A journey through a collection of new poetry touching on many themes: childhood, love, self-identity, religion, memory, death, Existentialism, Greek myths and legends
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
A poem for The Dead
Sunday, 29 December 2019
Welcoming the Slaughter, a poem on love and breakdown
Ben and Jane (an extract)
Jane has boxes for everything.
She keeps them under the bed,
In the bedroom of the house
In her head.
Her mother gave her the boxes;
Label them carefully, she said.
What kind of boxes? Egg boxes?
Tea chests? Crates?
She was anxious to get it right.
If you like.
What kind of guidance was that?
Her first box was Anxiety:
A shoe box, big enough for boots;
They’d been in a sale;
They chafed her heels.
The lid didn’t fit.
She’d found the house in a memory,
Though she couldn’t remember it.
The front door,
Fanlighted, letter-boxed,
Its number an opaque code,
Leads to the stairs,
And off the landing is the bedroom,
Cluttered with boxes.
There is a window,
Its sill cluttered with boxes.
Light streams against the pane,
But the view is a blank,
As if the house were in a carwash.
The other rooms feel
forbidding.
She thinks there are lodgers,
Whom she may have met,
Or would have liked to.
Sometimes,
She hears their voices,
Soft, sociable noises,
The clink of glasses,
Murmured laughter;
Sometimes,
A nervous greeting:
The bleating of a small animal,
Welcoming the slaughter.
Other times,
When alone,
She sits on the bed
And imagines herself crying,
Wanting a mother for the daughter.
Friday, 27 December 2019
Holding on? Or letting go? A poem
Sunday, 8 December 2019
Dark Atlas, poem
Friday, 29 November 2019
The Reader of Oneself, a poem on hope and loss
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Friday, 22 November 2019
A four-letter word
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Saturday, 16 November 2019
Still Life
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Saturday, 2 November 2019
A Free Lunch? A poem on faith
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Self-portrait, a poem
Self-portrait
Click here to see some of Bacon's pictures
Sunday, 27 October 2019
The self and the other, a poem
In the last poem, Imago, there was the idea of a second self, a pure self - an alter ego, a possibility awaiting realisation: the voice in our head that speaks to us of us.
It is a fiction, of course - the story of us that we tell ourselves - an apocrypha, a shadow on the wall of our cave.
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