Amphora

December 19 ‘21 

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Dusk comes down like ashes, 

a shellburst 

from a fire 

gutted 

sky. 

Traffic crawls 

in stop 

start stall; 

when then 

a leisured bird makes dark 

unclear 

its monstrous 

petalled 

flutters. 

Factory stacks wave tuneless 

flags 

and beyond 

the plant, a mile or two, 

the mica 

shine of sunset rarefies 

the either eye 

of day.

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Fragmenting the Night 

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Darkness drips to the garden 

through the sieve of the stars 

and the splendid silver moon 

collapses on its rotted mast. 

I close my eyes. My imagination is blank as a book without letters; 

an absence, perhaps more like 

an emptiness 

or a laboratory of nothingness. 

The garden is near the end 

of its life. Its hedges are withered, and last year’s tawny leaves 

still hang on its trees. 

There is a greenhouse somewhere in the south, half grown 

over on its murky pagoda of weeds. Beyond the greenhouse, open ground. Empty fields. 

The autumn sky’s abyss. 

Above the shorn fields, the telephone wires hiss like iguanas 

as the north wind returns, 

bringing back 

the night 

and the blackboard 

the imagination requires.

 

 

 

Billy 

Nothing to see here except a touch of hoof and horn; in general, nothing sinister, just a file-on-iron abrasion for conversation, a touch of Devil’s Chuckle—Paganini, B-flat major. An agate— cracked—rolls in its socket and reflects the landscape, inverted, as the ebon chapel of the tree-torn, branch ripped sky opens in prelude to purposes dark, dark for heaven and us.

 

 

 

Finding a Voice 

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As a writer I am dumb; faux prosaist, my words shrivel and die on the page like animalcules over-scrutinised on a biologist’s 

slide. 

As a poet 

I am worse—a wolf 

in a church of words, chewing 

on metaphors and choking 

my throat with verbs. Lexiconic beast salvific, aprowl— 

stalking the dark arrhythmias of Dante, Bishop, Bukowski and Frost. In the absence 

of imagination, 

depollinated of meaning, of muse— deprived of the honest 

amanuensis 

of an empty room, I snarl at Merwin’s formidable yoke and gnaw at the storied bones 

of Plath, the tarnished amplitudes 

of Hughes.

Bio: Thomas Farr is a British writer of fiction and poetry. He enjoys travelling, running, reading and writing. He tweets @TFarrHorror