blurt odd things out
say the wrong joke

read poetry
unasked for
fall

down a well of thought
no interruptions

dance
like your body
forgot its limbs
react

a second too late
or too soon

smile
in the rain

forget
the question
that mattered

laugh at the funeral
watch carefully

as the reflection
confused
blinks back at me
through cracked silver
screaming
under skin

the way sunlight
shadows the trees
and asks
to be felt
all the while
colours shouting back
at me

voices
become blades

your words
bleed
the sky
inside my veins

did you know
they let me out today
in a public place

Selected byRaymond Huffman
Image credit:Yuichi Kageyama
Arran D'Aubigny

I grew up holding opposites. A charismatic, megalomaniac entrepreneurial father who made and lost millions, and a deeply spiritual mother. They separated early, and instability became normal. I attended nineteen schools, grew up in a large, fiercely loyal family, and learned early how to move between worlds, belief systems, and classes.

Later in life I experienced both entrepreneurial success and loss, survived life saving surgery, and eventually chose physical work, now working in removals. Having lived across class boundaries, I feel most grounded in practical labour and the body. Poetry became a survival technique rather than an ambition, a way of creating worlds outside the given one. My work is concerned with memory, forgetting, loyalty, and the quiet mechanics of endurance.

 

Conversations with stars, the sea and the heart.