These poems have either been published in the "poetry press," or have achieved  recognition in (inter)national poetry competitions.

Resilience and Connectivity through Poetry

[Parthian, 2021]

Honed spell explodes, well-machined, oil-primed;

Drowned knowledge wings afresh as wild-word blossoms,

Chimeric charges through furled aether climb,

Hoofed, jewelled, incensed, sear gist’s glossed existence,

Bore gimlet holes through every thought's quartz-grain;

Fuse crust to silica-sea, sweat-clammy oceans boil,

Summon that dragon that ties the sundered worlds,

Live amber-wire enthuse; out-thresh static birthing-signals;

Sprout doubtful seeds in heart-volcano ground;

Rain names upon the oath-sieve, uncoil syntax golden,

Your speech a brazen law: to mage alone beholden!

Charms ember-penetrate earth's passion-hallowed scales,

Coagulating, melting, coiling, setting right

Belief through action, base reconcile with noble;

Pool deep-gored blood-stream in hell's gory cauldron;

Light-spool white-feathered sacred sacrifice,

Fantastic prayer-flight's practised ornament;

Pearled incantations, swinish lead-wings laden,

With lusty cruel-iron voice, all destiny condense;

Words, lacerated copper-pink, and self-upholding,

Bind permafrost savanna to their wracking task:

Dark-matter weighty, unlace quivering cosmic flask!

[South Wales Evening Post: 31 July 2019 and 12 October 2019 as PM; "The Seventh Quarry" (Issue 32, Summer/Autumn 2020), edited by Peter Thabit Jones; a poetry magazine published in Swansea, Wales with an international perspective]

Blonde-tousled dream-child,

You channel a giggling stream,

Swimming-bath chlorined;

Joy follows your fluttering, as

You pollinate smiles,

And heart-nectar overflows;

Perfectly unformed fruit,

You drip from the bough,

Smelling of sunshine;

Beyond rainbow’s edge,

With unicorns dancing,

Banishing bed-time once more.

[South Wales Evening Post: 20 September 2018 as PM; "The Seventh Quarry" (Issue 32, Summer/Autumn 2020), edited by Peter Thabit Jones; a poetry magazine published in Swansea, Wales with an international perspective]

I labour to dilute the fact that, yesterday,

My vaporous thoughts condensed –

And amidst the steamy distillations,

I wetly dreamed I’d managed to perfect

Electric wooing of aluminium from crude ore:

With man-size graphite bricks as anodes,

Bathed in steel-shod cauldrons, live with

Cryolite lava, lined with refractory tiles:

The reckless oxygen hiss devours the slabs,

Recharging our fragile hothouse;

As seething metal swirls in lusty splendour,

Urged on by wanton tongues of lightning

– Some cackling villain’s acid-bath

For liquidating love.

Yes, I’ll always recall that bitter salt, charmed

With unyielding bauxite – screams blood-wrung

By caustic leaching, costs cork-screwing, earth-

Pulverizing stress – when I stumble,

Trench-blind, across lab-books and sketches,

Long declassified, but enticingly related

To our one-time tries at alchemical rebirth

– Reactions long spent, and best left submerged, in

Rust-sullied pools of love-sick sludge.

And so, having invested a lifetime

Failing to roll out economical ingots

Of that silvery stuff, light as it’s strong,

I size up with one last, cold calculation

My cage amongst the stunted shrubs;

In this, our post-industrial playground

– Mine-pocked, scrubbed-out by bilious juice,

Where the air’s forever fluorine-fouled

– And where, ensnared with you and your flue-gas,

I’m – entropically – X’ed…

[Creative Futures Literary Awards Competition 2018: Reached the shortlist of 18 out of 500 entries]

When I was a child, fresh on the vine

I wanted to grow into a fine fecund man so

my father would tend me, nourish me.

He claimed to be a keen gardener,

always grafting away in his secret shed with

his booze and his floozies, needing something

other than his roses to prick on, when

he wasn’t picking his huge hairy honk.

I was a queer fruit, a mutant, rather

like dad’s favourite flower,

the purple pansy: it must have been, as that’s

what he always punchily called me,

a man’s man’s way of

showing love through violence to

a shrinking violet.

No talking bollocks about footie or cars

could make my manhood sprout.

Like a true hoary-handed son of

exchanged-labour toil

he used to express his deepest feelings by

threshing the life out of me when he got back

from a hard day’s drinking and tab-toting

with my older, prodigal brother,

who shagged birds, sowing

his sterile seeds all over

the red-painted town.

Biology’s clock doesn’t stop, though.

Now the old man’s storm-birds have come

home to roost, fouling his lung loft

with nicotine filth. The cancer, they say,

keeps on generating, proliferating; slowly, silently –

his whole body a chemical temple

to manly excess. Sooner or later.

I suppose, he’ll be pushing up daisies: it must

be something to do with his green fingers,

and all the crap he’s sprouted over the years.

But out of this fertile muck I’ve grown brassy.

Harsh cutting back has made me strong, and

this weed has taken over the garden now.

So, for myself I flourish: a hybrid breed,

self-spawned – In the unlikeliest places

flowering – and

fucking.

[12th Welsh Poetry Competition (International English Language Poetry Contest) 2018

"Special mention" from the judge Sally Spedding]