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

Interview

September 2012

Interview with Michael Hansmeyer

Lawrence Lek

Interview

September 2012

Every project made with a computer expresses a relationship between aesthetics and technology. The historical progress of technology works...

feature

June 2012

Nothing Here Now But The Recordings: Listening to William Burroughs

Charlie Fox

feature

June 2012

About a month ago I was in Berlin. Every night I had a very strange dream. I was watching...

Art

June 2014

Opus

Charmian Griffin

Amanda Loomes

Art

June 2014

Bound with animal fat, milk, or blood, Roman concrete is hardened over time. Less water would ordinarily mean a...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required