First dream in a new house

January 17, 2026January 17, 2026 / Wezzlehead / Leave a comment

Admittedly, I have not had it yet.

That particular night – that sleep –

still has miles to go. But I can hold it,

the way a bed, its army of pillows,

might hold me, cradled in a soft shell,

carried safe and low in their hands.

The dark will be absolute but for

the map of stars, scattered histories

above my head. All will be pristine,

the past muted, its anguishes still.

There will be no endless fallings

through emptiness, no loss of teeth,

nor hair, nor anything like reason,

though I will forget what reason is.

And I will be woken, a whole night older

and no more, eyes attuned to the

plush light of morning, by a queue

of tiny birds waiting at the window,

breezing their wingtips over the panes.

first published in Ariel Chart, 2018

First Overseas Christmas

December 22, 2025 / Wezzlehead / 4 Comments

In fact, there is no Christmas here. No baubles, no tree.
No threadbare dilemma. The usually shaking streets,
the lush roadsides, twitch like the first morning of a war.
Here, they live as close to death as birth, dare you to spot
the difference, celebrating both with noise and colour, no
silent night. Even the intolerable guests are invited.

It makes me miss you, from a distance, whoever you are.
Boarding a largely empty train this evening, bound for
a range of deserts, physical and personal, I find myself
clutching the place where I’m told my heart is, or should be
anyway. And I lie across the wooden seats of my carriage,
cold in spite of latitude, sink into once-abandoned longings.

first published in Dodging The Rain, December 2020

Stars

December 4, 2025December 12, 2025 / Wezzlehead / 6 Comments

By December, the sycamore leaves have fallen,

gathering ankle-deep at the edges of his grave.

On Christmas morning she’ll sweep them all away,

and into a harmless pillow over by the kissing gate,

between the staring yews, blurred with poisoned fruits.

The newer stones slotted around and about his,

with their black angles and gold italic lettering,

will have been sprayed with plastic bouquets of

incongruous pinks and yellows, grinning awkwardly

through the frost, like hopeful boys at the school dance.

Counting the melted-away years is a futile game.

Instead, she’ll scrub a season’s beard of moss

from the dirty marble, and trim the tufts of grass left

behind by the council mower. In the soil below, the worms

are turning everybody into stars, one by precious one.

first published in The High Window, 2017

Airport Run

November 16, 2025December 12, 2025 / Wezzlehead / 2 Comments

Dawn lifts a timid, disapproving eye
behind us as we head west.

In the seat beside you, he is already
fidgeting, stick-limbed, arachnid.

The night will have been ghost-ridden.
The radio creaks pointlessly, too quiet

to be heard above the discord of
engine, tyre-tread and wiper-blade.

For once his returning is relatively
cloud-free, yet still I can see the sky

between you – its weather systems –
interpret the signs. At this hour,

the road remains empty all the way in,
commuters still cold under their showers,

breakfasts undisclosed. Like it’s the thing
we’d planned all along, you steer the car

past the exit marked Drop-off, swing us,
without a murmur, towards Short Stay.

original version first published in Sleet Magazine, 2018

Towards the end of our knowing one another

January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 / Wezzlehead / 6 Comments

Towards the end of our knowing one another

that infamous whisky-hour conversation ceased

its looping flight and fell from out of the clouds,

becoming more a string of painful retreats

from the same old mountain, with no guide

to navigate a way between the boulders,

the only choice to keep on going down.

But then I remember you telling me how

you always really preferred the plateau,

the big-sky possibility of the high moors

or the wide-open silence of the desert,

with the comfort of its horizons. How it

bathed you in a bottomless pool of space.

Where did it all disappear to? The quiet

sine-wave of your voice circling my ear?

Sharing your untold versions of the darkness,

pointing them with the tired light of our stars?

first published in Cacti Fur, 2020

Holly

December 25, 2020December 28, 2020 / Wezzlehead / 4 Comments

Best wishes for the festive season.

Holly

All this time cowed in shadows,
stunted and contained, or else

straggling desperately through gaps,
her thick-set leaves have become

as dark as the longest night, and
glossed well beyond necessity.

Each has grown a ready fist of teeth,
defending her hard, blood-blister fruits.

first published in Northampton Poetry Review, 2018

Holocene

December 15, 2020December 16, 2020 / Wezzlehead / Leave a comment

Holocene

The shoreline has no recollection of the ice;
only the genetic memory of suffocation, smothering,

of cold, silent fingers playing at the clay of the Earth,
sundering rocks. There are only echoes, hearsay,

the whisper of older waters – receded, replenished –
forests, hills, a whole continent swallowed below.

Becoming a pixel in the image, a word of the story,
I press footmarks through a knotted dunescape

to arrive, human, upon it, eyes finally registering
only in the present tense, shouldering my own tide.

first published in Amethyst Review, 2020

Oxalis corniculata var. atropurpurea

October 20, 2020 / Wezzlehead / Leave a comment

Oxalis corniculata var. atropurpurea

Trying to put a solid name to every colour

you think you can see in those posies

of three-hearted leaves, you scribble down

a recipe calling for Verdigris, a spool of

old-style camera film, liver (both cooked

and uncooked), the persistent stain left

by berries on your fingers in late summer.

And all the while they are taking over

your world, starting – naturally – at the

front doorstep before flouncing off at

right angles towards the alley, the off-white

cones of their roots somehow deriving

sustenance from its mortar, slowly working

loose the mass of its hundred year stone.

first published in Envoi, 2018

Lobster tail

July 3, 2020November 28, 2020 / Wezzlehead / 2 Comments

dav

Lobster tail

Uncommon to find such a thing up here,
beyond the exhausted seaweed,
vacated mussel shells and limp
trawlermen’s gloves in bleached out
blue or yellow rubber, their fingers
often present if somewhat perished;
but there it was, cradled among the
whirled nests of withered marram
woven untidily through a scalp
of sutured pebbles. Time had melted
flesh away, revealing the miracle
of its engineering, in segments
and articulations, a suit of armour
still functioning in our snow-bitten,
astonished fingers, as we prowled
the empty shore, pleased to find
such a simple gift, today of all days.

original version published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, 2018