and cross the river Acheron with the help of the ferryman, Charon. The performer, called ‘Nick’, is loosely named after the singer Nick Cave, the frontman of the Australian Rock Band ‘Nick Cave and the Bad
The Stripping of the Altars
They from London came and armed with pages: scrolls proclaiming you a wolf in wool. Father, it seems you have misled us. We went picking fruit and ploughing, strapping boots to furrow sunrise after sunrise into penance. But you did nothing sacred with the tithe. All the sundry charms you hall
sonnet for the new age
before contemporary verse meaning was contained in a frame solidified by ruling rhyme and iamb. we feared weaning poems off their infant structure defied all comfort reason and tradition raised into being an unbound form of word doomed to non-meaning only to be praised by howling radicals wit
JESA
We invited our ancestors to dinner for a feast too good for the living a low lacquered table lay immaculate and swept — a week’s worth of preparation on smooth wooden platters porcelain cups metallic bowls; a different clack thud and tinker at each spare movement — and
Berlin Prayer
The Spree Komtesse is groaning with passengers The tables are laden with hams and bratwurst This summer’s arteries are almost cut – Out spill the last songs of the August nights From all four chambers of her heart And the black Spree takes us rolling and rolling Cradling us down her a
Go Figure
“During those days, women were mistreated to spare the guilty from chastisement. They even went as far as shaving women’s heads.” Go figure. I, whose remorse was The wretched woman Left on the pavement. The conceivable victim, Her dress in ta