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  • Wokingham to Sutton

    old police station
    hollyhocks lean through the railings

    double rainbow –
    a childminder wonders
    when it will end

    space hopping
    Canadian professor
    wrong to ask

    cough remedy
    in the river current
    or just the box

    cabins near Feltham
    daffodils arraigned –
    what’s the plan

    summer fair
    bouncy castle
    by the cemetery

    two month old
    daily sudoku –
    a woman stares

    old Mortlake
    war graves
    endless rubble

    writing ‘graves’
    my pen wobbles
    with the train

    tower blocks
    tell us thirteen minutes
    to somewhere else

    shunter’s yard
    trains lined up
    going nowhere fast

    mind the gap
    between the phone
    and your nodding head

    where are you going –
    your spaniel will never know
    West Croydon

    financial instruments
    given equal billing
    to Wandsworth Common

    air conditioned train –
    he lost his social battery

    Wimbledon’s plateau –
    the drooping life
    of delphiniums

    Sutton station –
    I’ll be there
    in John’s grey jag

    Mitcham Eastfields
    cameras for your safety –
    who wears a crown?

    purple flowers
    by a well –
    one up
    one down

    Mitcham golf club
    can you survive the cut
    cabbage-white sands

    August 3, 2026
    #train #haiku

  • Dark Matter Chronicles

    As I leave, I lock the door against last year,
    see a red kite unmobbed above the poplar.
    It’s as if all we have are still lives’
    shallow depressions in a web who knows who
    draped across contours between moons,
    unknown time and gravity ditches’
    dark matter chronicles, anti-force
    plugholes, tunnels, vacuums and voids
    in which the Great Unknowing
    here and now morphs into unbecoming.
    The final outcome, destiny implosion,
    all meaning folded or scrunched like paper
    for recycling. Then repurposed souls
    will drift through celestial apocalypse
    outposts of the inhuman or stop, stuck like limpets
    shuffling on a scrap of debris in the dark.

    August 3, 2026
    Poetry, soulrecycling, space

  • Erftstadt Court

    A thoroughfare, a place for passing through
    but the brickwork underfoot is calming,
    matching the walls: differing levels, curving walkways.
    Hanging baskets always seem a ruse
    to spruce up toxins with myriad flowers
    corralled into neat gatherings
    as if to say the luxury of time
    extends to this civilised blooming
    while you step across broken pottery
    and dried formations of weeds by a network of webs
    a spider left. That downward curve again,
    outstanding for skateboards, scooters
    or an easy pause for the unfulfilled.
    Across from the baskets, heraldry of towns’
    true honour to join German and English
    in civic partnership, albeit in this place to zoom through
    or hold hands with a brave and tentative child
    briefly eye to eye on a narrow wall

    August 3, 2026
    Bricks, Erftstadt, LassitersZoneWokingham, Poetry

  • Larry Gopnik’s Depth Charge

    When you wrote, you submerged metaphors
    far too deep for readers to pick up
    and even a fleet of interpretive submarines
    foundered on the rhythm of surface waves.

    Your depth-charge ruined prospects
    of underwater hermeneutic archaeology:
    whatever that is.

    The big point, central purpose, eventual finding –
    all was lost in the process of articulation.

    There was a quest, a pilgrimage
    like the one to Rabbi Marshak
    who sat in silence in A Serious Man

    after Rabbi Nachtner’s orthodontic parables
    fell decidedly flat and Larry moved on.


    June 17, 2026
    A Serious Man, Coen Brothers, Meaning, Poetry, Search for meaning, Submarines

  • Poetry Sampler (Short)

    Please note ‘Accessibility View’ (3 dots top right once the link is accessed) is the correct format for this little word/image collage thing:

    https://sway.cloud.microsoft/q2VxTltad3mSkWuI?ref=Link&loc=play

    Contents

    Under the Radio (extract)
    Winta’s Island
    Away from Imber Court (extract)
    Palace Sunrise (extract)
    North Sea Island Pitches
    St Patrick’s Stream (extract)
    A Welcome in the Flatlands (extract)
    Angels of Wallasey (extract)

    June 9, 2026

  • Leaf Blowers

    See the leaf blowers by the Cornerstone:
    leaves and dust, a brief step back
    as if new combinations of air and sound
    were a threat to the slow-paced man
    in thin black jacket and white canvas cap.
    See the sign language rumination
    through ironies of dust blown from a cemetery
    to a leaf blower in a cocoon of sound
    conversing only through movement
    every passer-by thinks they understand.

    February 18, 2026

  • It Kicked in at Mytchett

    In a scuffle in the viewing gallery
    of a regional netball game in Southampton,
    whatever this temporal fug now is,
    it kicked in at Mytchett.

    At a standstill by the Basingstoke Canal
    at Rushmoor parkrun, the slowing down of time
    and will to survive kicked in at Mytchett.

    Have you seen the price of a coffee
    at Sutton Scotney – this ennui
    over a latte at the cost of a pint
    kicked in at Mytchett

    and through Yateley and Little Sandhurst
    I was transformed again
    by the renewing of the mind

    only to board the Cross Country railway.
    Wandering around Stoke Minster
    after a football away day
    and on to Planet Bollywood
    disorder returned; I couldn’t resist it
    emerging from a compost of faults –
    it kicked in at Mytchett.

    February 18, 2026
    Hampshire, Mytchett, parkrun, poem, Something starting, Stoke, Surrey, Surrey Heath

  • The Halfway Line on the Other Side

    The Halfway Line on the Other Side
    December 20, 2025

  • Tuns Lane Parakeets

    I’m very grateful to Ian Chung for including two of my poems in Eunoia Review. This one is set in Slough and is inspired by glimpses of parakeets on grey and drizzly morning drives. There is still no consensus as to how they got here…

    Tuns Lane Parakeets | Eunoia Review

    Tuns Lane Parakeets

    November 20, 2025

  • Charing Cross

    Poem published by Eunoia Review

    Huge thanks to Ian Chung for including two poems in Eunoia Review. This one is set in the area around Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith.

    Charing Cross | Eunoia Review

    Charing Cross

    November 20, 2025
    Charing Cross, Fulham, Hammersmith, Poetry

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