Ginge Reads

If the world is my oyster then I must have an allergy to shellfish. And I don't mean to sound a cynic, Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash But my head is a prison with just the occasional conjugal visit. So I don't want to waste myself with things much bigger than those on the bookshelf. Been there, done that, but the t-shirt was just too tight For a loner with paperback eyes. Now I’m left To think and thoughts and less wuthering of heights Where conversational stares can’t hurt me. Crack the spine. I’m running through pages, splitting their seams, Stalking fiction and forgetting dreams. Paper-faced friends with inky backs are enough to escape the world and its crap While the monsters of the mind Refuse to fall quiet. I ’m not waving, I’m drowning, Frowning, clowning, counting down the days, While stone cold stoned, the world watch away.

You can tell an awful lot about a person by their shoes.  I barely did much wrong, just a bit of lifting here and there but enough to put me in trouble. Grey never was my colour. And yet here I am, shivering on the bottom of a bunk bed with my toe poking out of a hole in my right sock.  Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash A pair of Jordans snore above me. A white base with red and black streaks across the tongue and midsole. No one knows what he did – no one’s brave enough to ask. But he’s been here that long you might call the great dent in his mattress ‘memory foam’. A couple of white Nikes follow him around, occasionally punching spider web cracks on a wall that looked at them the wrong way. They’re alright, really, once you get over the low glances.  Six doors down, a pair of muddied, navy trainers with no name. He doesn’t say much, just mumbles to his game of solitaire and whispers when he needs a hit of china white. Fila is in next doors cell, plain whit...

The poet laureate of Great Britain since 2009, Carol Ann Duffy is a particularly noteworthy writer as the first woman, Scott and first openly gay individual appointed to the role. Much of her work centres heavily on themes of love and relationships, possibly as a result of her own experiences as a homosexual writer constantly in the public eye, and nothing epitomises this more than her 2005 collection, Rapture . Comprised of 52 love poems, Duffy traces the course of a relationship from infatuation, through suspicion, heartache and finally to death in one of her most moving shows of literary talent to date. As the end of her time as Poet Laureate draws near, it seems only fitting that this, arguably one of her best collections (and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize), should be brought into the spotlight once again. Carol Ann Duffy Photo via Wikimedia In truth, not many people like reading poetry. It brings out the worst in writers: a pretentiousness not to be found in novels. They ...