< 1 mn read This head of mine tells me stories Of predictable gloom, of past pain.So I have to trust my heart and itsSudden surge of feeling, whichCatches me unawares and racesTowards the smell of your familiarityAnd our conjoining.We are so entwined now that I amInconsolable without you near me.Can you feel this force field thatPulls us nearer, […]
< 1 mn read I’ve lost their latest questionnaire, along with its covering letter, thanking me for my previous entries which have informed their research so they could inform me of all the risks I have taken, based on my consumption of alcohol, twenty years of smoking and the size of my waistline. I remember filling it in; […]
< 1 mn read I could have been a prodigy if I’d grown up in Upper Saxony, in my father’s small town with big lakes and forests and seven aunts, all widowed in the war and eager to teach me to ski, langlauf and skate on ice by the age of three. But that would mean rewriting history. […]
< 1 mn read Always at the door, or tapping at the window, it calls: “Please let me in.” In kisses and poems, where unheard words write unsent letters, it calls out to me, from books that fall off shelves, opening at pages where phrases stand like a wink caught sideways on Goya’s Dona Isabel as she sways […]
< 1 mn read October had me thinking about dying. The specialist had dropped a few new words into my humdrum, day-to-day vocabulary, sharp, angular words like prostate, blood test and tumour. I waited as the days grew shorter, burned faster, turning for consolation to Alden Nowlan and Raymond Carver, poets who both died conscious at fifty, facing the […]
< 1 mn read have first kisses again in the way they only hint at what is possible with slow tongues that are sleepy, breathless with promise, and if I cannot reclaim the first whisper of silk stockings, of silk panties, the pulling on, the sliding off and feel my hair all wild again, snaking down my back, or […]
2 mn read All those nights of different lovers, thinking they wanted me because I was special, they fucked me because they wanted to stay. All that empty fucking that meant nothing and I thought it meant something real was about to happen, as if fucking itself wasn’t real at all. The night Dominic said I was aloof […]
< 1 mn read I’m not menopausal anymore I am bleeding again for now So it’s just been a temporary stop A foretaste of what is to come My age has reversed So it’s not always linear There are circles, U-turns and diversions Every now and then Age comes and goes In roundabout ways And for now I just […]
< 1 mn read I think yes, I have it. The pas de valse is slow but winning. And then she wants a pirouette in the mix and, in the room, I’m the tornado, dizzy and feeling like I’ve been caught stumbling in my underwear, a dipsomaniac on the sprung-wood floor. I know she won’t believe me when […]
2 mn read I’d felt as old and out of place as the Angus Steak House in Leicester Square, until fifty became the new forty, sixty became the new forty-five and my daughter Katie joked at her fortieth party, Gee dad, the way things are going you’ll soon be younger than me! I inwardly glowed with the glamour […]
