Peter Pan

Peter Pan


There’s a picture of him,
moustache at half mast
like Neville Chamberlain’s,
tiny man in a flasher’s coat
with a St Bernard’s, Nana
you presume, waist high.
He’s half turned as though he knew
the camera, like life, was unkind
and found only gravity in his face
now, the jowls, the joyless lips,
the eyes dead as space.
He said to clap if you believe,
but this was after Flanders
and Neverland had taken
all the pure and heartless.
What was left was Jim.

Ghost Story

Ghost Story


Down an alley telling tales
to 12 year olds. They gasp,
scan the shadows for body parts,
and horses come from hell

(of course it’s lies,
no children were murdered here
and made into pies).

“Later when you go past,
you might feel a hand
plucking at your sleeve” and
see in the smudge of glass

a small child, moon eyed,
the image of yourself,
that year, that night,
so rapt and so alive

(it’s sad but true,
the only haunting here’s
by you).

Gypsy

Second in the new strange series



Not the Usual Gypsy


She came from behind
a group of shoppers
like a left arm bowler,
took my hand in the kind

of grip you expect,
prior to being conned.
You’re going on holiday
in the next few days,

without your wife,
but your mother will be there.
Aha, I am about to say,
with a rueful smile,

but she shakes her head,
I know she’s dead.
And long since.
You’re tired of work, she says.

I am fishing
for a fiver to swop
for a piece of wishful thinking
but she tells me I won’t

ever have much money.
In that alley beside TJ Hughes,
I wonder: surely then, love.
In her grey eyes nothing


but people passing, as if tipped
off the end of the world.