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

January 2016

Good People

Nir Baram

TR. Jeffrey Green

fiction

January 2016

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the...

poetry

December 2016

Three Poems

Adelaide Docx

poetry

December 2016

ADVICE FROM BENJO CORTEZ GALLERY OWNER, CHELSEA THE RED CAT, NEW YORK, 2AM    When I feel something It...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Vanessa Place

Kyoo Lee

Jacob Bromberg

Interview

October 2014

Vanessa Place is widely considered to be one of the figureheads of contemporary conceptual poetry, yet while books such...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required