Four more poems, first shared via Blackbough Poetry’s Top Tweet Tuesday.

The honest A-Z

The honest A-Z is filled with empty pages, 
roads unwalked, unprinted. Areas ignored 
and little-known shrink, or vanish altogether. 

Whole postcodes are erased through lack 
of interest. While places you have loved, expand. 
Side-streets stretched into tree-lined boulevards. 

Market stalls, grimy corner pubs, exes’ flats, 
old offices transformed – recalled as mansions;
bustling quarters, layered with a living history. 

All these plans can change. Every faded suburb 
of the soul can be rebuilt. Step outside again,
explore, redraw the map of your emotions. 

***

Walking in Scarr Wood, Halifax

Dark and darker in the winter, 
leaning beeches, oaks, scrabbled up a hill.
Squeezing round uneven teeth of rocks.

Further up the valley, a spiteful chimney jabs 
an ornate finger in the air. Downhill, a jay 
erupts from shadowed branch. Jolt of blue 

signalling the new year’s light to come, 
a reminder of unexpected life, emerging 
bright from long-forgotten, buried acorns. 

***

Newly Released

Needles weighted with blu-tac and a penny 
to outwit scratches, aided escape back then 
through vinyl. Grooved routes pursued out 
of bedroom windows. Drifting over Bristol, 

exact location didn’t matter – anywhere, but 
those four walls. Becoming, for a song, a human 
Cameron Balloon, teasing rooftops with dreams 
of leaving, furious teenage hot-air expended, 

high above the suburbs. Frustrated not to share 
the euphoric secrets bands appeared to own, 
frozen into ostentatious frowns, inkily deceitful, 
on the cover of the NME.

***

Battlebridge

They loomed like giant crowns 
of fallen kings, the gasholders. 
Palisades spiking sky, from towpath 
stages, ripping holes in backstreet city 
clouds. Iggy would be proud. 

But those accidental monuments 
have lost their lust for life. While some 
survive as curios, rounded showpiece flats, 
the others have been taken down.
Divided iron parts, given up to rust.