In The Poetry

Su Tung P’o is a figure who moves me deeply. In a few more years he’ll be a thousand years old. A great Chinese poet – he was a designer of gardens in Imperial China. Now the great thing about Su Tung P’o is he not only wrote these pastoral poems and loved to design [...]

You’re Beautiful

because you’re classically trained.
I’m ugly because I associate piano wire with strangulation.

You’re beautiful because you stop to read the cards in newsagents’ windows
about lost cats and missing dogs.
I’m ugly because of what I did to that jellyfish with a lolly-stick and a big stone.

You’re beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not a marketing
[...]

Little Elegy

But now that I am used to pain,
Its knuckles in my mouth the same
Today as yesterday, the cause
As clear-obscure as who’s to blame,

A fascination with the flaws
Sets in – the plundered heart, the pause
Between those earnest, oversold
Liberties that took like laws.

What should have been I never told,
Afraid of outbursts you’d withhold.
Why are desires something [...]