Stephen Knight

The world is packed with scaffolding and empty packing-crates Where this train terminates The humid air is poorly when the clouds are working nights Moths crowd the windows dreaming hard of cancelled flights

Where this train terminates Waiters ghost among the tables clearing dinner plates Cocky foxes wearing human stoles take in the sights Shadows build in places theirs by rights

The...

– waiting for me somewhere out of sight past the betting shop and the Nationwide where buses stop to shiver in the middle of the night – doesn’t for a moment doubt we’ll recognise each other when he looks me in the eye, but wonders if the buttonhole was wise or lifts a wristwatch to his ear then sighs before a table laid with shiny cutlery and a cloth so...

A queue has formed outside the box. The air’s quite warm so someone takes a blazer off and pink magnolia trees open their arms to a broken breeze dismantling the lacquered hair and the one comb-over à la Bobby Charlton. Eyes down, all ages fidget and shift their weight, rehearsing beneath a wispy sky.

Prepared to tolerate the smell of piss and a crackly line so they can say the...

For Colleen

If not the giant redwoods taking centuries to reach the light, nor the lights- camera-action typhoons regular as clockwork in the murky Tonga Bar, nor, perched above LA, the penitential Getty – its prospect of the coastline smudged by airborne crap, nor even the Chronicle’s news that the universe is flat, and expandingfaster and faster for ever – ‘Wow! Wow!...

Presumably the whole point is that there should be no continuum: of anything. That failures of memory are but a proof of a living organism’s subordination to the laws of nature. No life is meant to be preserved.

Joseph Brodsky, In a Room and a Half

‘I really ought to stop climbing trees,’ you said, nipping the filter off another low-tar cigarette then settling your arm...