share


Bacon’s Friends

Always got caught out by their shadows:

Stuck to their soles like monkeys on trapezes,

Cellophane fortune tellers curling on palms,

Squashed black jelly babies.  Naïve beside his

 

Cunning swirls: ugly blobs leaking like ink

Out of the cages that held their likenesses.

Glimpsed through cheeks or at the back

Of yawning, unravelled mouths.

 

Keep looking at the shadows, the shadows

That try to love their creator

While their doubles shave obscenely

Or choose stubbornly to read the newspapers.

 

 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

has published poetry, short stories, critical essays and travel writing in magazines in the UK and internationally.  He was runner-up in the Elmet Foundation Ted Hughes Poetry Prize. His work appears on the Poetry Library archive, for which he has made recordings.

READ NEXT

Interview

August 2013

Interview with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Ben Eastham

Interview

August 2013

Four or so years ago, at what was then the single Peckham establishment to serve a selection of sandwiches...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Tom McCarthy

Fred Fernandez Armesto

Interview

Issue No. 1

For those expecting him to be, as the New Statesman called him, ‘the most galling interviewee in Britain’, Tom...

feature

Issue No. 15

Translation in the First Person

Kate Briggs

feature

Issue No. 15

IT IS 1 JUNE 2015 and I am standing outside no. 11 rue Servandoni in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. I...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required