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Mike Farren’s poems have appeared in journals such as Rialto, Stand, 14 Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. He has won several competitions, including Poem of the North (2018 – ‘canto’ winner), the Ilkley Literature Festival Poetry Competition (2020) and the Red Shed Competition (2023). His pamphlets are Pierrot and his Mother (Templar), All of the Moons (Yaffle) and Smithereens (4Word). In 2024, he was one of Ilkley Literature Festival’s New Northern Poets and in 2025 he was accepted onto the Arvon Foundation’s
Advanced Writing Programme. He is part of Yaffle Publishing and one of the hosts of Shipley’s ‘Rhubarb’ open mic. Website: https://www.mikefarren.co.uk/
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Mike Farren: Eight Poems
SCHOOL STORY: ROBERT
Hair so neat and clean, I wanted to kiss it.
He let me, in the form line where I stood
always behind him after lunch and play.
His mother was a teacher, mine a cleaner.
She always wanted to befriend my mum,
who couldn’t understand how that could work.
I liked his older brother, too, for the way
he could draw Thor exactly like the comic.
When I tried to meet them once, straight after
school and they didn’t show, it was the first
time that I had ever cried for love.
Then the older kids stopped me, as I
was going home and asked me if I knew
what a poof was. When they told me, I knew.
I knew what it was I had to lose.
YORK STREET FURNITURE
Colin says he’s got to have a break.
he’s gasping, and the bog’s the only place
they let them smoke. He takes the pack of Players
out of the pocket of his long buff jacket.
I don’t smoke, but he doesn’t even ask.
We talk but say nothing. The fifty quid
a week is college beer money for me –
for him, it will be beer money forever.
And when the tab’s half-smoked, the foreman slams
in, takes one look and with a What the fuck?
kicks me out as though I’m wagging off.
I’m back to loading king-sized mattresses
myself. I try one and find I can’t even span
my arms across, so I stand and sniff
the reasty, hot machine-oil air, sweetened
by seasoned timber, as it turns to sawdust.
SLATE GHOST
When everything around you
is slate,
when your house is slate,
your kirk,
the place where you work,
the stuff you work on,
the sea and the sky
ten months of the year,
the dust in the air
you breathe,
on the food you eat
and the look in the eye
of your slate wife
when another slate life
shears
from the quarry
of her body –
no wonder you couldn’t
stay flesh and blood,
couldn’t keep the mineral
from your being
or own an insubstantial spirit
that fades on the tail
of a human span.
Slate man
surely becomes slate ghost,
bound to his host
for the timescale
of geology,
fissile and hard
as the land
that made him.
THE ABATTOIR IN EDEN
how tenderly the slaughtermen
hook the carcasses onto rails
and back them into rooms
where armfuls of guts
are lifted from zinc tubs
and placed inside with a touch
so deft that to know
they are attaching all the organs
nerves arteries and veins
in an instant seems miraculous
see them seal the stomach with their blade
use a scraper to apply the self-adhesive skin
suck the hole from the skull
with their bolt gun so the beast
leaps to attention
wide-eyed with wonder
and love for life
like Adam the moment
God touches his finger.
IN ARCADIA
Poulithra, Greece, 2007
A sixty- or seventy-something man;
bald, with grey chest hair but muscled still,
xxxxxxunder sun-leathered skin,
swimming where the water’s barely
deep enough. I watch him – watch a world
xxxxxxthat might be turning
smoothly now except for this sense
of dread that things are clinking out
xxxxxxof synch, oceans away.
I wonder about his back and forth
of dog-paddle, keeping the same distance
xxxxxxfrom the same strip of beach
for half an hour, until the water churns
and suddenly he rises with a harpooned,
xxxxxxoctopus bleeding out blue
but still alive, tentacles writhing, out
of its element. He drops the harpoon gun,
xxxxxxswings the creature hard
onto the shingle beach, leaves a sagging
bag that once animated all those arms,
xxxxxxall those brains, all those hearts.
ON READING ILYA KAMINSKY’S
WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE WAR
I wanted to walk the long, long path from
nowhere to nowhere:
it mattered and I was proud to cover twenty miles
in a day. On the way
home the taxi driver said he’d walked
a hundred miles over mountains to a border when he was six.
When my mother was young, she was taken away from where
the bombs were falling
She didn’t have to cross a border, she was no refugee, even
in her own mind because we were people like us and people like us
were not like that and if people not like us
had a war – what else could they expect?
I thought I knew better but I’d been taught we’d fought a war, so thatxxxxxwe didn’t
have to fight wars.
And when there were wars and as wars go on, I
protest
but not enough: I read the news and I worry but not
enough. I can walk
from nowhere to nowhere and expect there will be
a taxi
to take me to the somewhere that the gravity
of money always draws me back to, the house
that money makes invisible
from the war.
DUPLEX FOR A
Thirst isn’t thirst if it can be quenched.
You put five thousand miles between us.
xxxxxWhen you put five thousand miles between us
xxxxxmy stories of you grew truer than facts.
The world you chose wove truth out of facts.
You loved ideas more than the body.
xxxxxTo flesh out her idea, she used your body.
xxxxxIt took on a life beyond her, beyond you.
You never imagined life was beyond you
but to reach for it, you needed help.
xxxxxYou had to reach for whatever helped.
xxxxxOblivion, knowledge – sides of the same coin.
Sides of the same coin – knowledge, oblivion.
Your thirst was real. It couldn’t be quenched.
UNSUDDEN
After ‘Snow’, Louis MacNeice
All is slateroofxxxmushrooming
of chimneysxxxwhere aerials are pickedclean
fish bonesxxxand abovexxxsky also slate
or washybluexxxnot evermore the denseness
of whitebehindwhiteonwhite so white
there is no room for lightxxxso heavy you
feel the weight of winter before it falls
sifts and driftsxxxinsisting on
its right to smother you in love
wrap youxxxlike Jesus swaddled in world
world withoutxxxworld undrunkxxxuncrazy
unsuddenxxxwithout rosesxxxwithout
snowxxxwithout anythingxxxfor
the glassxxxto comexxxbetween.
Acknowledgements
‘School story: Robert’ was included in The Rialto, #102.
‘York Street Furniture’ appeared in the pamphlet Pierrot and his Mother (Templar). It was also featured in The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry.
‘Slate ghost’ was included in Blue Nib Chapbook IV.
‘The abattoir in Eden’ was highly commended in the York Poetry Prize 2020 and was published on the York Mix website.
‘In Arcadia’ appeared in Stand #239.
‘On reading Ilya Kaminsky’s We Lived Happily During the War during the war’ was published in Poetry Salzburg Review #34.
‘Duplex for A’ was published in the pamphlet Smithereens (4Word).
‘Unsudden’ was included in 14 Magazine, #2.1.
The High Window 