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

June 2015

Interview with Moyra Davey

Hannah Gregory

Interview

June 2015

One way to think about Moyra Davey’s way of working across photography, film and text is in terms of...

feature

Issue No. 10

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

David Harvey

feature

Issue No. 10

Prospects for a Happy but Contested Future: The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism   From time immemorial there have been...

Interview

March 2016

Interview with Han Kang

TR. Deborah Smith

Sarah Shin

Interview

March 2016

Han Kang is a disquieting storyteller who leads the reader into the very heart of human experience, where the...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required