"this is sixth form poetry, not Keats or Yeats"
Beneath cloudy, frigid skies outcrops of fertilised laughter glare knowingly from sneering seas; their steady retreat stained by the crooked smile of those who know the joke, has gone too far. We trace lines in the filth, dowsing for patterns in droppings; faces contorted to manic snarls. Monochromatic waves ripple …
Your translucent skin Gasps gently for breath In the Land of the Noonday Sun; A mountainous vista Unexpectedly replaced With Ziploc bags and Moist paper towels As you travel to Transparent incubators To be fed a diet of Crickets, Humidity, And rising temperatures. Beneath a harsh and Artificial sun …
On the night that Titus fell His night nest was not empty, Not empty, but silent. His body still warm, Still warm to receive The procession of still warmer bodies Come to bear witness to what had Fallen. First comes Umushikirano, He beats his chest and begins to Shake …
Across the vibrant reefs you snake and crawl, In search of shelter from an unseen threat; The shadows write their names in salty scrawl, Your body intertwined in blind duet. You see the world without a lens or eye, As veiled photoreceptors help you scry; Your skin a dense …
Besides the tranquil sea and sun-bleached sand, The turtles find a place to make their nest; Probing the rolling crescents of the land, To find a place where incubation’s best. Now buried like a golf ball in a dune, The eggs begin to undergo great change; To their surroundings they …
We rip apart the Earth on which we stand, Try tame the wild for all that we have planned; Now caught up in our thoughts and ‘expertise,’ Expose ourselves to buried-deep disease. The virus is unmindful of our scheme, And flows between the species like a stream; We cut …
Your pearly whites gleam in the midday sun, But soon your eyes will close and you will sleep; There will be no dreams behind your eyelids, Only the cool steel of the artist’s knife. A coffee-stained sheet of yellow paper In a forgotten filing cabinet Tells us that you are …
The oceans are awash with our debris, As plastics from our lives flow down the drain And travel down hewn channels to the sea, Where laced with man-made poisons they remain. Through plankton they leach into the food chain, As fish consume this fouled and tainted meal; The plastics then …
You prowl and sniff the air around your pack, With outsized ears you wear just like a crown Atop a cloak of matted, mottled brown; The silence summons heckles on your back. You take the centre stage for your attack, And outline plans to raid the nearest town; You …
Balanced on a rock Orange sneezeweed in your mouth; You drop in the heat. This is a Haiku, inspired by recent research which has found climate change responsible for the local extinction of the American pika from California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The American pika is a small mammal adapted to …