“Ulster, Gaza, Vietnam/were anthems beyond all words:/the world played tunes unknown/to us. We all stopped singing.”

“There’s me & the pizza,/a mournful tenderness shared/between devourer & devoured.”

“I count meself lucky. Me disposition allows is to laugh at how the landscape colours me illusions of life and me place within it. How I use them to interpret faulted interactions and what it felt like when he jumped into nothing.”

“What I often find as I make my way through the year in books is that I am prone to zig-zagging between different styles and genres. I couldn’t imagine reading the same type of book all year, even if I adored that particular type.”

“a door slams,/and I beg the world for something—anything—more than this.”

“The treacle trees started appearing a few months after the mine dried up and whilst people would sometimes stumble on them by chance, my Dad was the only one who could sniff them out at will.”

“What is wrong with you? Why are you like this? you demanded silently of your smudge of a reflection, but it didn’t answer. It just stood there, indistinct and wholly uninteresting.”

“I watch as my mom leaves the shell in the sand /draws her mole bitten arms to herself in the water wading now /a string /of dark red wrapping down her thigh and into the foam”

“Suzy’s weekday life was work and friends but every evening, she would go home and wait till ten o’clock. Savouring the waiting, she told me, before lifting the receiver to make her call.”

“It must have been made worse though,/having to fight your way through/those corridors clogged with/bullshitters and grifters/with the same depth as the mirror pools/outside their private schools.”

“It was a normal Tuesday night, not long past dinnertime, when the man-next-door slammed the woman-next-door’s head through the wall”

“above him the unending star of Tesco, the/moon over Tesco;/flashes of sheet lightning that broke/the week’s heatwave ”

“here is madness, and respite/
browns and greys and greens that stain/cold-frothed foam and tangled seaweed”

“But, alas, alack, your massive, yearning, ravenous lack: a stamp is only 34 cents and your pen is on fire and your heart is already bleeding not for Lyla but for the ledge she represents and the world you imagine blooming and ripe just beyond”

“You can be sat looking fully and utterly dead on a London train and everyone will have the good grace to leave you alone.”

“Abel’s life has deposited him at Campland. Life, anyway. He isn’t sure if it’s his, if he must own it. He’s forty. Broke. Lives in his car. Who’d want to own that? Who’s culpable?”

“Just because something is beautiful/doesn’t mean it should be yours”

“Only the sea matters, heavy/with conspicuous lack of passion.”