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

July 2015

Agata's Machine

Camilla Grudova

fiction

July 2015

Agata and I were both eleven years old when she first introduced me to her machine. We were in...

feature

September 2014

Paris at Night

Matthew Beaumont

feature

September 2014

The picturesque lightshow that, once the sun has set, takes place on the hour, every hour, when the Eiffel...

poetry

May 2013

Flatlands

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Horses and geese in a sodden field. Solitaries with luggage on a wet platform. Postage-stamp house on a bit...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required