Nick Burbridge Poems

The Moon Bear slips
into a nightmare
where they force
him to dance.
...

Tom got by with what H.G. Wells
wrote of a horse in difficulty,
a random redistribution of his legs,
extreme facial expressions
...

City boy, city boy. Last week,
across the square, took on a phonebox:
put my fist right through the glass & laughed.
Saturday tonight, pissed up, pole-axed on a bench.
...

Somewhere among crisp packets and curled plasters,
where the nightlights can’t reach,
push the door shut,
and come to me, naked and quiet.
...

To Harry, the annual bloom of open houses
in the hotbed city is a dream come true.
He leaves his bags of materials
at the church centre and goes armed
...

He decided to make his resignation public.
After two handfuls of blue-coated pills
and a bottle of Aqua Libra
he was bouncing off the kitchen walls
...

I address this to old Doctor Bermingham,
who always asked after my mother,
prescribed the company of dogs, and caught pneumonia,
the keen new psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia,
...

Stanmer Park, late afternoon;
we come for a partial eclipse of the sun
but Molly has us press-ganged
in the belly of the woods
...

We have new neighbours.
They keep parking an old Ford
with no tax disc on the sidewalk.
They come back drunk at three
...

My father tried to make
Sunday afternoons take shape.
He built theatres out of cardboard boxes
fixed with fairy lights and left me
...