COTTAGE

We drive past a cottage in the country

with its quaint decorative bricks

coloured and weathered by age.

The east wall overlooks an overgrown field

with three huge windows hung with old curtains

hiding a burning oil lamp.

This small cottage is two centuries old

and everyone has lived here

from old Victorian families to a modern eighties wri...

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CEILING ROSE

An alabaster ceiling rose is ever so delicate,

a round swirling pattern that is a joy to look at.

It used to be white but now it’s all yellow

with centuries of grime and age old smoke.

People stop and wonder what went on under

the hanging lights, what was said, who loved

who and who dared to dance close.

Today the huge dance hall is empty

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MY LITTLE COLD WAR 

My mate sent some song lyrics to me, by some band. I read them after reading my story on my nuclear armed stealth jet being used in anger. I’m trying to make sense of the cold war I grew up in now, so many years later. It’s so crazy. The younger kids have no idea but my mate does, he’s only 21 but he tries to understand what it was like growing up under the shadow ...

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'The Lady of the House
Wia,
Whom he loves'

within these ruined walls
you lived
loved
played
laughed
cried
worked

- died

long gone now
only dust remains
yet carved painted stones
bring testimony
of your life
and warmth
down through the years
and suddenly
you are almost
close enough to touch

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`







if we looked at history
on a multi-plane spreadsheet
and compared the goings on
in each particular era
we shall find that at any given
period, no matter the advancement
there inevitably at a cost lay revealed
atrocities, genocides, discrimination
prejudices, and a lack of conscience
that marks the brute in humans
poets have also been present
ever a...

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`

Invisible but not voiceless,
This fire within me burning;
Fueled by things long since done;
Uncertain it would continue

And most certainly would one day end.

Resounding vermillion trains,
Travelling across frontier lands;
That began by fits and starts.
But this is just the beginning,

And most certainly is not the end.

Smearing the silence with my t...

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On the 18th of January 1981, 13 young people died in a fire in New Cross, South East London (a fourteenth committed suicide after losing so many friends). Just shy of thirty years on, these are the contemporary reflections of a man who was a seven year old boy at the time. Widely thought to have been a racially motivated attack, more recent advances in forensic technology have suggested o...

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