Sweeney Todd

I can promise not a hair’s breadth betwixt life and bereft. A big something for the weekend, sir? If it ain’t kitten in the pie, it will be worse, I surmise. This precariousness of my barber’s chair. That skill of mine to really polish a string of basement pearls. I hear how hair is cut from ear to ear. In a dietary reworking: I love Mrs Lovett’s pies made from meat at MacDonald’s. The big sleep of a short back and sides is my favourite read. Demonology of ruthless styles. Once I have flipped, the tresses stand on end in more ways than can be undone.

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Ted Hughes

Speaking for the fox who still walks now and now in my and our writing. How I caught the moon in a bucket and poured back its light. When roosting high at my own convenience there was a same holding it all, sophistry replaced with the strike. It was me instructed Crow to tell us a thing or two about the way we blacken lives. All those sheep with their gore trails and my incessant telling. In the folklore that is mine as an alloy of words, sound came out metal-strong and blood-fired. Nature red in tooth and me. I know the determination of cow-shit in its cast-iron personification. That night reading with Seamus in the Newman Rooms, we gave everyone the luminous black of poetry as something laughed to the centre of itself.

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Mike has commented on the three pieces included here:

The first two are found prose poems taken from a sequence based on random themes or targeted information, altered to first-person voices; the third is newly written, an erasure as Tom Phillips using W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document, the source for his extraordinary A Humument [and I have previously written another as TP in the same way].

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Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK. His most recent published poetry is Professions [The Red Ceilings Press, 2018] and a collection of his found prose poems is forthcoming with Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Banner image by James Knight