From the dead moths staccatoing
the sill – I count them still – now
at forty two and rising –

to the bra
black and ripped, on the floor,
beside the bed.

There was nature and there
was fun, this is art of the heart –
dead and gone, preserved, not for long.

I’ll miss you until the cows lay down
predicting rain,
after that, I’ll miss you again –

like trains should miss quaint drunks
on the line
but don’t.

I’ll miss you like a mole missing his
hole, flailing around
on hot concrete, blind, lost and useless.

I’ll miss you
until the pylons stop buzzing,
until the starlings fly when the electricity dies,

till blackout,
till infection,
till the end –

I’ll miss you
as well as I can.

---

Listen

This Is the One Thing We Didn’t Want to Happen (notes from End of the Road Festival)

We arrived like pilgrims with plastic ponchos,
trading spreadsheets for mushrooms and sleep-deprivation,
hoping to lose ourselves between the trees
and maybe find something louder than our lives.

By Friday, the woods were singing.
Goat set the sky on fire—
masks on, minds off,
a ritual in distortion and holy noise.

We danced like summoned things,
like the stage was an altar,
like praying was a given.

Later, Sylvie Kreusch floated onstage
like a spell in silk—
half Kate Bush, half séance.
She sang and the air changed its shape.
I forgot my name,
but remembered every person I’d ever loved.

Someone yelled,
“This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen!”
and the sky broke,
and the tents collapsed,
and everyone laughed like it was scripted.
Perhaps it was.

We stumbled into a quiz by mistake—
2 grams deep and full of hubris.
Every answer, no matter the question:
“Roy Orbison.”
A performance art piece.
A disaster.
A moment of joy so dumb it felt divine.

A boy played cello in the folly, and
someone gave me an e for free.
I watched a band I’d never heard of
play the soundtrack to my future breakdown.
Five stars. Would definitely cry again.

The nights were velvet chaos—
lanterns and dope smoke,
a quiet woman painting planets on strangers’ faces
while a techno remix of SOS played somewhere deep in the distance.

When it ended, it didn’t.
We carried it home in our hair,
in the ache of leaving
in the way we now look at strangers
like they may also have been there,
beneath the fairy lights,
watching the world fall apart and then coalesce
ceremoniously.

---

Listen

Sunburned gas-blue
I think I love you –
you’re cracked
anchored and abandoned

Your surname is sunk
beneath the silt and sand
but ‘Betty’ is aloft
Betty Blue I’ll call you

as dawn gleams
like mercury above you

almost afraid to rise.

---

Listen

I ran from Ivan Allen
a monster of a boy
more a man.

I imagined him Russian
with a knowledge of tractors
and a black belt in everything.

He terrorised his teachers,
he darkened all corridors, and he
loomed like all preachers do.

So I moved through the half-built walls,
bare brick and scaffolding bones,
the air thick with cut wood and Ivan Allen ghosts.

A rust-bitten mixer growled – its drum still warm
I climbed inside, to hide and to see
how the world spins differently…

Out and dizzy I sat above
a deep concrete pit,
pools of rainwater laced with oil.

I dropped stones, watched the ripples
spread out like something waking,
My fear, our toil

I found a crowbar—
its heft a thrill in my palm.
I prised at doorframes,
tore them clear,
and shouted my name
into the void
to revel in the echo,
no one hears…

Later, I walked home,
pockets rattling with
bent screws
and the stolen heart
of a padlock.

---

Listen