28.2 Degrees East of South

Mushroom dishes explode
a rash onto flat walls—
randomly sited, uniformly angled 

using a known azimuth and elevation,
taking precise aim at a distant god 
and into our daily waking dreams—

hyphae lead back into homes, tendrils 
that secrete enzymes—a mycelium 
of culture and world news and no news

in colour, movement, sound, story, 
breaking down the organic matter 
of our brains, of our resilience—

the flat-screen petri dishes supply 
bias as nutrients on glittering agar, 
entertaining us into powerlessness. 

First published by Barbara

Bone Stories

Capela dos Ossos, Evora, Portugal

After worms and soil of decay
had done their cleansing best,

skeletons and skulls were stacked
in foursquare patterns, iterations…

See the poem here:

The Lake - contemporary poetry webzine - Ben Bruges

My car’s brakes squeal of metal being ground,
an echo from when it was first cast by heavy plant.
The engine shudders to a halt I step out of;

the scent of rubber, petrol, the slammed door
disturb the shadow of the field I’d fled to:
each step steps deeper into the echo

of childhood. Through the five-barred gate,
I see the sub-station the board planted
among cow pats. Red zig-zags signs fastened

to gun-grey metal warn of volts, of danger,
and hook up a cacophony of light, machines, hot water -
distant for the moment. My ego hums like this burr

in on-going shakes: what am I doing here?
How do I connect? The questions spread
against distant barbed-wire boundaries.

Like the madness those too-large rabbits dance,
close to their warren’s safety, or thistles,
purple-strong, waving, rooted…

there’s no going back. This wheat reminds me
of child-dreams, but stalks and scratchy husks
can’t hide me any more,  and are cut,

threshed, processed in a chain I have no part of:
I just pay for the painted cardboard box I recycle
when empty. We can’t live rooted any more

and need that rush, that anomie,
those random rites the city does so well.
So all I glean is a clean breath,

a snatch of nature: and those flies, the field,
cows, this hawthorn bush, the sub-station
which were once so familiar, blur before my eyes

glimpsed through the car’s wet glass.

First published by The Cackling Kettle

The white car crossing the below-sea-level salt-marshes is full of Mahler.

The land was reclaimed a long time before cars and the road skips every so often around 90-degree corners and back and forwards over level crossings, so the driver has to concentrate. The road runs loosely parallel to a Napoleonic War-era defensive canal that was never needed, still isn’t, but is kept clear of weeds and the banks maintained. The salt-marsh lambs and hoggets are high quality and few around here can afford them, so they are butchered and shipped off to expensive restaurants in the capital. Along with a residential area further west and a nuclear power station further east, this area will be lost to the sea, perhaps within a decade, though if the Atlantic circular switches off it could be sooner. It’s on the list for being too expensive to defend, or, rather, not on the list to defend. Out at sea a large wind power array might also end up drowned.

The youngest knows the 9th well, and skips through the Spotify progress bar expertly, playing themes, explaining the pattern of the movements, and places it within musical history and within the understandable trepidation and superstition composers after Beethoven approached their 9th symphonies. He points out an oboe solo as it comes up to please his father, driving, who played the instrument many decades ago.

They are looking forward to seeing Simon Rattle’s farewell performance of the symphony at the BBC Prom in a week, and a car at dusk on a long journey is probably the only way the three of them would be in the same place long enough to concentrate on the same piece of music for any length of time. The driver wonders if it would be possible to sum up Mahler’s specific harmony, more than than it’s tonal and late-Romantic, but doesn’t know how to frame the thought so says nothing. The mother has been traumatised by riding in the driver position down fast French autoroutes too close to the central reservation for her liking, and grounds herself by writing a shopping list, which she knows she would end up writing anyway. The son explains that the middle two movements are faster than is typical, as a balance to the fourth, which is unusually slow and dirge-like. He finds the bit in the third where the sole theme of the fourth is prefigured. He declines to play the fourth, claiming that’s enough with the spoilers.

The son has been reading Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and his mother, Dante’s Inferno. Her partner can’t quite believe she’s reading it for pleasure - for a second time it turns out - and suggests that the two of them are right boffins. But then he acknowledges that he’s reading Chekhov’s short stories on his sister’s recommendation, so maybe he is too. The mum points out that the Inferno was written earlier than you’d think, in the 14th century, and the son muses that it’s around the same time as Machaut, who was also startlingly advanced for his age.

On the back seat next to the son, his friend is in the middle of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which the rest have also read and liked. The father had taken part in a online discussion of the answer to the question of the meaning of life recently, and objected to the riddle being “solved” by knowing that 42 is the ASCII code for asterix, aka, nerd-talk for ‘whatever you want something to mean’ or ‘this stands in for whatever’, which, sure, would have tickled Adams, but is not the ‘meaning’ of the answer. He thinks that the answer to the ‘what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything’ question is intentionally a nonsense / funny / pointless / disappointing answer, that yes, may also be recursive, but Adams would have known that most readers, even those reading Hitchhickers wouldn’t have known the ASCII code, so would have been as let down, amused and mystified as everyone else, and that maybe you need to know how to frame questions to get meaningful answers, that could have been his point.

Earlier, the car was full of J Diller. For different reasons, the parents don’t much like J Diller, while the son thinks he’s the world’s best hip hop / EDM / left-field producer, by far. The mother dislikes many of the sounds used, thinks it has dated badly and dislikes the absence of a coherent rap. The father thinks that it’s like listening to a scrapbook or a mood board, rather than completed pieces of music. He likes the samples and everything that goes into the mix, but sees no shape or development in them. So maybe they agree more than they think. The son’s friend was napping, but would probably also agree, as he has more mainstream hip hop tastes and likes to rap along word-perfect to an impressive number of tracks. The son is Bluetooth DJ, so when the father says he’s getting bored of J Diller, DJ Son switches to Alt-J.

Alt-J are a favourite of all three. It’s not known what the friend thinks, as he is asleep. But something about the juxtaposition with J Diller does something to Alt-J for the father. The contrast emphasises the pedestrian mid-tempo pace of most of the songs, the limited tone-pallette, the singular voice and choir-like backing voices and the straight-performance aspect of the band. But that passes after a while. The father slowly warms back into his usual delight in Alt-J. DJ Son skips the cover of House of the Rising Sun as the father had used it to edit a holiday video.

For the tail end of the journey, the son switches to a guitar piece that he’s in the middle of learning. The friend is woken up to be ready to be dropped off home, and to be told he does a good impression of the dormouse in Alice. The potholes tell them they are back in their coastal strip home town as they pass the closed-for-the-holidays secondary school, they all have strong and differently problematic connections to. The county doesn’t maintain the town’s roads as it should, as the town would never vote for the ruling Conservative party that runs the county, so there are no votes to be gained.

Around that time, three candles in Amiens Cathedral finally burn out. The father isn’t religious, but had lit them for three siblings who had died of cancer, possible medical negligence while sectioned, and alcoholism, respectively. They’d arrived there during a service for the Ascension, which meant that they didn’t have to pay the usual tourist entrance fee, and the place was heaving. The father took some surreptitious photos of the service, which didn’t work out, but then the service was over, and they could walk around freely. The father took a photo of a deeply sad woman praying in a Lady Chapel, wondering at the fact that the list of possible reasons for why she was sad could be so long, and so many of them likely caused by men.

More happily, a young girl with mixed ethnicity had brought her drawings, and her elegant white French granny helped her offer them to a different altar, then they re-joined Black granny in an impressively colourful print wrap-around African dress. The son noticed that a woman asked a chatting priest to bless something she was holding, and got the father to take a long-distance photo to find out what it was. They saw that it was money wrapped in cellophane. The mother joked about money laundering with God’s help.

The famous rose-stained glass window was boarded up for renovation. The north wing rose had a safety cloth strung underneath to stop bits of the roof falling and killing people, and, indeed, the roof generally looked like it needed some loving care. The father liked the way the sun shone through the cloth as it added a diffuse lighting effect. On the way out, he took a photo of a young couple looking admiringly at his partner, their eyes shining.

The father remembered earlier trips to France, where white and black seemed very separate, and there were many fewer ethnically mixed people. The congregation now, though, seemed much more mixed, happier and more at ease with itself, though wandering around Amiens afterwards, it was clear that unemployment and lack of purpose were a problem more for Black than white. That said, the service felt unifying and hopeful in the wake of the recent riots that had swept across France following the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel M, which had been enabled by making it legal to shoot dead drivers who refused to stop when instructed, a law that combined predictably badly with endemic racism within the police.

Outside, the father noticed a double window display in a closed shop that completely filled each with ruffled gold-leaf, as if a background for the missing products. He thought it would work well as a side-by-side square backdrop for the two boys to pose in front of. They pulled their best OG poses, which the son later checked with horror, as he thought that the friend may have pulled a white-supremacy hand sign by mistake - the one that the US alt-right had co-opted from the OK sign, but, with relief, realised he hadn’t done that. Even though it meant more walking around to find a boulangerie, the mother was supportive of the French way with bank holidays. Not only did they have more of them, but they ensured that they were honoured, and most people got the day off, unlike in the UK, where the habit was to go shopping for tat on bank holidays, which meant that most shop workers had to work, and most weren’t paid extra.

The previous day, Dormouse had lost his ball-cap in the tourist information part of the Thiepval Memorial to the missing of the grand guerre. It had the word MOIST across the front. The father did his valiant best using his terrible French on the two women behind the counter. He later realised he’d first asked them if they could help him find himself and then if they could sell him a cap with MOIST written across the front, which would have been a surprising item in the context. The cap wasn’t found. There’s probably little overlap between those who know the YouTube e-sports channel Moist Critical and those who might read this.

Because of the extent of wartime tunnelling, the foundations of the memorial had to be built a staggering 19 feet thick. An architectural critic said that a memorial building is the purest expression of architecture, as it has no practical function beyond expressing memorial meaning. They were all impressed by the memorial. It was strange that the Second World War hadn’t produced a similar level of memorialisation and hadn’t had as embedded a social impact as the First. As they drove away, the parents discussed historical theories about this, which they didn’t agree with. That the second was a delayed continuation of the first war, and that both were the final destruction of the feudal order by capitalism, much later than was usually considered. The shock of the first industrialised and mechanised mass killings was probably what was significant, they agreed. As well as the evident pointlessness of the slaughter.

The Ukraine war was continuing. It was hard to know whether that was a continuation since 2014, or was a new war. People generally ignored the Saudi Arabian slaughter in Yemen, the ongoing Syrian War, the re-take of Afghanistan by the Haqqani-Taliban, the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israel and the long list of US disastrous invasions that had deepened the Sunni-Shia conflicts across the Arab world. Libya remained a basket case. The father had lived and worked in Kabul, so he felt a deep connection to that tragedy and the failure of the world to evacuate those who would be tortured, harassed and executed by the Taliban, which caused a mental health crisis that he was now emerging from with the help of medication and therapy. As it happened, his sister had been born in Khartoum, so he felt a connection to the civil war then raging in the Sudan as well. All three of them were aware of all of those issues, as many were, and, like many, also had to ignore them to get through the day, however much they were a constant unspoken presence.

When they finally bumped up onto the pavement outside their house to offload bikes, bags and bottles, a nearly-naked runner ran around the car to avoid an open door so that he didn’t have to pause his run. His body was sleek with sweat. He was gone before the father was able to apologise for being in the way. His run and the road curved down towards the sea. The route would be shorter one day.

Later, the father’s insomnia kicked in. He didn’t have a great deal to look forward to. Money was precarious. Their effort was mainly put into supporting the son through university and on to, hopefully, a career in serious music. He wasn’t sure that they were typical, but their lives were not that much different from those around them. Their wages meant that they could afford a mortgage and to eat each month, not much more. The society they lived in was close to economic stagnation, food banks outnumbered McDonald’s restaurants, and they had no faith that the national or global political systems would be able to rise to the climate challenge.

Darkness turned slowly to light, as sleep evaded him. Somewhere outside, badgers, a couple of foxes and a hedgehog snuffled for titbits. The early birds of the dawn chorus started to sing. A red sky promised another clear day.

First published in The Memorist, Medium

Smalltime

Smalltime

is blown through
and through
the trees
dancing

to see the sodden
blackbough shaking off
glow-red leaves to
revealself

true
in curving and
branching estatic
my smallson is

the windwhirl
running Daddy I jumping
I going up
ing fall-oving

blown through
the trees
dancing
smalltime is

First published in Write Under the Moon

I’ve been reading and responding to writers, journalists, scriptwriters, poets & students, for a lifetime. I am that holy grail.

Do you find nice platitudes help you? Your friends and family don’t know how to respond to a poem, or why they should. And they certainly aren’t going to be honest if something doesn’t work or seems off. It’s lovely to share your work and get praise from the closest people in your life. That’s great. I’m not knocking that, but you need more than that. That person is a beta reader.

A poetry beta reader reads your draft collection or individual poems from a fresh reader’s viewpoint, providing honest feedback on emotional impact, imagery clarity, rhythm flow, and overall resonance with your target audience. It’s a simple way to get unbiased input before finalising. They’ll flag confusing metaphors, suggest tighter phrasing, or highlight standout lines, helping refine your work into something sharper and more engaging for readers.

Here’s a simple way to start. Send me ten poems. Choose them in whatever way you think is most helpful to you. The ten most recent. The ten best. The ten you are most worried about. But ten of something.

If you are struggling to find ten of something, come back in a year. I want you to choose ten from among many. Not struggling to find ten. I want you to choose ten, in the sense that there’s more than ten to choose from.

Tell me how you chose that ten.

Send all ten to me, then tell me which five to ignore. Which is difficult, I know. There’s a reason for it, which I’ll happily go through with you.

A first read will tell me if we are a good fit or not. If not, there’s really no point in continuing as your beta reader, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t find a good fit with someone else, and good luck.

If we are, you then nominate one poem, and tell me why you chose that poem. I will try to match the reason with one of mine. So, for example, if you are pretty sure a poem is solid, really works well, has music and value, then I’ll find a poem of mine that I think the same about. If you chose a poem that you’re not sure about, then I’ll do the same.

We both write a response. And we exchange them at the same time, so that we haven’t read the other person’s response.

From your response, I learn what you think is useful and valuable in a response from a peer. And you become more self-aware about how to give and receive a response. And I get a useful response to my poem as well, of course.

I can suggest what a ‘response’ means to writers and beta readers, or you could search it. For example, beta readers may pose questions like these to evaluate a poem:

• Does the imagery feel fresh and vivid, or clichéd/overused?

• Is the emotional core clear and impactful—did it evoke the intended mood?

• Does the rhythm, line breaks, or form enhance the meaning, or disrupt it?

• Are there confusing ambiguities, plot-like gaps (if narrative), or weak phrasing?

• Which lines or stanzas shine and why; where does it lag or need cuts?

I then offer a beta reader’s service. I will respond to one submission per week. You can’t save them up, but you can skip the slot when not needed. The submission could be a poem. Or it could be ‘is this group of poems good to send to such and such magazine’? One per week.

I don’t need to do the hard sell about how useful this is and how much it would help your development as a writer. If you don’t realise how useful a beta reader would be to you, then you are probably not ready as a writer. I don’t mean me, necessarily; I just mean any beta readers. I just happen to be the one talking to you at the moment.

If you already have beta readers in your life (official or unofficial), congratulations, you don’t need me.

I’ve offered it as a service through Substack, so go ahead and try it out and see if it’s useful to you. If you decide not, then there’s no problem. You cancel whenever.

My promise is that I will speak as I see it, no flannel, no flattery, no holding back praise when needed, and both meanings of tough love. I think writing matters. And writers, rather than Writers, need support and love.

Thank you to Fragmented Voices for publishing this poem which celebrates recent working class history. Fragmented Voices chose the photo, but the actual block was huge - about as large as a person’s head.

A Gift of Anthracite

The block of shiny black carbon, among cards
on my mum’s mantelpiece, is losing meaning
as her memory and our collective spirit wane.

It’s never been lit, but is fired with significance:
digging it cost lives, destroyed families,
the union fought every step of the way;

the smell of eons, of compressed swamp,
peat crushed to unbearable pressures, endless
time spent unbidden between seams of rock.

The echo of the controlled explosion
and cut of diamond-tipped band saw,
the rattling ride on the travelator

carted to the surface, carded,
weighed and away. Miners shaped
this deep blackness that glitters still.

Was it on a second or third trip
that one of the striking miners
decided to lug it down south,

thinking to recognise her effort,
thinking she would appreciate
what others would find a strange gift

in thanks to the support group,
who knew it was a fight to the end—
a tribute, an emblem of struggle.

First published by Fragmented Voices

Delta Songs

Salt water came first before all. 
Heaven and earth did not yet exist: 
everything we know and everything 

we are or could be came from dividing 
sweet from salt, fresh from brackish,
the crucial distinction of delta peoples.

***

We crawled from sea, 
crafted through creatures,
our lineage a long salty tail.

***

The god of subterranean waters
the god of wisdom, of knowledge,
hides from us in undercurrents

in that dark place where we hold
our lungs closed as they compress;
we force ourselves against flotation,

away from where we breathe and love:
aliens among silver flashes and kelp.
Snatching truth like pearls we surface,

rising sleekly into light and air,
gasping, delighted, enriched.

***

We no longer belong in watered salt.
We left for the fresh, for the air, for the land. 

The land that is shrinking 
as the sea rises again 
to engulf humanity 
as the ice melts, 
the land over-run, 
its sweet salted.

***

The delta lands are the first endangered,
their outrage, their anger is righteous.
We forget the sea is a vengeful monster

and sweet water our sustenance. Just ask
delta people, the diviners of our future.
Just listen. They weep salt water.

First published in Write Under the Moon

Roundabout

Your toddler follows you, gripping you tightly
with her flying hair and shining eyes.
She loves the safe danger: her wild delight

echoes over tarmac, strained by diamond wire.
Using since thirteen, now it’s only
the livid green substitute you swallow,

and you’ve got your act together,
going places and keeping clean. The junk
is still on the walls; codes of youth:

the garish hieroglyphs speak of illicit joy,
adventure, or merely street paranoia
strutting showy. Your toddler notices,

she thinks the walls are dirty - bad boys,
mummy - but maybe later, decoded
teen attitude will become the prism

colouring her teen world. Then she’ll escape
from your shadow - out of your life,
or just out of it - and can you -

you with your stressed-thin life, cope
with the weird mess she may create
from new spice? And if it was a sin,

so destructive an evil, why did
you jack up? Any answers? No?
So how will you understand her?

And that is only motion sickness, right?
Because you’re trying so hard to do right,
and it’s a struggle, your throbbing veins

mock each day your daily effort.
And you remember her notes of anguish
and your guilt: the squalling scream

of pain from her crippling withdrawals
as she left your womb, already hooked.
But, when she looks up with her trusting eyes,

that possible hell-to-come seems remote.
She spins faster mummy! on the roundabout
flying wisps of hair and fresh laughter.

First published in The Cackling Kettle

‘The Orange Rose Literary Magazine’ sounds like the title of a book by Alexander McCall Smith, but is, in fact an online magazine who published my poem Ringing the Changes. I’ve always been fascinated by bell ringers and bell ringing, especially after reading The Nine Taylors (1934) by Dorothy L Sayers, which depends on an understanding of peals in order to solve the crime. The connection it has for me is with a group of poems about the nature of work, though I’m not sure whether it’s work or performance, or something else entirely.

Read the full poem here.

Thank you to the Orange Rose!

‘A Tissue of Lies’ was one of those ‘sparked by a moment’ things. I usually try to sit with my back to the wall so that I can see the main door of a café or restaurant. This time I hadn’t and wished I had.

Immediately some will have an instant recognition and others will be mystified. Why would that be important to you? If you have ever worked in some kind of danger zone, you’ll know why.

When I came back from working in Kabul I had to remember not to put up my hands for a pat-down as I entered my local supermarket, and had to get used to the fact that there were no guns around. I still have to remind myself that my work bag is just that. It’s not a ‘grab and go’ bag.

But which is the right attitude? Should we live assuming everything will always work out, that there is no threat?

The poem starts this way: 

A Tissue of Lies

The next punter is unlikely to wear a suicide vest,
won’t be a person-borne IED, unlikely to carry an AK,
or launch a complex attack for kidnap or death.

Eating with friends, back to the room, perfectly
at ease, mostly, a few times I wished my back
was to the wall, that I had clear sight of the door...

Read the full poem here.

Huge thanks to Authora Australis for publishing my poem Sharon’s Mouthful.

This poem developed from one word - obol. Around that one word a modern myth came unbidden. I should warn that it refers to the death of a mother in childbirth.

It starts like this:

Sharon’s Mouthful

In the aftermath, the doctor asked me 
if my hands were clean. I could only nod, 
still in shock. Nursing can be tough.  

The doctor said There’s something
here, something in the mouth, 
too tiny for my sausage fingers. 

It was that moment after birth, 
I’d just started her breathing, 
she was vulnerable and alone.

The mother was still, …

Have a read here.

I would love to know what you think of the poem. American writer Don Marquis said “Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” If that’s true of a whole book, imagine what posting a single poem is like! Help me by giving a response - whether praise, criticism, questions or recommending related poems of your own or others. And help all writers you come across. They largely do write for you, dear reader, as do I.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

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Talking English

Arlington, June 2024

The clanging animal carrier takes pig
to convert to pork, or maybe calf to veal.
We stand at the lychgate among nettles,

waiting for the road to clear, to resume
the deepening chatter of our writers’ circle
among bright objects of memory.

On this same road Saxons—
all organic swirls and filigree—
railed against the Norman invasion:

the killing, theft of land and liberty;
for their despised French ways,
and their berserker Viking past—

violence amplified by entitlement,
might clothed in a body of learning.
The story became that ‘they’ invaded ‘us’

but ‘we’ British are also them, and Celts,
and every admixture since. Without the clash
there would be no English—pidgin developing

into creole into full language with maybe
the world’s greatest word-hoard. That division
is carved within us, plays out in myriad forms,

with a twist of the mace and incarceration,
part identity, part politics, surviving in class wars,
culture wars, coded in accent and etymology.

We gather around the table to share
objects, stories, ideas, dreams, poems,
in a language leavened by ancient conflict.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion. It may be that it will develop into a private, secure and ‘non-published’ workshop space. Get in touch with how you think it should develop.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.