I coveted the pretty ornament. Like a child I wanted the sweet colours, the crimps, the curls. I wanted it for no reason, or for no good reason. I was walking among the detritus when the market closed. The coathangers were driftwood, the defeated, lonely shoe stranded by the tide, billowing newspapers yards of airy […]

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Suddenly I’ve been persuaded to buy myself a “codger cap”— or that is how I think of it. It makes me feel a different chap, the way its says so clearly “English” but of what class I’m not quite sure. Worker down the pub in Sheffield? Gentry shooting on the moor? Geoff Page

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It’s strange how often all through Europe names don’t quite mean what they should; towns say something else in English— the locals think that Bad is good. Zutphen is a case in point. It ought to mean a little bird that flies low over marshes fast. As just a town it is absurd. Geoff Page

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“And what will these boys do when we close our eyes for good and they’ll have to fetch for themselves?” My mother used to say it to no one in particular, at home, in the shop, wherever she stepped. Not to me, who am still here, and have seen lots of wars and disasters, sickness, […]

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Do the names of English towns deliver what they seem to mean? A century of economics is summarised in Milton Keynes. And Leighton Buzzard, not far off, is somehow waiting to be fed. One sees a sky fill up with shadows waiting for the freshly dead. Geoff Page

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The curvatures, the curvatures … back home we drive 300 Ks, our small car clinging to the tar, upside down to that new day arriving for our friends up north, entering to their different June. The Eurail map’s in love with Europe but gravity’s a single tune. Geoff Page

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Surreal Elements in a Relationship He wore jeans and a singlet boots and a watch which he hung over the chair like a Dali watch it grew bigger and bigger while I grew smaller and smaller he said my moustache made me look like a man I said his moustache made him look absurd I […]

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Glass Slipper My beautiful, blue-eyed boy grown so tall and strong and strange, able to make a living not a life, beloved but ill-equipped to love your lovely, laughing girl who barely hesitates as he draws her into the slow, somnambulant dance of the unrequited, taking up the 3:4 rhythm like a heart born to […]

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Chandelier-Tree I find myself staring at the spaces between fronds, where pure blue plumes appear, the air painting itself on my eye. And I see how the trunk doesn’t end where a person can climb, but continues to the redwood’s true crown, sky-feathers piercing the stratosphere, blue forest on blue, some white with lace frills […]

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Redwood Canopy Explorer I hang in the spaces between canopies and when I pause for breath it hits me— the total silence. Even my mental chatter vanishes. Just me and these ancient beings and the rain they filter from the fog dripping on my glistening skin. I glide in a wordless mist. All that holds […]

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