I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Nothing is as it was before, after the screen has gone to black. Darkness lies on the soul. To use Beckett’s phrase, “what cowers behind it begins to seep through.” With her new shopping cart Hekabe, queen of Troy, will be prowling the aisled for dog biscuits.

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.

Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows – dear stench.

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ’life and no escape.

Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.

This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth.

M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more.

26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.