Thomas Edward Puleston Rickarby Poems

Round the houses we go,

first one, then two, then three pints
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“Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

To an untrained ear the term may sound
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We label the parts of a flower,

the pistil, petals and stem
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You cannot be but what you are
and everything you've ever hard
is but the surf formed by a wave
unfolding to the beach.
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The long and the short of it is we were caught in that trick of a space, your foot hard on the brake, as we plunged into that impossible gap and almost made it to safety.

I can't stop seeing the time on your watch as we smashed the Polo in the back of his Porsche with such damn great force he flew straight out onto the pavement.
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Heavy handed sleight of hand
was what it took to win the hand.
In the cave of his lap a crumpled knave,
a deadly, smuggled, silent fact. He's brave
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