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

Art

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

poetry

Issue No. 17

Winter Diary

Galina Rymbu

TR. Joan Brooks

poetry

Issue No. 17

who bravely blasts their breath through the horn flares of gloomy streets, into dripping construction trailers, dropped by the...

Art

February 2012

Awst & Walther: A Lexicon of Questions

Francesca Gavin

Art

February 2012

Awst & Walther are a husband and wife team who create multi-disciplinary art works which range from building a...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required