PUBLICATION NEWS

 My poem,  'Now You Are Old', came third in the Fosseway Writers' Poetry Competition 2025, and another poem I entered, 'A Funny Turn',  was Highly Commended. The theme of the competition was 'absence'.

Now you are old

Now you are old, he can see the vacant

hollow in your mind, where chemicals

once leapt across synapses, each thought

an electric eagerness. But now,

though restlessness still shambles 

through your senses, the world

cannot stick in that lost space.

Act, respond, remember – all washed up

like froth on listless waves.

 

You can’t recall the siren pain that

brought you here, imprisoned you in A & E

for eighteen hours, laid you on an unfamiliar

bed, inside the empty tangle of an

unknown room. ‘I didn’t know I had Covis,’

you say, voice faltering with surprise

on the mobile phone. ‘It’s Covid, mum,

and it’s me who has it. You have gall-stones.

Don’t you remember?’

 

But the events of two nights ago

are lost in the abandoned streets

of that derelict place, cracked

webby windowpanes, the bones

of dusty rooms and doorways

like open mouths in roofless buildings.

Untethered notions drift and fall,

make random links before they lose their hold

and float off, rudderless.

 

He perseveres, picks at the knot

of your mind till your thoughts unspool,

a grappling hook caught on an outcrop

of memory, but always there’s the sudden

collapse into broken threads,

deformity of misaligned ideas that shape

your baffling world. The absent place

where dreams no longer pounce and pace,

now you are old. 

 

A Funny Turn

 

The first time was late August,

leaves yet to fall but hips and haws

glowed hot and red as garnets

in the greenery. I was on the gravel path

that leads down to the dam, slipping

purple sloes into a plastic zip-lock bag.

 

It always starts with light, as if the sun –

shadow-slanting through the maize behind me –

had slid inside my brain, fizzing my thoughts

like soda. A tremble in my legs, warm air

like Marilyn above an underpass,

hands fluttering like crazed birds.

 

And as I fell, that first time, a rook

surged upwards from behind the blackthorn

hedge – rising and rising, into the blue,

followed by another and another, till the sky

was a whiteboard filled with ticks,

growing smaller, higher, sheering off

 

-    -  a Disney mist – towards the lake.

I can hear their rattle and rush –

before the absence, when the world retreats.

Birds fill my vision with a blackness

like closed lids. And next, a voice – ‘Are you ok? –

brush of a stranger’s fingers on my face.

 

I didn’t know, had no idea of where I’d been

or who I was. Not even sure of what

I was, as my brain rebooted. Was I grass

or air or a bird’s wing cutting through the clouds?   

I tried to move, felt bruised, abraded by the gravel

that dug its tiny fingers through my clothes.

 

There was a rush of smells, green and sharp –

and the sound of the ground too close to my ears.

‘You’ve had a funny turn,’ some woman’s voice

explained. Later, when it became a thing

I was, rather than a thing I had, it was an ‘episode’,

once petit-mal but now ‘an absence’.

 

I think now of the first time I withdrew,

that first undisciplined retreat. In sleep, dreams,

faints, you go somewhere – but I went nowhere,

and its sky was filled with wings.

 

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