You can't impose a legacy.

Geography is destiny. – James Ellroy.

He stood, fluffing his feathers: as poet, priest of place, shoulders sloped like folded wings; magenta scarf, scarlet lining to anorak, black-rimmed spectacles and aureole of wizardly white hair.

Why not add another yarn? That’s all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories.

Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else’s expense, you can’t beat it.

The faster we walk, the more ground we lose.

Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.

You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You’ve got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don’t get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head’s in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.

For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you’re a mass observer and you can’t afford to care whether people are busy or not. You’re a witness.

The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio.