The Onset
All my aspirations nothing but a ghost train,
and my family the waxwork kin
that stoop through cobwebs, a scrape of nails.
Nothing is quite forgiven with flowers
since the days you held me like a ventriloquist
and talked along a metal tongue.
Everything wrong with my hinged jaw.
Could i be a spire rising from a reservoir—
as i emerge through flaps of tarpaulin
like birth into a bright surgical light?
i sing of my past loves, a cappella.
My head is a pumice stone: holes within holes—
and i wait so patiently
like a church phantom
in the off-chance glance of a child’s eye.
Darkwave
Your long black coat repeats like favourite vinyl—
a dream of us that spins under the fluff of a stylus.
Even at the wrong speed, it’s where we meet—
a tiff I can’t unhear,
a riff I wake with, whirls round like earworm,
those hurled words that burn as a parting shot.
I’m the bullet hole just before it bleeds,
the moment tears surge, the verge of lucid.
Replaying the scene, you insist you need
no chaperone, throwing on your long black coat—
one you joked gave you the look of a darkwave singer.
Oxytocin racing as we consider the split.
And you’re out of my door, up the grove,
fog shrouding your steps. You recede as I up my pace.
And this is always how it is. We’ve been here before.
You handing back your ring
like an unwanted encore.
Noctambulists
Nightfall. We meet by the paraffin lamp on the green.
Wrapped warm, scarves, mittens, while darkness clasps
around us like a shawl. Does sunlight, we ask, stretch
above the skyline, making clouds blue or mauve, early
like this? No, comes the reply, that’s the sky-glow from
the urban centre. Our phones all go to airplane mode.
A guide warns us to stay close, switch off our cameras,
don’t talk, only talk when he talks, stops and talks. We
go single-file into the ees, some of us following a trail
of fluorescent heels. We’re warned of apex predators
or things that hide in the crepuscular, like flashers or
doggers, how it takes twenty minutes for pupils to dilate.
It takes this long for the soles of our feet to awaken,
and for twigs to re-invent the ancient form of alphabet.
Reiki
How many faces
of grief have passed here
ahead of a long schedule—
as if the ache had a locus,
her thumb’s deft focus
on the pressure points
between joints, a balm
at the threshold of suns,
their final throes.
Her suntrap of cleavage,
my battle in shadow
where the scent of jasmine
curls to eclipse words.
She’s in place of mother,
bridging beautician and
morgue, me in her
crib of towels, howl
held to my heart
chakra. While we
await the throat’s rattle,
a room soon manicured—
just a CD spinning
panpipe instrumentals
through still seconds,
as kisses skirt Elysium
beyond the air of a corridor,
the vortex of sky.
She Dreamt of Fire
she dreamt of fire through a clutch of drugs,
that sirens were sent to the wrong address
sirens were sent to her childhood address,
wailed like banshees from below her window
crazed banshees wailed below her window,
while our kitchen was a smoulder of cinders
she imagined our house, a mound of cinders,
her sons and husband milling round her bed
sons and husband doing their best, visiting
as Russian spies filled her syringe with ricin
Russian spies would leave her pills on the tray,
and we kept asking: who’s the prime minister?
who’s the prime minister? we kept on asking,
though she replied: ‘why is it dark in daylight?’
Patrick Wright’s poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The North, and The London Magazine. His debut collection, Full Sight of Her, was published in 2020 by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His pamphlet, Nullaby (2017), was also published by Eyewear. His second collection, Exit Strategy (2025), was published by Broken Sleep Books. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Open University.
