Author: Mark Fiddes

Dear Greece, This letter encloses the stone that I stole from the Theatre of Dionysus on a school trip to help me with my O’ Level in Greek, understanding the teenage rampage of Orestes, the helplessness of Iphigenia in Taurus. I was both the hapless brother and sister waiting for a machine god to issue […]

Back in my mother’s garden,the fences were always brokenas the whole of creation clambered inwith tendrils and buried nestsand shanks of love-lies-bleeding.Star-bright stock, always night-scented,lit the crazy paving to a fern bank,where toads with golden eyesguarded my marijuana crop disaster.Ivy followed us all the way indoorswith moths that slept in lampshades.Beetles fell from our homework.Chrysalides […]

Frozen in their Kodaks, our old folks wear slippers to protect the carpet from their feet. Colours leech. A tap drips. Dinner lingers in another room. A yucca erupts on the lawn. The lounge is an orgy of fakery: leatherette armchairs, plaster dogs, silk orchids, mock encyclopedias and more fringe than necessary on lamps, hairdos, […]

We walk the canal under plane trees, words in one pocket, silence in the other past palettes stacked for la cooperativa, the air thick with dust and late harvest. We talk of work, cards we’ve been dealt, the missing people, our grown children, whose absences now lengthen beside us. I explain how this hour a […]

(to poet Geraldine Clarkson) If you have to tweet photos of cow parsley, please include the crushed beer cans. On those verges embroidered with poppies, don’t forget the fly-tipped mattress. Show only streams strewn with Tesco trolleys and valleys planted with wind crucifixes. Depict the grey logistics depots along the M1. Because now I live […]

Somewhere near you, a man in late middle age will be sitting on a bench with his head on fire like a safety match. On buses and trains, other men will smolder suddenly roaring into flame from the neck up. I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen them. They would cry out but with no […]

She returns at night in a flat-bed truck stacked with scaffold and dangerous paints. The canvas moon dips for a closer look. Coyotes remember her from way back, scampering like puppies in her tail lights. Even the bones in the sand know Frida. Her song wove the sinew that bound them. Her brush, dusted with […]

She cuts down her lane like scissors through blue silk with barely a snip; her deft turn at each end is a stitch. One morning, she will rise from the ladder, the pool draped over her shoulders like a cape of kingfishers. He rolls like a barrel of vintage port cast overboard, his crawl Shakespearean […]

When the removal men come, they use cotton gloves and masks for the books. “It’s the dust,” he shakes his head, like we were in Nagasaki instead of Tooting. Penguin classics, their black spines cracked with effort, slip in beside Elmore Leonard. It’s Boll to Cocteau in the next carton and a dog-eared frottage of […]

Your Grace, I will require you to wear black which will move under my paint because your enchantment is never still. I ask that your red scarf drapes around your waist like a general returning from war against an old enemy. I will place you under a southern sky the blue of bird’s eggs on […]