Now Winter Nights Enlarge by Thomas Campion
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze,
And ...
On Reading Virgil’s Eclogues by Raficq Abdulla
Not so much the rivers that have dried up
As myself, dried up with acts and failure to act,
Alexis is yours, mine is ...
Ballad of the Londoner by James Elroy Flecker
Evening falls on the smoky walls,
And the railings drip with rain,
And I will cross the old river
To see my girl again.
...
Symphony in Yellow by Oscar Wilde
An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
...
‘perishable poetry’
At Borders on Oxford Street
Poetry is at the end of Fiction
Next to Crime
London stands united
What a blast
We share the rain
Not the umbrella
David Hermann has written ...
London Fashion Week/Pelvis
stepping out
onto the sunset
catwalk, London
juts its bones in
couture: organza
sky distressed
over the West End’s
knowing armour – it’s
all about structure,
darling, the single
crane dangling its
ruby ...
Auckland
CK Stead
Lovely for the long ago
child in the night
to hear the huge rain
beating on iron.
No fibre-glass muffle –
only that raw rough
sleep-inducing
din.
We’ve eaten the 12
jars of plums
I stewed and froze
at ...
Adder
The adder’s taut head was a few feet away,
its lie a freeze of symmetry and curl
amongst the stones and scruffs of heather.
I remember feeling sure that the cleft it was
sunning ...
Coyote
A face, a flank – lit up
from his road kill hunt, oblivious.
As if we had called him into the beams
to break our cover, not his,
wanted the shock of him loping ...
He-Man and Hopscotch
We played He-Man and Hopscotch
one tomboy
one ballerina
both grass knee stained
and Marmite mouthed
by the end of the day
at Christine’s house
always so well ...
I Know a Place in Africa
I know a place in Africa
Where I can feel the sun on my back
And the sand between my barefoot toes
Where I can hear the gulls on ...
Housewifery by Isobel Dixon
My walls grow fur, plush velveteen.
Come, brush your palms down my lush passageway.
The fridge hums greenly. Om. A ...
Song by Siddhartha Bose
I have tied—firmly—my girl to
Stumps of iron, with
Rope of stone.
I keep her at home, feeding
Chewed bits—massacres—of
Lamb gut,
Fox eyes,
Duck ...
London in Peace
The sunshine slaps my shadow across Hanbury Street.
There’s a skip to my step as the latest old song
Grabs me by the ears and snogs me hard
And London ...
Snow by Louis MacNeice
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we ...
A wikinquisitor writes his memoirs
We’d seen heavy trolling near the capital,
disruptive sockpuppets jumping patrols.
Grandma and ShriGanesh were blocked as sockpuppets of Kolabare,
who’d been blocked as a puppetmaster back in 2.0.
Rouge ...
A Brief History of Combat Simulation by Ross Sutherland
Standing in front of the bay windows
of my crisply vectored apartment
wearing a promotional tee-shirt
I got free from a box manufacturing company,
looking out ...
An extract from Glyn Maxwell’s poem “Liberty”
It is July 1793, just before the Terror.
Rose, an actress at the Theatre Nationale, recognizes Maurice, a former aristocrat who now makes a living doing puppet shows in the street. ...
If Picabia Had Spun Above Zelażna Street by Ben Borek
… to be sung
Oh you maddened machine
no your face isn’t clean
in the traffic soot breeze-
you’re a relic
And the dirt on your ...
Scratch a Liberal by Richard Tyrone-Jones
They say, ‘Scratch a liberal, you’ll find a fascist’.
But scratch a fascist, you’ll find a communist;
scratch a communist, you’ll find an anarchist;
scratch an anarchist, you’ll ...