Black Hole

Bloodless skin too tightly drawn for lips. White. Like supermarket chicken. A row of teeth along the bottom curve. None along the top. (You lost those long ago.) And that moustache that grandmas get And tickle when you kiss. It’s four. Trying to remember that…

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Cloud lines

We live on the lower slopes of Titterstone Clee Hill in South Shropshire. Our house straddles the ever-shifting boundary (sometimes less than a vegetable patch wide) between what is shrouded in mist or cloud and what is clear. Between the seen and the unseen. Between…

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Learning by rote

I hadn’t learned anything by rote – apart from my bank PIN number – since playing Friedrich Von Trapp in the Parkfields School production of The Sound of Music. And that was back in 1972. So when my poetry coach, Pele Cox, asked me to…

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Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas My poetry coach, the wonderful Pele Cox, has asked me to commit this poem to memory. It’s proving to be a tough gig. Not least because the last time I learned lines was probably as Friedrich von Trapp in the Parkfields School…

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A birthday poem

I was asked to pen a birthday poem to celebrate the first anniversary of The Big Live Breakfast Burrito – perhaps the weirdest, most eclectic but nonetheless wonderful LinkedIn live you’ll ever see. Follow the Burrito link to see the reading in context. Here it…

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