In The Poetry

When I first started publishing and performing my poems, I used to use the name Khan Singh Kumar, which is an assimilation of three religions of India.

Booking Khan Singh Kumar

Must I wear only masks that don’t sit for a Brit
Would you blush if I stripped from my native skin

Should I beat on my chest I’m [...]

This poem is called ‘From the Irish’. I was the eighth in my family – it was an Irish family – the first born in England, so I was the only one to that point who hadn’t been taught through the medium of Irish at school. So if my elder brothers and [...]

Razor

Carving this same face
out of soap, each morning
slightly less perfectly.

As a child my primary fantasy was living in the rain forest as an adult – I loved rain so much and I think it was an altogether sensual experience. I remember herding goose bumps sitting on my grandmother’s porch with a blanket and watching a storm approach and letting the chill go up my [...]

Essay on Snow

We have been here before, but not often.
With the blue snow lying on the shaded roofs
And the city beyond them
Lying open, miles of it, with no one there -

Untrodden parks and freezing underpasses.
The statuary anonymous, the cobbled chares
Like streams of blackened ice.
There is a bird somewhere. Its voice

Is like chipping an icicle,
Damping the [...]

On a Train

The book I’ve been reading
rests on my knee. You sleep.

It’s beautiful out there -
fields, little lakes and winter trees
in February sunlight,
every car park a shining mosaic.

Long, radiant minutes,
your hand in my hand,
still warm, still warm.

Don’t smile please

Since the primary school is next door
You can’t help passing the playground
But don’t you smile at the children
Whether a small girl or a little boy
Don’t you even look
You know what people will think
And you really can’t blame them.

What a world we live in! What went wrong?
If there’s another world to come
Let’s hope it’s [...]

Frost

Overnight, a giant spilt icing sugar on the ground,
He spilt it in the hedgerows, and the trees without a sound,
He made a wedding-cake of the haystack in the field,
He dredged the countryside and the grass was all concealed,
He sprinkled sugar on the roofs, in patches not too neat,
And in the morning when we woke, the [...]

The Plunge

Grace is the law of the descending movement.
[...]

This is the last of the ‘Wire Through the Heart’ poems – it’s called ‘Malenki Robot’ which in Russian, or rather in the Hungarian version of the Russian phrase, ‘malenki robot’ is ‘a little light work’. The Red Army rounded up about a tenth of the men and put them in camps for what they [...]