My parents leaving, guilty-faced, me in my far corner bed, puzzled revulsion at blood-stained sheets right where my head would rest.  Long, high room, distant door, dirty cream walls and total lack of knowing what I was doing there (‘not in front of the children’).

Only solace  – and small delight – the view from the two-storey tall windows…

I remember decorating the tree with dad, always a noble pine because the thickness of the branches and the wide spacing was more conducive to the types of ornaments we’d like to use. 

We used the same ornaments as people all across the country used, glass spheres the color of the season, swirls of decorative glitter that always seemed to slough off a little more each year.

I remember spreading the glitter around the tips of my fingers and holding…

The summer I was eight, Pam and I spent a couple of days thinking up words for lipstick colours.   (Yeah, I know - but eight is young!)   I ruled a sheet of foolscap paper into five columns and fifteen or so rows, so as to write them all down.

We didn’t fill the sheet – reached forty-two or -three in total.   Most of them I contributed – Pam (whose…

All we have been is now memory, and what we will be  hasn't happened yet.

The now we stand on is a small painted turtle, moving unsteadily into the future.

To consider your own past as having no relevance is to deny your entire…

We found what was left of the golden retriever shrouded in tall weeds along a vacant stretch of road. He had a length of chain and a padlock where a collar and tags should've been, and the skin beneath it had worn away the fastest. That we didn't know his name stuck with me that night worse than the sight of the larvae sustaining themselves on his stench. We pulled up fistfulls of clover and dandilions and said a prayer as we covered his matted fur. But we left a clear place around his nose.…

I remember sitting on my Grandad’s lap watching my two-years-younger brother take his first steps, backlit at the end of the hall by the light from the small window beside the front door.

So small an area, that hall, so strongly influential, so readily recollected, was papered halfway up with bumpy brown and shiny anaglypta.

Above was cream and hung with English hunting prints,  the startling scarlet of their coats buried deep in my…

I remember, having woken in the night and gone downstairs to interrupt an evening meal, the hardness of my mother’s face as she said, in front of my grandparents, my aunt and my father ‘Why should I cuddle you?   You said you didn’t love me anymore.’*

I remember the surprised delight, …

Late that evening, I found him at the kitchen table, a glass of Jim Beam poured, the dishes pushed to the side in a jumbled pile. A single burner on the stove glowed red, but no pot or pan sat on it.

"Kyle?" I asked, turning off the stove and pulling out a chair for myself, taking inventory of the knives close at hand, but not sure why.

He was deep in concentration, eyes focused on a point of great importance, a gaze I would imagine a sailor holds as he steers towards shore but…

He had a penchant for pale purple shirts.  ‘Lilac’ maybe, or the longer-drawled, elderly ‘mauve’,…

The heartless, hand-rubbing man had, on my arrival in the four-times-as-wide-as-narrow room, told me to sit at a desk which overlooked the inner court of this soot-edged red brick octagonal building, my back to the double entrance doors and the right hand door by which he came and went far distant.   Handing me a list of letters to type he said “Put stamps only on the out-of-town addresses, the local ones will be delivered by…

I’d succeeded, poorly, with the shorthand typing but failed the OND in Business Studies because we so terrorised the brand new Economic Geography teacher that he took his revenge by failing the lot of us, (history does not record whether he failed in his career as a result).   I’d earned opprobrium by announcing my next step would be marriage – then I…

Eleven months ago I woke so happy that I wrote a poem, using the very nice word 'fornicating'. 

It began ‘Last night I dreamt I had hip bones again. angular, skin-piercing, teenage taut.’

I put it down to watching lots of thrusting rugby thighs.

This month I find myself remembering his hip-bones. The flatness of his belly.

Put it down, almost, to self-deception, that it was ever thus.

The man that sat across from Leslie on the train was ordinary in nearly every way except he smelt amazing. She caught a whiff of him as he squeezed past her in the confined space of the carriage, the aroma was spicy. She searched through her memories to try and place the smell, was it cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice or a masala. Leslie could taste it but her palate was too inexperienced, as he stood to leave she tried to smell him again and felt foolish.  The smell haunted her all…

In the middle of the night, the passing window on a dark train of thought etches lightning on glass, snapshots flashing.

In the middle of the night, the passing window on a dark train of thought stares down into dark water, no life savior to save me.

In the middle of the night, the passing window on a dark train of thought traces my shadow in the corner, my crime now forgotten.

In the middle of the night, the passing window on a dark train of…

You're lying naked on the bed, head tucked into your body pillow. I can smell you. It's an aroma I can't describe, but it's undeniably you. Don't move. I want to take this in; your body, your scent, your sweaty mop of chestnut brown hair, the fingers of sunlight poking through the bedroom curtains, the dull hum of the oscillating fan, the gurgles of the cat snoring under the bed, the way you twitch and mumble to yourself as you slowly drift off to sleep - all of it. Grant me just this one…

There was this accident, you see. In the dark night, in the car, everything and everyone is shadow. On the front seat, the adults’ silhouette, lit only by passing cars, radio and the moon. I lean lazy against the cold window as the outside flows away rushing us towards home - my lids sink heavy and I drift toward my own bed. Opening my eyes, the car is idling; my father is gone and my mother breathes a hush. In…

Found this photograph loose in the back of an album.  

Written on the back ‘Scapa Haven Oct. 1997, Sunday lunch.’   

Taken thirteen years ago in a house we no longer own.  

Table, chair,  jug and jar (with brushes ) we still have.

No idea where the painting is, my…