I descend wooden steps paved with sunlight; a pulled switch licks cold metal with a spark, but the light bulb flickers and dies. I shield my face from the glowing doorway above until the dark unveils its landmarks. I crunch across gritted cement, fingers glide through tufts of dust and slide over abrasive rust. In the centre of the room,

Today is not a good day I'll tell you that, black and white and I'm feeling 32 shades of grey that's right, 32 I'm not being frugal the human eye can only distinguish 32 basic shades, it's true if you don't believe me check it on Google And I am b-rowned off because I just wanna be round you So

They found the remains of Mr. Clapper, our former history teacher, three feet beneath the school field. That would make him Edwardian. A piece of chalk remains, poised among bone digits, like a sixth finger, still pointing at the mouth of Matthew Braithwaite, expecting an answer. “Who was the fifth wife of Henry the Eighth?” A search begins for Braithwaite,

This piece resulted from my fight fire with fire approach to writer's block by writing about the feeling ion not being able to write anything. This wrong foots the block in an infinite logic loop and lets the words flow. The Catch A fisherman waits all day at sea. Despite the bait, nothing bites; his plate remains empty. He can

A centipede of commuters scuttles a hundred feet underground. We break free from jostling briefcases and arm-clamped free papers. Only the briefest of glances to the pearly kings we overtake, wafting their oysters through mechanical gates. Not at that Italian table amongst valentine couples, nor beneath Eros guiding arrows for the tourists  lost at Trafalgar. But there, within that square,

A day that calls for rethinking attitudes, for looking back it’s clear life’s strains, year upon year, can cause cracks and there is nothing to gain by platitude plastering over black gaps, so would it be crass to utter the phrase ‘Fourteen years of married bliss’ when we still carry the weight of a lost child and haven’t fully counted

The boy takes a pencil and draws the first walls Takes time to pause, rub out, extend, corrects corners and doors. The basement plans of a building he found at the back of his mind. He takes no new leaf. There, on the same paper, he draws the next floor; some new lines conflict whereas some agree with what was

I developed a method for dealing with writer's block that I have come to call 'Fight fire with fire.' The basic premise is that when struggling to find inspiration of what two write, you write about the feeling of not being able to write instead. This wrong foots the writer's block and helps the words to flow. This poem was

In 2012, we tragically lost our beautiful daughter, Talia, to stillbirth. Everyone around me kept telling me, ‘There are no words.’   I appreciated the sentiment, but this seemed an awful poverty to be in. A place without words, as if we had tumbled off the edge of language and there was nothing left to say. In this dark and