Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Poetry

  • manifesto

    Let’s make this clear: I do not want to die.I don’t—I want to live, and live againlike I remember living as a childin stories that I tell myself aboutmyself. To live that childlike life again—not like the lonely dead, reducedto mewling hunger past the fence of life—I must then be reborn, and shoulder offthis chrysalis…

  • First There is an Island

    Later this week I’ll be taking a trip down the country, and also down the years. On Sunday 12th June, I’ll be reading a poem in Sandown on the Isle of Wight. I started off writing poetry seriously around 2004 or so, as a kind of preliminary to practicing the longer forms of writing that…

  • Opportunity cost

    The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those lab rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were…

  • Brownout

    I’m not sure what they’re calling it these days. In my time you were “gouching”, “nodding out”; there’ll be some other name for it, no doubt, as language shifts its shape. But this malaise remains unchanged: that head-down slump betrays the use of morphine (or her daughters) like a shout for help in silence. Mud-caked…

  • Rhyme vs. Reason

    The why of my wanting you differs each time. (The wanting, returning, is always the same.) So strangle my reason and drown it in rhyme: to query the telos of love is a crime. (And I know there’s only one crook in the frame.) The why of my wanting you differs each time; this quiddity…