A cigarette glows
reflected in the truck windshield
careening through the city night
These headlight beams
fruitlessly searching
for something gone
The Grand Rapids highways
never take me where I want to be
not even close

I drink awhile at Anchor bar
a quarter spinning on the table
thoughts go round, keep coming back
'til my skull's swimming too
Two more beers
heads they’re mine
t...

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So many warm afternoons
spent in my Grandad’s endless garden
Home to my first and only treehouse
when air-raid siren tests
still filled those Northern streets 

And most magical of all
the rough lumber shed he’d built
A place of wooden-handed tools
you had to carefully maintain with oil
tools that would have been his grandad’s

A place where big furry bees
chose to die with dignity
b...

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Shooting through the greenery
I lovingly eye our reflections 
as they flicker in the glass
of a Bruges-bound train
Your fingers knit silently into mine
warm in your woozy dreaming

On a dirt track headed for Hanoi
behind me on the motor bike
cutting through a tall tapestry of trees
my heartbeat lost beneath the engine
Twisting the throttle so instinctively
as you steal a kiss over my s...

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If you can find your way back here
let’s meet
under the old whale bones
this place that we each love
Where we look out to sea
or back towards the sleeping town

One day, we’ll stand together
and unbeknownst to us
it will be
for the last time in our lives

Whichever of us, must go first
let’s make a promise to meet again
under the old whale bones
Hearts filled with feeling
and the b...

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Picking you up to go driving
I’d get there early to watch you get ready
both seventeen and tangled
in that unspoken thing between us
Cruising the looping country lanes
in those dim headlight beams
That was our place, alone together at last
Two teenagers, eyeing each other sideways
and wondering who each of us would be
would you always stay right there
would you always be
in the car with...

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As autumn's rusty fingers begin
to push their way through tired trees
So, the early dimming light
and spectral chill conspire
to gently sweep me back in time

It's Oxford in the autumn
nineteen; with eyes opening
A new life unfolding
cycling through the leaves
and sighing under bridges

Oxford in the autumn
that brick so old around me
broad streets, illogical lanes
busses and puddle...

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The sweetest memories hang
like negatives
in the dark room of my mind
I develop them occasionally
picturing again 
more exciting times

Yellows and browns begin to wash
across the leaves outside my window
I haven’t seen you in the flesh
since those shoots were new
it feels so long ago

We ran through those streets
as if we owned them
spinning endlessly from bar to bar
from joke to ...

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Nineteen nighty five
Nominally fourteen;
I was sitting in the sports hall
pen in hand
the desks apart
a teacher I didn’t know
patrolled the aisles
The English paper said ‘write a story
include a river
and an allegory’

The clock at the front clicks
thin hands jerk and tick
I spin my pen
study the air vents above me
there’s a dusty shuttlecock
caught up in the pipework
there’s a br...

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The complication of those earrings
the texture of the paint around your eyes
the sun's highlights in your hair

The redness of those parting lips
such belief in everything we said
the pristine shape of your nose

Lying on the roof
your head close to my heart
summer blushing the sky
weren't we beautiful
weren't we beautiful then

Nothing to fret about
just prolong the passing day
sw...

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The strength of your light
catches me unguarded
how brightly you shine
blooming brilliantly
how welcome
how confusing to me

The confidence of your glow
magnetic from all angles
I'm softened in the shadows
but your light does not permit them
so welcome
so challenging to me

Brighter than in our youth
brighter still than photographs
we talk and take a new one
twenty years since the...

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It's a quiet night

a quiet night at the telescope

an eye on things

all that's unfolded, all that is done

The moment shivers

as December's knifing breath sinks deep

and weather's long sigh

the only sound in all this silence

The whole sky 

looks straight into my eye

The whole of space 

has it's magnifying glass to my eye

searching for something

I...

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