share


Bacon’s Friends

Always got caught out by their shadows:

Stuck to their soles like monkeys on trapezes,

Cellophane fortune tellers curling on palms,

Squashed black jelly babies.  Naïve beside his

 

Cunning swirls: ugly blobs leaking like ink

Out of the cages that held their likenesses.

Glimpsed through cheeks or at the back

Of yawning, unravelled mouths.

 

Keep looking at the shadows, the shadows

That try to love their creator

While their doubles shave obscenely

Or choose stubbornly to read the newspapers.

 

 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

has published poetry, short stories, critical essays and travel writing in magazines in the UK and internationally.  He was runner-up in the Elmet Foundation Ted Hughes Poetry Prize. His work appears on the Poetry Library archive, for which he has made recordings.

READ NEXT

fiction

March 2017

Slogans

Maria Sudayeva

TR. Antoine Volodine

TR. Jeffrey Zuckerman

fiction

March 2017

A Few Words on Maria Sudayeva   Slogans is a strange, extraordinary book: it describes a universe of total...

poetry

December 2011

The Pitch

Minashita Kiriu

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

Dripping excitedly from my earlobes And falling over my crowded routines A rain of Lucretius’ atoms Is just beginning...

poetry

January 2012

Mount Avila

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘el techo de la ballena’   Time to be climbing out of time as the wild city rates it,...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required