Sample Poems

Listen to Russell read:

After the Moons

Breathing Space

The Flat Opposite 

The Ant Swap

God Has Still Not Appeared to the Birds

Star

The First Kiss

Jupiter

Waggledancers

To His Coy Dalek

Pet Poet Laureate video samples:

A Tempest

Hero


Or read a few verses for yourself:

God Has Still Not Appeared to the Birds

In Boston we kept a jar

of eggs, thought nothing

of the life

cracked onto the waffle iron.

This palm shook, rattled out

a yolk. At the window

starlings – I think they were –

flew by us. Do you think

they saw

my shudder, my shell,

my hands? A knuckle

remembers

the old wounds it gave,

the eggs it’s beaten

and God

has still not appeared

to the birds. These hands

are my knives, my gut,

they have tasted things.

Think about that

chick

that hit the thud window

like a wet sponge and let out

its first

and final choke of a song.

These hands

took it,

they have felt things

breathe, life flap 
in the smallest wings. 

The First Kiss

What a disappointment. Nothing like the movies,

nothing like the mind. A mass of muscles writhing,

an awkward hand on a tightened arse

at the under-sixteens “Angel and Demon Night”

What a farce. Is this the limbo

stick for life? Where are the fireworks,

the butterflies, the butterflies exploding

like fireworks into a glorious rainbow

of wings and ash?

My son will sit with me and I’ll tell him

the truth that there is no word to fit

a feeling of lust and immediate unrest.

Or the lingering taste, the pleasure, the alien

of a first kiss. There’s no word, I’ll tell him,

for the particular fullness that breaks through

the lungs and fills you with the breath

of their hair, for the sudden rush of two hands

clambering until the fingers find

each other and grip. Grip to that, I’ll tell him

and be thankful for the imperfection

of love and that the first kiss is nothing

like you expected.

Ghazal Jigsaw

From the small, closed window by our study table the stars are set

like the pieces of your space jigsaw. I ask if you’re any closer. The stars are set

you mutter as you slot another nook into the realised corner, and yet

you seem unsure which cosmos you’ve pieced together. The stars are set

upon like foxes: your hands are hungry dogs. Your eyes are ready trumpets.

Your mind is a nebula and then aha, you’ve a northern glow and the stars are set

in their place with a satisfying click. Another, two more and you’re a puzzle-rocket.

They look so still and steady with you, but through our study window the stars are set

in more dimensions than just those two. You drop a red dwarf and I reach for it.

You continue. I open the window and, like the sails of a ship, the stars are set.