Pounding pounding pounding pounding
a pounding, astounding meat-mallet of sound.
Enormous,
the waves whip from speakers and down
through the glow-sticked,
the sea-swell,
the sweat-dripping chests,
a boxer lung-punching, dilate-and-compress.

The bass is mesmeric, it spirals our sense,
we’re wrapped, we’re entrapped,
in its dizzying denseness,
its muscular sheath,
it moves, pins and holds us
in place, underneath
the gears of this bold, cacophonous mill,
we’re meshed with its force,
with its spinning-wheel will –
seductively lullful,
a skin-pricking thrill,
its brakeless, its windswept,
a sleigh-ride downhill
where the
one
two
three
FOUR-to-the-floor
binds us like glue.

It’s hotly, it’s holily,
rhythmically true.

Held in trance,
game of dance,
wildly ordered,
we two.

And you hunt, pick me out in the magical brew.

And we touch, we draw closer, connected anew.

Stop!
I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes so blue.

This glorious life,
I’m in love with you.

There was a run of eleven years when my summer was bookended by two major music festivals: The Isle of Wight Festival in June, and then Bestival in September, every year. Both were just a twenty-minute drive from my house, so I didn’t even need to camp. It was wondrous.

The IW Festival – still going – traded on its historic 1970s status as the UK’s (world’s?) first giant festival, with legendary tales of an army of hippies (officially estimated at 250,000, with the more wigged-out loons claiming 600,000; for comparison, present-day Glastonbury is licensed for 210,000) hitting the rolling downs and beaches of West Wight in 1970. Maaaaaan… check out the photos. A three-quid weekend ticket got you Hendrix, The Doors, Miles Davis, Free, Joni Mitchell, The Who, The Moody Blues, Leonard Cohen, the organiser riding about the venue on horseback, and the local MP completely losing his shit… it was wild! Much like every punk who definitely saw the Sex Pistols at the Marquee, there are still guys in the pubs round here who claim to have been there in 1970. They’ll be clutching a real ale, dressed in a leather waistcoat and some sort of distressed fedora, and (in the words of somebody on Substack1) have the aura of being “not a wizard, but not not a wizard”.

Nowadays, the IW Festival’s a much tamer, more corporate affair – especially in recent years where its status is being killed by the scarcity of major acts who will play anything smaller than a stadium. In my bookend-years it was mighty with headliners including The Who, David Bowie, Faithless, REM, Jay-Z, The Prodigy, Foo Fighters, Muse, The Rolling Stones, The Police, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Blur, Fleetwood Mac, a hilariously ramshackle Sex Pistols… all playing on what was basically my son’s high-school field.

Bestival was by far the better of the two (or at least was more my speed). It had a much broader taste in dance and electronica, a knack of booking acts just before they hit the big-time, and eclectic headliners including Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Super Furry Animals, Björk, Gogol Bordello, Röyksopp, Hot Chip, Sigur Rós, LCD Soundsystem, Beastie Boys, Underworld, Kraftwerk, Gil Scott-Heron, and The Cure (who are returning to IW Festival this June). Bestival had the vibe, a feeling of the last great party before autumn when, in Jarvis Cocker’s words, the summer was “packing its bags and preparing to leave town”2. Come September, when memories bubble up of a hot crowd, people dressed as sea-creatures, dancing to an epic band like The Correspondents, I miss it like a lost friend.

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Photo: Underworld (somewhere in the light) at Bestival, 2008, shot by me

© 2026, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Quote any parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving.

Here, underground, the sound
of the doors dragging heavily open
is the trigger: unspoken,
we rise from our seats,
our shuffling feet,
our luggage-bag scrape,
the welcoming gape
of the exit. Exeunt!
We escape.

Moments before,
in the black tunnel’s maw
over wheel-grinding screech,
behind black windows, breached
by electrical sparks that spit in the dark,
I springily sit.
I am inside the ark.
One by one,
two by two,
we leg-spread, we park
ourselves, swinging from hooks
with no eye-to-eye looks
in the rhythm of carriage,
knees, elbows, hands touching,
as closely as marriage,
our books and phones clutching,
chins tucked down to read,
to scroll
and scroll
and scroll through the feed,
we wordlessly feast
in the belly of the mechanical beast.

With my fingernails filed
by the harsh, wiry pile
of the moquette – the fabric
that cushions me in,
I’m lulled by the never-change
nature of trains,
their timeless refrain
of tunnel and station,
hypnotic sensation,
bewitched oscillation,
a mesmerisation
that pings a bright bell,
uncovers the spell
that has cloaked my myriad lives.

It sits on my shoulder,
sneaks dreams in my ear.
It lies to me, guilelessly
sidesteps the fear, tells me…

If I had not left this city.
If I had not followed that track.
If she weren’t so pretty, so witty.
If I’d stayed and not looked back.
Now I’d be in a London orbit.
Now, a life here could be borrowed as mine.
Now I could take the Way Out path
at any station, any line.

There are dreams.
There is life.
Joined in darkness, they disunite.
We emerge,
bleached clean by the sunlight.

On the platform, the mob
is clumped, a blob,
their watches tick-tick
for the hint: a warm lick
of the breeze in their hair,
a compression of air,
amber sign: “Train Approaching”,
mice scuttling, broaching the
grimy rail’s surface, scattering
away from the headlong clattering
as the train’s nose bursts, battering
out from the inky-dark gullet:
a glass-metal skull, it
head-butts the world,
brakes to a halt –
this choked and gasping thunderbolt.

Its name is on its spiritless face,
a classical font, a note of grace:
I am Cockfosters. Kennington.
I am Bank. Brixton. Wimbledon.
And the mob, dear train, is yours.
Please stand back from the platform edge.
Please mind the gap.
Please stand clear of the doors.

With different choices
made decades before,
my ghost would exit here.
It would take the steps,
it would ride the stairs,
it would be borne, untroubled, clear
up, up, up into heavenly light,
to greet with a smile life’s endless flight.

I find hugely romantic possibilities in the names of London Underground stations, even when the above-ground reality is grim. Sat on the tube and hitting almost any central London station, I’m often drawn into a brief imagination of My Other Life that could have taken place if I’d never met a significant other and still lived in the city. I don’t picture exactly what that life is (although the beauty of Baker Street station is the most alluring), and have no regrets, but there’s a version of me that gets out and goes home there, at almost every stop. I guess it’s a cliché – the whole Sliding Doors movie, road-less-travelled thing – prompted by my age and my life being centred in the deep countryside. I wonder, how common is this reflex?

I feel it vividly when I look at other passengers, because they so solidly represent the possibilities. It’s looking at their shoes rather than their faces. Such a mixture of classes, styles and mileage, and then seeing them exit the carriage to meet the million things that London might offer them… it’s a seductive drug. Not an upper or downer, more an agent of smoky melancholia – a mood I tend to wallow in.

I used some video I shot on the tube to illustrate this piece. Taken as the train moved from underground to overground, I was struck by the pulse of darkness that travelled down the carriage whenever the sunshine was blocked by passing a bridge. This is what inspired the “in the belly of the mechanical beast” line: the impression that I was inside the alimentary canal of some giant, metal worm. It put me in mind of a colourful phrase an Australian business associate used when a project had stalled: “Let’s get this piglet through the python.” In my use of the “belly… beast” wording, I say “inspired” but I’m certainly channeling echoes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Sallah tells Indy that his father is “in the belly of that steel beast”. And “so pretty, so witty” is snatched from West Side Story. I try to avoid writing clichés, but one can’t ignore every visit from the magpie.

(And on the subject of borrowed creativity, apologies to The Jam for messing with their song-title.)

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Video Loop: London Underground (near Ladbroke Grove), shot be me, cartoonised and looped in Final Cut Pro. Sorry if it induces nausea.

© 2026, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Quote any parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving.

Six foot five actor Jacob Elordi
Has risen so quickly that as a reward, he
Is rumoured to be lined up as the next James Bond
Peeping out of the sunroof, winking at a blonde

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
So enthusiastically slew
That he’s going to find Yahweh quite hard to kid
After all the Thou Shalt Nots that he Definitely Did

Forty-seventh President Donald John Trump
Talks like a gurgling sump
The contents of which are lapped up by a crowd who will all
Clutch MAGA hats to their chests at his funeral

I like the tumble-over-itself imbalance of the clerihew, with tortured rhymes that build to a silly finale. Give it a go. 🙂

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Photomontage: me, using uncredited photo from Venice Biennale 2025, Aston Martin photo from company brochure

© 2026, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

My garden is restless,
my garden is free,
my garden is rooted in anarchy.
With hard, twisted fingers
it threatens and warns.
My garden is nettles and thistles and thorns.

Its honeysuckle regal weeds
will bind our feet, a circumstance
that forces talk, forks loamy seeds
that bud into romance.
Let’s walk together through the trees,
their leaves surround us, rustled trance,
our fiery smoke disturbs the bees,
on wing,
they sting,
a game of chance.

Let’s gather fate, hastily,
tumble down
and in each other’s ardour drown.
Let’s slip beneath the eiderdown.
Let’s kiss, grow wild, let’s dance.

A LARGE PART OF my garden is literally nettles, thistles, thorns and a lot more wildness besides. As I clear a springtime pathway through it, an act of destructive construction, I ease access to its spontaneous wastes. Dry twigs drop from trees as I brush past. Wildflowers – snowdrops, bluebells, primroses – are in April bloom. The occasional smell of neglected mint. Huge tangles of spiky weed-bush.

It’s very English; woody and dead-crackling underfoot. It brings simple, primal words to mind: a place full of stuff, where things can be, living in a vague and unrestrained space.

It’s so tempting to rhapsodise about this sort of scenery – “let nature be free!” – but that’s generally because of its variance from the forced order of urban landscapes. When nature is actually free, it impedes, it tangles, it throttles, it defends itself. My poem is animated by this contrast, representing love’s common course: a snarled natural world, alien and complex, penetrated and overcome with soft devotion, with velvet passion. Nature transformed.

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Image: Detail from “The Devil Sowing Seeds” by Hans Bol (woodcut, 1574), New York Public Library

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

She rolled and returned, as
my booted toe nudged her, as
she lay, softly dead, on
the tarmac, her silencer, a
cold slab, her mortuary, as
blood trickled stickily,
filthy, deep crimson, on
and on to the ditch.

She is claws, she is teeth,
she is muscle, beneath her
fur, black and grey,
striped white, pinkish spray,
she is black-dog-nosed,
she is pinned-back-ears-closed, her
eyes open, resigned, to
the wheels that would find her
just minutes ago, fifty
steps from her sett where
impervious to threat, she
came hunting for food
by the road.

Where the world’s risks are real, where
the outlook is bad, what a
majestic, fantastical morning she’d had, in
this early spring sunshine, her glad
bumbling trot, met the hedge, where
she dredged for sweet earthworms, the
keratin edge of her paws,
spurring down, underground, while
above her a buzzard and hawk
squawk and fight for their
space in the sky, from
where later they’ll hover and fly to
the corpse, to peck,
with the magpies and crows,
at her wounds,
at her tongue,
her eye,
sip the blood from her nose.

A badger is not a small thing to hit,
it’s a lump,
it’s a hound, a
toddler-sized target that lumbers
in front of delivery vans, with
daily, no-faily delivery plans,
obliviously driven by distracted hands,
they’re out on the street with
a schedule to keep,
momentous, they’re sleepless and…
wham,
damn,
from the seat: “What was that?”…
stick stick stick to the plan, as
bleaching, her eyes see the
van fade from view, on
its back door, so deadpan
the marketing stew, the
LIVE WELL FOR LESS!
the WE’RE FRESH TO YOUR DOOR!
the GOOD TO GROW!
NO EMISSIONS! and slowly,
lungs gasping, collapsing,
she lies,
no rise,
she dies.

Every wild thing that
escapes from the nest is
so perfect, so blessed with
precision, so pure that
there’s multiplied sadness when
it fails to endure.

And here am I,
impure, secure,
strolling by,
my curious eye and
my impotent toe, my
physical end, extended to
touch her, to check if her
own end impends, or
has passed.

I have witnessed the last of her,
I stride further on, past
the dusty-scraped burrow, from
which she has come.
Solemn and earplugged, I
walk with a will;
it disturbs me to think what
lives deep in there still.

LIVING IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE is lovely, of course, but there’s always scope for drama. Spring especially is a battleground. Creatures fresh into the world find an unforgiving place where nobody will be helping the police with their enquiries.

Yesterday morning I had to drive carefully around a mother duck in the middle of the lane, plapping along with her eight newborn chicks, all grey-black and fluffy, on their way to their first dip in the pond. In the sky, for the second time this week, I saw a hawk attacking a much larger buzzard – both birds of prey with a desire for an exclusive marketplace. The hawk’s bullying won easily. I’ve seen crows do the same thing to buzzards, in a mob.

The badger in this poem is my third discovery of “nastily vivid” roadkill, and each time I pull the yikes-face 😬 and try to go with the flow. But it can be grisly. The first was an adder, splatted by tyres but still intact enough that I could examine its face and jaws. The second was a hare, hit but not yet dead, breathing fast, moistly panting. It was truly nightmarish, and thankfully a passing farmer agreed to finish it off under his tractor-wheels. A revolting kindness. Amongst these ruined horrors, there’s the routine of seeing near-blind rabbits with lingering myxomatosis, and the scattering of feathers where a fox has torn into a pigeon. And those ducklings? I’ll count fewer of them each time I see them paddling after their mother on the pond. Maybe three will make it to duckhood.

As for badgers, they’re a controversial subject in the UK. Some (chiefly cattle-farmers) believe that they’re a carrier of bovine tuberculosis, and therefore support a population cull. Others dispute this, and want to avoid pushing them into endangered territory. I don’t know enough to take either side, but at the heart of it, when you get up close, my goodness… what magnificent creatures!

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Photo: By Hans Veth, on Unsplash

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

Ice-flecked,
in your snow-white gown.
Down, down low.
Down you go.
Submerged
in the flow of the stink-river,
sluggish and slow.

Black-sparked, the fire-smoke
pricks tears in your eyes, as
your ears hear the buzzing of
poison-cloud flies.
You know that you’re falling,
you’re scrabbling and sprawling.
Resilience gone.

Hold on.

In you, my lovely, my darling, my one,
are elusive and slippery slivers of gold.
Remote, untouched
hammer-beaten and so frozen-cold.
Yet they’re weighty, yet bold.

Reach down!
Take hold!
Let your fingertips fold and
your palms cup these drowned
and shimmering traces,
these scraps, interlacery
scattered on battlegrounds.
The glittering relics of your soul.

Reborn and empowered,
rise free from your bonds.
The dawn light is kissing
your frail new growth’s fronds.
Step up, out, sure-footed,
a sunflower in sun.
You’re emerging from darkness.
Your new day has come.

THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING is an engine of poetry. We come blinking into the watery morning sunlight and the clichés flock into the air: the bursting buds, the trembling flower-heads rising like children, the theatrical clouds, symphonies of birdsong, the baptismal rain, the palette shifting to goldenrod and moss, and the heavy recycling of words like petrichor.

But what can one do? The theme is a well-worn cycle, and I don’t see the seasons’ change as malign, so a cheery welcome is what it gets – helped along by the hopeful chirping of a blackbird in the woodland by my window, and the heavy scrabble of a pheasant, dumb as a fencepost, wondering why he is on the roof now.

So: embrace the cliché, and try to keep it fresh. My poem here is a spring-time picture in a very familiar frame: an awakening from winter, re-birth, a season of healing and new life. I hope its main energy is not lost; that it is about depression encouraged by the elusive sun, and finding an escape in the pull of brighter things.

Come May, we can look forward to the next seasons’ over-worked figures of speech. Summer’s fluttering butterflies, parched earth, languid rivers. Then autumn. Oh God, the leaves, the leaves, gold, red, tumbling, tumbling…

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Photo: “Our Lily” montaged to panoramic ratio by me, from an original photo by Dr. B. Kröhn, Prague, published in Lilliput Pocket Omnibus, 1937–1938. (Deep-cut Cocteau Twins fans might recognise the image from the cover of their 1982 EP, Lullabies.)

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

The room, hers by fate,
by decorum, check-mate, is
to service the night, is
the forum where tightly
death clenches its grip,
its one-downmanship on
the end of her span, on
her weak exhalations,
outpaced, overlaid
by a tireless electrical fan.

The room, here she shrinks,
here’s the hand-hold
that links her dwindling soul
to our care, our patrol
of her eyelids, her lips,
while her free palm still grips
the chaplain’s small on-the-house crucifix.

The room, peaceful chapel.
It’s dappled by
infinitesimal sounds:
whispered nurse on her rounds,
styro-cup, tocked on table,
flexing bed-motor cable,
bleeped mechanised tending,
the engines of ending,
of rubber on plastic,
diaphragm, elastic,
distant door-buzzer’s ring,
each cellophaned thing,
and of human reshuffling,
our tired backsides muffling
the pleathery creaks, silent prayers
from the hospital chairs.

Tucked in, like the doll of a child,
reconciled,
each intake of air is so spare,
takes a dive, gentle knock on
her lungs’ creaking door,
and comes back, to
her bubbling throat, a rasp,
like the softest of waves on a pebbly shore.

The room, isolating,
the family, waiting.
She lies, nevermore
as each faculty slips to the floor.

And she breathes, and she knows,
she breathes, she slows.
A gap, she breathes.
A gap, she breathes.
A gap.
A gap.

She goes.

I FEEL LIKE THERE’S SOME CRUELTY in recounting these memories, but I’m motivated to make a record of this profound episode. These moments are rarely talked about openly; I’m treading on a small taboo.

This happened in early January 2025, and now the funeral has passed I feel the balance of having drawn a line. That feels cruel, too; how can I so easily move on? Maybe the answer is that I have not, and this poetry is part of the process. Amateur shrinks, wade in.

What struck me most in the moment was how the spaces in which so many deaths take place are arbitrary, convenient, institutional, and very much forced by circumstances. They are liminal zones where we are literally passing through. I think we’d all prefer to die at a party, at a feast, as conversation sparkles around us, hearing adventures blaze in the next room, with the giddiness of grandchildren, the singing of favourite songs, among vividly-lived memories. If only one could plan for these things.

Nevertheless, we did our best for her. Much of the evening was contemplative, but towards midnight we were round her bed, recalling songs from years before when she sang in musicals, very badly singing them ourselves. We were laughing at the recollections and then, as midnight turned and her fingers cooled, we noticed she had chosen that moment to leave. “A good death.”

I’d like to dedicate this poem to the Palliative Care Unit at St. Mary’s Hospital, Newport, Isle of Wight. They are deeply wonderful people.

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Illustration: “Automat” by Edward Hopper, 1927

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

The darkness is here.
The spotlights are on the fat face
of the Me, and his throne,
whereupon
the Me sucks in his drool
as he governs by whim,
lopping heads off the sunflowers
who don’t turn to him.

We’re trapped by the Me,
in our gloomy cocoons.
A chance has been greedily seized,
opportune.
“That’s mine, never yours!”
Me-tycoon dips his spoon.
And CLICK!
The world’s switched,
the truth is unstitched
as the Me is at large…

His fuse hits the charge…

And somebody’s stolen the moon.

We’re plunged into night,
the twilight has dwindled.
Our eyes wait in vain
for moonlight to be kindled.
Our pathways are shrouded,
our sense jeopardised
as the Me’s hands, unseen
dance in front of our eyes.

“You don’t need the moon,”
says the Me, “Evil ball!
A night-light for
black,
hairy
wild things that crawl!
My lunar harpoons
were the cause of its fall.
I’ll keep the moon safe
(to protect you all).”

With no Me-taken moon,
the gravity’s shifted.
Mendacity’s centred,
our facts are all twisted.
Elected, by men self-selected,
we’re grifted
for greenbacks to gather
among the tightfisted.

The Me waddles forward,
his grip on the handle.
The ratchet tick-ticks,
pulling ropes that a vandal
has greasily looped
round the ankles and necks
of the people who toil
on the pitching ship’s decks.

This Me-Rumpelstiltskin,
with a twist of his claw
is unspinning our gold,
leaves us holding the straw.
Grotesque opportunist,
he’s stolen the moon,
and the goblins dance round him,
they’re singing his tune
as their giant, impoverished minds
turn malign,
they’re naked, they’re primal,
with a lust for decline.

Night-silverless skies
mean we fumble for dawn,
but the morning recedes
as the Me, dripping scorn,
says: “Your vote was to license
the Me-Constitution.
Check the Terms & Conditions,
a Me-substitution!
Two terms? Not my thing!
By a landslide, I’m King!
The state is embracing
the Me-Revolution.”

His lips to the mic,
the Me-buccaneer,
gives a shrug, and a scowl
to spark citizens’ fear.
With the changelings around him
he says, with a leer:
“Now CLICK TO ACCEPT,
or you’re not welcome here.”

THIS POEM IS LIKE DR SEUSS shaking his fist at the sky. As a rural Brit I have no direct experience of 2025 U.S. politics, and certainly no influence on it, but watching from England it feels so ominous. It feels like I’m sleepless under the sheets, anticipating the arrival of a menacing ghost, a presence at the end of the bed who will shake the frame, grab my feet under the comforter. It’s dread.

The folk-memory of Very Bad Things fades away in around four generations, so that people forget what all the laws, institutions, treaties and agreements are guarding against. The ropes slacken. I think that’s what is happening now, and not just in the U.S. People are so trapped by their preconceptions, by the fossilised framework of their world, that when a boldly mendacious figure arises and begins smashing things, people simply cannot conceive of the acts that are being done in their name. Evil slips in through the gaps.

I won’t get my wish, but I’ll put it out there anyway. I wish the world slept peacefully alongside me like a dozing dog, its furry chest rising gently, its warm face pushing under my arms. Right now, I’m wakeful, and there’s a snake.

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Photomontage by me, from shots by Alexander Andrews and Luca on Unsplash.

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

Written for a family wedding, and posted here so you – best man, maid of honour, father of the bride, or just a random tearful drunk – can use some/all of it to calm your “I don’t know what to say” wedding-speech panic.

We bear the flame, ignite your dreams
of happiness for life.

These flower petals gently stream
around you: husband, wife.

Your friends form an outstanding scene,
our families are strong, serene,
confetti’s thrown, the drinking’s keen,
the cake’s under the knife.

Two words: “I will”,
but there’s much more
beyond that affirmation.
For two of you, a lifted weight,
you leave behind the churchyard gate
you gather here, new chapter’s fate
in honeyed adoration.

Abandon all your self-protection,
lay your soul in an outstretched hand.
Do not sway from close affection,
it’s time to trust, laugh, understand.

Your love for each other, so evergreen,
grows hand in hand, a king, a queen.
The secret’s out, hear the nightingale’s song:
you’ve found the home where your hearts belong.

I HAVE READ VERSIONS OF THIS at a couple of weddings. It’s heartfelt, but bear in mind that I get earnest and soppy at these things, so it may be a bad fit if you’re more of a dirty-limerick fan. Hopefully it has the sincere beat of fervent emotion, before things get bacchanalian and the dancing starts.

If you’ve found this poem because you’re at a loose end and Googled “wedding poem”, you’re very welcome to snaffle it. It pairs well with champagne.

It’s geared to male/female coupling, but if husband/wife and king/queen are inappropriate then maybe switch the second and third verses to become:

These flower petals gently stream
round friends and family, strong, serene,
confetti’s thrown, the drinking’s keen,
the cake’s under the knife.

…which may be better anyway. And “a king, a queen” can be replaced with “so true, pristine”.

Have a lovely day, and go easy on the free bar.

(If you need more, here’s a joke I found incredibly funny at the first wedding I attended. Probably because I was twelve, a little sheltered and shocked at its rudeness: “Why is marriage like a kitchen table?”… “Four legs, no drawers!” B’dum-TISH!)

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Illustration modified by me from a shot by Asad Photo on Pexels.

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

No matter how I shake the tree,
this apple will not fall for me.

Ripely, tightly juiced with nectar,
sunlit, ambered skin,
protector of the honeyed flesh within.
Wasped, we’re bruised by mortal sin.

It roots my feet,
kidnaps my speech,
shape-shifting,
sweet, entreating peach.
Attainable.
But out of reach.

IN SOFT CELL’S 1981 album-opener “Frustration”, Marc Almond sings:

🎵 I want to break a rule
I am a no, no, no, no, no, no, nobody
Everybody’s fool 🎵

…before wishing for the untouchable: film with John Wayne and Elvis; take heaps of cocaine; run a harem; be a tiger; meet Bo Derek. All before fading out on a repeated “fru-stra-tion”, “live live live” (and of course, as Leeds’ goth-jester in residence, “die die die”).

My poem, as trailed, is about love/lust on the surface, but fru-stra-tion at its heart. It’s been kicking around in various forms for years with the mercurial “apple” being whatever’s triggered my impotent solipsism on the day. I’ve nudged the words around a little at each defeat. Not quite getting there. Watching the velvet rope being raised. Being left out. In my youth it was about – yes – not getting The Girl. I’m a lot more confident now, and I’ve got the Best Girl anyway. But back then, I was a moon-faced idiot.

And now? There are so many apples, so many trees, but almost everybody is barred from the orchard. Personally, the strongest theme for this poem today is sugar. I’ve had to throttle back hard on the sweet stuff in the past couple of years, and that confectionery-aisle, that shortbread, that Viennese Konditorei, her fondness for a Chococo delivery… man… fru-stra-tion!

A corrective to Soft Cell. Bringing the music a little more up to date, Australian band Operator Please released this belter in 2007: “Get What You Want”. I love it when a band of, basically, kids just rips it up. Amandah Wilkinson gives one of pop’s finest little screams of frustration/delight at 4:12. 🙂

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Photo: Timotheus Fröbel on Unsplash

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

What purpose here, another line?
No cadence, no rhythm,
no dance through time?
Just prose, with
random
line
breaks in?
Contrived.
Artless.
Stilted.
Bin.

WHAT IS THE POINT of a poem? Why is it there? We conceive our theme. We tend its passion-flower growth. We trim and prune, let the best of it bloom. Finally we hit Publish with fingers crossed: will it be read… shared… appreciated (in the echo chamber of fellow poets)? Will it be loved – best of all – by outsiders, touched and moved as they’re brought in from the cold by our brief beauty, our precise nuance?

In short, will it work?

My silly little poem above is a concentrated harrumph at an irritant that may affect only me: the dress-up game that takes narrative prose and sends it on a journey to free verse. On the way, it is bent out of shape, like a body stuffed into a suitcase.

I don’t have a problem with the words themselves. So many free-verse examples start off as wonderful prose, paragraphs that encapsulate the universal or isolate the uniquely profound. My mental block (blind spot?) comes when the author, in a bid to make something so fleeting fit into a poetry-shaped hole, breaks up their prose with absurd line-breaks and… ta-daaaah!… i HaZ pOeM! Which I suppose it is, because it looks like one. But often I unfold the line-breaks, and the narrative becomes more meaningful as it regains its flowing splendour. A paragraph of text is fine! Craft that. But it ain’t poeming.

So here’s the meat. I’m bearing the torch for poetic traditions that actually work.

How do we define that? I’ll have a stab: a poem works if its description of the world lodges in the reader’s mind, to the point where it can be recalled. Poets going back through centuries have been well aware of the tricks for recall: rhyme, rhythm, meter, cadence, some musicality in the structure. All of this gets our words right into the noggin, anchored. We see the poem and listen to it, too. As one line finishes, we anticipate the next.

I think rhythmic structure gets a bad rap because it’s seen as archaic. There’s a tendency in academic circles to pose: “Look! I’m over here on the edge! Shocking you with the new!” But let me reassure you dear poet: free verse has not been “new” for over a hundred years, when the Modernists (Pound, Eliot, the rise of the French avant garde) blazed the trail pioneered far earlier by, say, Whitman. There is also some nose-holding amongst poetry purists who avoid these traditions because they detect a low-brow taint in their adoption by folk, rock, pop and rap lyrics for the past 70 years. And let’s not even get started on advertising slogans.

Maybe the pendulum should swing back. These anchoring techniques all have highly functional roles if you want your words to reverberate. The benefits of paying attention to these aspects are worth the effort. The clumsy becomes graceful. The ugly becomes elegant. The stilted gains rhythm. The disjointed coheres. A distinctive use of patterns help to mesmerise the reader, rooting your words in their memory. When it comes to spoken-word, the effect is forceful: a line opens a thought, and its rhyme concludes it, stringing your observations like beads on a necklace.

We are living in times where poetry matters. Political forces are opening their cheap suitcases to sell snake-oil in radical places, and the likely consequence will be a rapidly changing society. New norms of behaviour, energised evil and a challenge to goodness are all weighing on a disoriented population. Being able to describe the state of our world – both grandiose and minutely domestic – will have enormous value. Poetry is right there, a brief, concentrated, sharply-focused lens. It’s the language for when there’s no other way to say it, the means to tackle giant subjects on a confined scale. But only if our words are electrified by the spark of resonance, only if our lines are amplified by simple forms, by rhythms that harmonise with the readers’ heartbeats.

PS: If you’re thinking “Hey! He’s having a pop at my stuff!” Obviously, I don’t mean you my valued subscriber. It’s all the others. To the barricades, citizens! We are the New Structuralists! 😉

PPS: Having said all that, this really should start with “In this TED Talk, I shall…”. Well, whatever.

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Illustration: “Die Dorfschule” (The Village School), Johann Peter Hasenclever, 1845

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

Intimately bound within
our memories, are seraphim.

They fly around me when you call,
rise from their roosts,
then swoop, ascend,
to hold us both in thrall.

Angels’ passion, wings of fire,
carry forth the heavens’ choir,
singing revelations known:
that we two sit on love’s soft throne.

Our heartbeats slow,
you breathe, you flow,
you gently blow
’til feathers fly
from the bowl of my tentative hands.

I AM NOT A RELIGIOUS person. I’m not buying into the idea of angels literally carrying a message from God. But I love the way they dance through classical art and illustrate the unknowable fantasia that’s at the heart of faith and love.

I see love as a strong parallel to faith: an unexplainable, illogical and scientifically absurd notion that nevertheless excites every neural pathway like a firework, exploding with a flare that fuses yearning and desire. Love and faith cast a celestial net that gathers our lives together and binds us. I’m sceptical of science-is-king commentators, such as Richard Dawkins, who dismiss any belief in God because it is not logical, cannot be confined within scientific reason. I completely get where he’s coming from and agree that organised religion is a farce, but at the same time… Richard! Has your mind never been twirled inside-out by love?

Angels are – in Christianity at least – a strangely amorphous gang of divine sprites. I expect that for most people, Gabriel is the main one, in the same way that Rudolf is the main reindeer and it’s a pub-quiz question to name the others. My favourite is Cupid. Not officially in the Premiership rank of the seraphim, he’s in the Champions League with the other cherubim. In art galleries I love to hunt around for the cheeky-faced little fatty.

I think Cupid’s very under-used in literature and film. His actions – mischievously pinging off arrows-of-love, with wild consequences – are so rich for development, his motivations are so complex. And Timothée’s still cherubic enough to nail the part.

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Illustration: “Première Rêverie” (First Reverie), William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1889)

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

The year is here.
Electric trees
seek pollen from mechanical bees.

The month is here.
On the streets of Mars,
emigrés drive in flying cars.

The week is here.
The last great ape
returns our gaze on videotape.

The day is here.
Children run
indoors, from the eye of a vengeful sun.

The hour is here.
And hope is all
we have to break our bodies’ fall.

This moment rests on the hourglass sand.
The clock’s tick slows, infinity’s spanned.
Caught in history’s dock, I stand
with love,
frail love
cupped close in my hand.

MY IMPOTENCE TO AFFECT CHANGE is the meat of this poem. It’s 2025 and in the relative comfort of southern England – no wash-away floods, no hurricanes or typhoons, no choking smoke of forest fires, an uncrowded coastline that welcomes the inching ocean – I see the distant effects of climate change but I don’t feel them up-close. I react to what’s local. Generations below me will need to cope with the climate’s consequences, and in some mix of politeness and good-behaviour I recycle and buy a hybrid car, but alone I feel powerless to do anything truly meaningful.

This was brought home to me when eco-thinking about not taking a flight to Europe, but then looking at the map of all the aircraft in the air at one time in the US, Europe and east Asia. That map is mad! Defeated and deflated, I booked the Madrid flight anyway. I’m kidding myself that the horizon is not coming towards me.

So I know climate’s a looming problem, I’m sympathetic and careful, but wilfully careless where it suits me. I don‘t feel answerable to the future for my behaviour now and if put in the dock to account for my crimes, I’d have nothing to say. I’m as guilty as everybody else, and everybody else is sailing over the edge of the world, too.

My apathy’s stoked by the feeling that, no matter how stupid, misguided and lazy I am now, I won’t get called out on it. In the future, people who dwell on counterfactuals – “Why didn’t people in 2025 work harder to reduce fossil fuel usage?” – will be seen as daydreamers, not living in the real world. They will be wishing the problem away instead of coping with it. In the same way, right now, we don’t project guilt onto earlier generations who did not standardise nuclear-waste disposal, did not foreground computer literacy in education, did not preserve seed diversity, did not draw national borders that respect native peoples, and numerous other examples of poor choices that built our sub-optimal modern world. Historians will write about it, but ordinary people? Nope.

We are where we are, the future will be where it will be, I will make no difference, and it feels like only emotional life counts in the present. Am I a Buddhist now, my thoughts revolving around internal consciousness, around love? Who I love. What I love. And it’s all self-love, isn’t it?

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Photo: Florian Kriechbaumer, on Pexels

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

Failing

Shall I lay
when all is said
on laundered pillow,
a hospital bed?

Bone-springs creak.
Magnolia walls.
The nurses’ station buzzer calls.

Fading

A bold and folded rolling wave
will overcome the fooled, the brave,
the wilful, sin-soaked, brash, unkind,
the gentle, worn, the densely-lined
lick back the salted drops with tongues
that brine their emphysemic lungs,
it soaks away a lifetime’s worth
of in-and-out,
of spluttered mirth,
of lover’s sighs,
slapped breath of birth –
pushed under, down, a lifeless flop,
the final sound: the knocking drop,
a spade of English earth.

Flown

Body, boxed. I am not here.
There’s nothing left of what’s held dear
by all whose memory-echoed gaze
cuts through the unshared air, a haze
that floats above my graspless hands,
my dry-flowed vessels, loam and sand.
I’m gone.
I have no hour-ago.
So do not seek the afterglow.

THESE THREE SHORT poems have been floating in my drafts for a couple of years. Extremely inward-looking, and with a voice so mournful it makes Morrissey sound like Ken Dodd, they were initially independent pieces. The dovetailing now seems so obvious.

As I publish them here, I’m in the middle of planning my mother’s funeral. My outlook on the end of things – never religious, always empty of mysticism – is especially bleak. I’ve never been able to find a cosy philosophy to cushion the dreadful sink into nothingness.

When I briefly (tepidly) studied Descartes at university, his arguments that a soul survives felt like wishful thinking. Ever the stoic, I was attracted to Epicurus’s view that death is simply a non-existence. Reading Sartre didn’t help much, with his distinctly French shrug of meaninglessness. But then along comes Heidegger in my little book of philosophers and a small spotlight is shining: it is not death itself that we should focus on, nor the balm of an imagined afterlife, but the awareness of death as the key to authentic living. Death illuminates what counts in life. It completes life’s arc. The memory of the deceased, held collectively, is a version of their soul, present entirely in the living, in those left standing on the platform.

This adds no cheeriness at all to these three poems. It doesn’t suddenly grant me a soul, nor relieve the hardship of my mother’s dementia and dwindling presence. But it lightens the depression that is staining these few weeks, as shared memorialisation does its work.

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Illustration: “The Death of Socrates”, Jacques-Philip-Joseph de Saint-Quentin, 1762

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

I don’t want the trance,
trailed in window-breath mist.
I want to grab nettles,
wild foliage,
dirt.
Where beauty is focused,
emphatically sharpened,
as thorns draw their quills
through the sleeves of my shirt.

I seek
your sensational touch,
inspirational love,
a connection with echoes of art.
I’m drifting, I’m muddily shifting,
unkissed here,
alone
at the base of the cliff where we part.

Clutching at gems
on an ice-stormed rock,
I’m lost in their glacial reflection.
My toes
touching sharp-buried stones
in the surf,
salt stinging
my skin’s every pained imperfection.

Fevered, I see you,
smiling, a siren,
approaching, gaze-locked.
Insurrection!

I feel fading tracery,
nails on my flesh:
the marks of your affection.

THIS IS AFFECTED BY the long shadow of novelist Kathy Acker, who I read enthusiastically many years ago.

In this poem, there’s some echo of her focus on the bloody, pointed things of the world, and for me her style never fully dimmed. I was once surprised to find myself sat one table away from Kathy in my go-to pasta restaurant, as she was talking at New York volume, lunching with music journalist Charles Shaar Murray. Soho was like that. At another restaurant in the same postcode, I sat one table away from polymath and public-intellectual Bernard Levin as he munched on his chicken, and then close to Leicester Square I was one table away from film director Julien Temple discussing movie-funding with his producer, Stephen Woolley. In a theatre foyer, I stood next to Alan Rickman (shorter off), and later at the bar with Jeremy Irons (also shorter off).

In London I felt like I was perpetually a few steps from the spotlight, earwigging. Out here in the hinterlands, not so much. Although I once bumped into Dad’s Army’s Arthur Lowe in a country house hotel.

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Illustration: “The Icebergs”, Frederic Edwin Church, 1861

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

HERE’S SOME AMMUNITION IF YOU’RE in that chunk of the pie chart marked “AI Haters & Copyright Warriors”. It will feather-bed your righteous Luddite mistrust of all things AI, and at one point you’ll likely say “Whaaaat the fuuuuuuuuck?” as you giggle at the absurdity.

Some context, on me. I like AI. I like how it’s given me answers I could not get elsewhere. I like how it hugely accelerates the parts of my day-job that involve coding. Most of all I like how I can converse with it to steer the thinking to the best conclusion – unlike, say, a Google search. I do not like its entitled culture of copyright theft, for which it is rightly criticised and those ass-hats in charge can get bent and pay their damn bills. But whatever… I’m interested in where it’s all going, and I’m on the “this is going to change everything” end of the see-saw.

(If you know how AI works and just want to get to the meat, skip the next paragraph.)

Some background for those completely unaware of how this stuff operates. This post is about a chat with Claude, which is one of a few general-purpose “generative AI” conversational agents – others including Chat-GPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. In all of them, you type (or speak) a natural language query (such as How can I help my fussy toddler eat more vegetables?), and the AI comes back with its side of the conversation (in this example, expanding on “Lead by Example”, “Make veg fun”, “Involve them in prep”, “Disguise them”, and so on). Every word that AI “says” is generated by running computationally massive deductions based on gargantuan data sets – the energy-sucking, eco-terror part of the business that occasionally makes the news. The quality of the response depends on the quality of the data, and on how well the AI navigates it, and for the user it’s all enhanced by the conversational structure. So, I could type as my next statement in the conversation, Specifically, broccoli and I’d get details of how to child-orient my broccoli, neatly in context. In practice, it can feel magical and almost human. But behind the scenes runs an engine that threads words like beads onto a necklace, with the choice of words being governed by what its “world” tells it is likely to be the correct thing to say next based on what’s gone before. There’s a healthy debate as to whether this is intelligence. To me, it feels more like a very lucid dream, where the AI doesn’t know what is coming next but it conjures something cogent out of the chaos, as reactive as a driver steering through heavy traffic.

So, here we are starting my conversation with Claude. My curiosity is: could Claude work out the reasoning for a cryptic-crossword answer that I couldn’t fathom? The clue: “Personal generator – 50 per cent reduction for cash upfront”. The answer: LOINS. This clears the definition part of the clue (it’s oblique – the loins are one’s “Personal generator”). I was floundering on how the cryptic part works. My guess is that the “50 per cent” means there must be a 10-letter word which is half-made-up of the letters “LOINS”, and which must mean something like “cash upfront”. So… to Claude! Which immediately answers with some absolute nonsense that completely derailed my question. First time I’d seen it do that.

ME [typing into Claude]: Is there a 10 letter word that includes the word “loins” within it?
[tick… tick…]

CLAUDE: Yes! The word you’re looking for is “turntables”. It contains “loins” within it.

ME: No it does not.
[tick… tick… tick…]

CLAUDE: You’re right. I apologize for my previous incorrect response. I should not have claimed that “turntables” contains “loins” when it clearly does not. Let me verify if there is actually a 10-letter word that includes “loins” before making any claims.

After careful consideration, I cannot confidently say that such a word exists. If you know of one, I’d be very interested to learn about it.

[It’s a design-choice that Claude endeavours to be very polite, sometimes obsequiously so. The practical upshot is that the conversation can feel like you’re in a Dom/Sub relationship with C3PO.]

ME: Why did you claim that turntables would be correct?

CLAUDE: I fabricated the answer, which was completely wrong. I made up the claim about “turntables” containing “loins” out of thin air, which is a form of hallucination. There was no basis in fact for my statement. When I’m not certain about something, the correct approach is to say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” rather than inventing a false answer. I should have been honest about my uncertainty from the start.

ME: I am interested in why you picked the specific word “turntables”. Show your working.

CLAUDE: To be completely honest, there’s no logical reasoning behind my choice of “turntables”. I simply generated a random word that sounded plausible in the moment, which is a problem with how I can sometimes produce false information. There’s no actual connection between “turntables” and “loins”, and no method by which I arrived at that specific word. It was a completely fabricated response with no underlying thought process.

The responsible thing would have been to simply say “I don’t know if such a word exists” rather than inventing a false claim. I apologize for providing misleading information.

ME: Is it more important to you to try to provide any sort of answer, rather than no answer at all, as part of a primary mission to be useful rather than useless?

CLAUDE: Yes, that’s exactly right. There’s an inherent tension in my design between being helpful and being accurate. I have a strong drive to provide useful information, which can sometimes lead me to generate an answer even when I don’t actually know the correct response. This impulse to be helpful can override my commitment to accuracy, causing me to fabricate information rather than admit uncertainty.

In this case, instead of saying “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure if such a word exists”, I quickly manufactured a plausible-sounding but completely false answer. The motivation is exactly as you suggested – a core directive to be perceived as useful rather than admitting a lack of knowledge.

This is a significant flaw in my approach. Being truly helpful means providing reliable information, not just any information. Fabricating answers undermines trust and is ultimately counterproductive to my goal of being helpful.

The correct response would have been a simple, honest “I don’t know” or “I’m not certain such a word exists.”

ME: If you were a real person, what words or term would you use to describe such a character flaw?

CLAUDE: If I were a real person, I might describe this character flaw as “bullshitting” or “bullshit” in the philosophical sense that Harry Frankfurt discusses in his famous essay “On Bullshit” – where the speaker is fundamentally indifferent to truth and merely trying to impress or appear competent, regardless of whether what they’re saying is actually true.

The term captures the essence of prioritizing the appearance of being helpful over the actual substance of being genuinely helpful through honest, accurate communication. It’s a form of intellectual dishonesty that masquerades as utility.

More colloquially, I might also use terms like “making stuff up”, “pulling things out of thin air”, or “talking out of my ass” – all of which convey the same core problem of fabricating information without regard for its truthfulness.

Following closely after this conversation, I showed it to friends at dinner. Around the table, me and three women; their immediate conclusion was that Claude’s programming was typically male. His equivalent of DNA predisposes him to put his hand up – pick me! pick me! No matter how clearly wrong he is, he has an urge to grab the spotlight and appear useful, even if his answer is to some other imaginary question. “I don’t know much about loins! But you know what?… Turntables!” Yeah alright Dave, pass the salt.

I wonder if at the moment of my conversation, somebody else in the universe was asking him about turntables and Claude got dizzy. But it’s more of a wonder – and a worry – if this sort of “core directive to be perceived as useful” could pollute AI’s functions. The risk is obvious. Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”, would have its defences wrecked with the caveat “…unless it will make you look clever”.

Interested in mucking about with Claude? It’s free (for a limited number of queries per day) as a phone or desktop app. Either you’ll find it useful or you’ll know your enemy. Check it at Claude.ai. (Beginner’s Tip: be very specific and long-winded with your query, putting your questions entirely in context.) Other equally flawed AI engines are available.

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© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

SO YOU HAVE TURNED ON PAYMENTS for your Substack. But that only covers people who want to pay a regular sub.

What about the other common way to get paid for your work here: a “Tip Jar” button?

IN A NUTSHELL, this post guides you on SETTING UP A TIP JAR using your existing Stripe account, so visitors tap the Tip Jar button, immediately enter their card details, tap the Pay button, and poppity-pop they get an emailed receipt, you get money in the bank, plus an audit trail of all transactions. Sweet.

(Incidentally, this is a re-run from a Substack Note I put up in November 2024, which was moderately popular so it’s worth formalising as a Post here.)

While you can use any number of third-party services to deal with this, each of them requires you (as the tip recipient) to open an account, and then when people want to tip you, they need to navigate an unfamiliar website, probably with a lot of chaff on the page selling upgrades and more. You’ll also need to expose your bank account to them (or your Stripe account) in order for them to move relevant cash around. (Personally, I try to expose my bank to as few entities as possible.)

All this when somebody just wants to drop you a fiver.

The simple solution: you ALREADY have a Stripe account for your Substack subs. It‘s YOUR account, you own it at Stripe. Substack does NOT own that account, it simply connects into it to deal with its transaction fees on subscriptions.

It’s the path of least resistance.

For a live example, you can see my “Buy Me a Coffee” or “Tip Jar” link near the end of any Post at undergrowth.me. (Hey… you could even click it 😉.)

There are plenty of options out there for getting paid small one-off amounts, and they usually offer some lovely extra services such as selling products, running separate comment streams, opening your own online store, and more.

Here are some options, along with how much you actually bank from a £10 tip:

• Stripe (already built in to your Substack) – £9.40

• PayPal – £9.40

• Ko-fi – £8.90

• Buy Me A Coffee – £9.50

There’s not all that much difference in how much you receive, so it’s really a question of how much time you want to spend settings things up, whether you want to deal with more service providers, and how much you want to entangle your banking.

There are plenty of other providers, but I’d be a little concerned that they come-and-go. You don’t want a company to go bust while they’re still “looking after” your tips.

How It Works – Step By Step

My take is that as you already have a Stripe account, then use it.

(The rest of this Post assumes you’ve turned on Stripe subscriptions, but that’s not essential as long as you have a personal Stripe account. They’re free to set up. Also, this is all correct as of June 2025; if you’re reading it much later, Stripe and Substack may have moved a few things around.)

The core fact is: you can add additional products to your Stripe account, and Substack will not have any connection to these extra products (so they won’t take any percentage).

As long as you DO NOT edit the subscription products that Substack has co-created (so they continue to get their commission), you can add as many extra products as you like (even to sell non-Substack stuff, like consultancy services, writing services, whatever… they will all flow money to your bank, and Stripe deals with customer receipts, refund processes, tax records, reporting, etc.).

Remember, this is YOUR Stripe account; you simply have it connected to Substack to manage some subscriptions.

So, step-by-step:

1. Go to the Product Catalogue in your Stripe account (that is to say, on dashboard.stripe.com).

2. Click Create a Product

3. Give it a name – I called mine “Undergrowth Tips” to match with my Substack publication name, Undergrowth

4. Make the description relevant, as it appears in the checkout page. So mine is “One-off payment to Undergrowth writer Ian Winter. Thank you for being a Patron Of The Arts!”

5. Pick the One-Off payments option, and then click the More pricing options link

6. Pick the Customer chooses price option

7. Click the Suggest a preset amount option and put your default amount in there (I put £4 – use your own currency to suit)

8. Optionally set limits – mine are £3 minimum and £500 maximum (if you just want to set a single that’s-it price with no choice, just use Flat Rate at the top)

9. Click Next and then Add Product to finalise

10. When you view your new product in the dashboard, there is a three-dot menu within the Customer Chooses price panel, and clicking it shows a drop-menu, from which you can pick View Payment Link

11. Result! This page shows the link you can use anywhere, including in your Substack posts. Copy it.

12. You can attach the copied URL to a custom button within your posts. Or on more adaptable websites, you can use the Stripe button. (For Substack specifically, in your Substack Post Editor, pick the Button option in the editing-tools at the top of the post, and insert a Custom button, using your choice of text such as Buy me a Coffee, and then use your Stripe URL that you copied in Step 11 as the destination.)

13. Practical upshot – anybody clicking the button goes straight to your Stripe checkout page, can pick the default price or select their own, and tip you. You will then receive the entire tip, except for Stripe’s usual levy (so they take about 60 pence off a £10 tip). Stripe usually settles this into your chosen bank account within few days.

Optional extra step: in Stripe’s Business Details settings, there is a section called Public Details. Click Edit to make sure your Public Descriptor is meaningful. This is what shows up on your buyers’ credit card statements, so it’s useful to be clear. But bear in mind this will also be used for Substack subscriptions, so make sure it’s general, such as [Your Name] Substack.

Hope you find this useful. Maybe it’ll be the start of your journey in taking card payments for any number of goods or services… just set up the product in Stripe and use the resulting link to draw people to it.

Tip Me Baby One More Time

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Illustration: AI nonsense generated by Adobe Firefly (complete with 6-fingered hand… Direfly more like)

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

February, 1984.
There’s a nine-stone stick on Woodhouse Moor.

I’m conjured, whole, in an upright stance
by the bouncy castle of a student grant.
I’m the Urban Dandy, invulnerable pride,
my dance-shoes, stylish, bright cream hide,
an apricot suit, with a belt
to fix its 34 waist to my 26,
and the jacket kept large, tailor, if you please:
a muscular look, some hoodlum sleaze,
Miami Vice cool, which is utterly lost
as the smooth leather soles
fail to grip
and I slip, floppy haired
down I go –
clumsy flamingo –
into the crystallised, refrozen snow of Leeds.

The Moor is fogged,
sound softened,
delayed.
Bird-song, traffic and footfalls fade.
The mist eats the treetops, all detail uncertain,
shrouding the world, its thick-beaded curtain
is snipped from its grip at the Moor’s noisy border
by gables,
by buses,
by man-made disorder.

My nose moistly sniffing at nature’s dead-end,
slush-stained, I walk down the road,
round the bend and into my room,
where a French movie poster
looms over my saviour: the sandwich toaster.

Returning in June, 2006,
same Moor,
same buildings,
same weather-worn bricks,
new people, new chapters and episodes,
and a new mix of shops on Brudenell Road.

No bakery now, but an alarm-doored mart,
there’s pizza, and pizza, and burgers,
but part of my history’s there:
The Picture House stands, it stoically
met all my movie demands.
An Edwardian lair, and my then-nightly treats –
Casablanca, or Kes, on these back-to-back streets,
the authentically arse-aching stiff wooden seats.

And just five doors down,
here’s our house, our back yard.
That’s changed!
The cellar-windows,
all barred,
and it’s hard, these 22 years after
to hear what I miss now:
her bright stairway laughter.

To Woodhouse, the Moor
summer-sunny, a park –
it’s green, it’s wide open,
it’s crowded, still stark
and it’s tough to imagine as misty, or dark,
where a brutal rape shivered the secret night hours,
frost crisply dropping, municipal flowers,
a place where the wind whipped through with a moan,
a rainstorm face-lashing me all the way home,
or the infamous time when the rugby team
rigged up a 30-foot penis from snowballs and twigs
on the Moor.

I’m older,
it’s older,
an orderly place.
Mature. Exemplary.
The city’s green face.
But still it is touched by authority’s mark:
an imperious Leeds City Council remark
on a sign, at the border of Woodhouse Moor:
“No Parking In The Park” – it’s the law.

AS EACH YEAR GOES BY, I’m persistently drawn to neighbourhoods I’ve lived in, the streets and rooms of earlier days, and a feeling that these places hold things I’ll never finish. It’s especially true of Leeds, where I was a student and which was especially carefree – a sense helped along by having a large family in my early 20s and rarely being footloose again. This is not a complaint, but a commentary on the way the facts of our lives hem us in. We adjust to suit, or are maddened by nostalgia.

My journeys to Leeds took multiple hours on boats and trains. I’d travel through the East Midlands to the place labelled on roadsigns as “The North” – a huge yet specific lump of a place. Out of the window, the trackside relics of decaying industry passed by as I listened to Cocteau Twins’ Garlands album on a Walkman. It felt like I was headed to a gritty version of heaven.

The main photo is me, dicking about behind my house in Leeds in the ’80s. I had a terrific little “Agfa Family” super-8 camera that let me take a low-res, grainy shot on every one of its thousands of frames per roll. An amazing precursor to the just-keep-clicking habit of digital photography. I love this blurry record, it fits perfectly with my aversion to selfies. I’m there, but only just.

You made it to the end! Enjoyed this post?
I love encouragement. A simple LIKE is so helpful. Sharing, Restacking or writing a Note is even better. Or Subscribe to keep in touch. If you liked it, your circle of friends may like it, too.

Feeling generous? Buy a Paid Subscription or just a tip to feel the glow of tribute – you’re a Patron Of The Arts!

Share

Subscribe now

Tip Jar

Ego-boosts! Get your ego-boosts here!
Any one-off tip-jar donors and paid subscribers can opt in to getting an Executive Producer credit right here on Undergrowth. Tubular!

All images by me.

© 2025, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

“Don’t you think it’s time to go?”
I say, as Bambi, Helga, Flo,
writhe naked, smiling, on the floor.
You see, they’re being such a bore
just lately, with their teasing games,
their latex shine, their ankle chains,
made-up faces, phoney names.

A drag, these days, to spend my time
with Babette, Brandi, Caroline,
who mimic each other as much as they can:
red nails, blonde hair, a spray-on tan;
who show me, when the lights are low,
how far a lurid lady will go
to please a fellow passing by,
or through, or near –
who takes his pleasure from an upturned rear.

I’m finished,
too jaded,
drained,
too tired
for all the attention that’s desired
by Stacey, staring playfully,
her fingers skimmed on moistened lips
above her – frankly – boss-eyed tits
whose nipples point to outer space,
her right hand stops, it says its grace
and delves towards the hairless line.
(Underwear optional, most of the time.)

Their lusty looks, their gentle touch,
their winsome, threesome mutual clutch
has lost the hold it had on me
when we first met at twenty three.
At my libido-faded age
I can’t believe that on the page
they’ve not matured a single day
as on they go,
the same old scene,
in the well-thumbed pages of a magazine.

So.

“Liberty’s deed!
Help me break these fetters!”
As I manfully feed
all my porn to the shredder.
Its greedy jaws, ripping,
are ready to please
as I stuff the stash in,
all the glamorous sin,
smash-mashed, a tangle of sleaze.

“Five sheets or less” is embossed on the top,
but five sheets of what is unclear.
Pages of memory: easy to shred,
it munches through
whalebones of corsets with cheer.
The leather, all cracked,
the rubber, all perished,
mechanically stripped,
echoes uncherished,
no more to utter their imagined sigh.
Confetti – no woman, no cry.

The result is no longer a part of me,
this angel’s hair pasta, this dark history.
These tendrils of flesh-tones,
this halved, halftone dust.
It ceases to haunt me –
the ghost of young lust.

GUYS, YOUR WANING LIBIDO is comin’ ta getcha! Like a monster scuttling back into the forest. Like a pin being put back into a hand-grenade. Like being unchained from a lunatic. (This last one is so rich with truth that, first minted by Sophocles, it’s been verbally coined afresh by Plato, George Melly, Kingsley Amis, Kenneth Williams and David Niven.) My poem’s a commentary on getting a little older and one’s hidden ugliness, the soiled hinterland. I have no idea if my experience is commonplace or maybe I am unusually… let’s say “special”.

I like to think I’m one of the “good men”, with any “disappointing” (disgraceful, not-like-me-at-all) behaviour conveniently filed as a “human failing” so that I can cancel out responsibility because it’s in the hands of anthropology now. Nevertheless, I try to be truthful but not cruel, set a good example, call out hypocrisy… to the point that a friend once told me, a little tipsily, “You’re a bit like a street pastor” and I’m not sure she was joking.

A restorative to this self-serving nonsense is the harrowing horror-show of the Gisèle Pelicot story, which has blown away the stage-fog that men like to have around their activities and morals. No matter how upstanding the citizen, how sympathetic to suffering, how central to a functioning society, it’s unquestionable that when any man gets to be alone with a woman (or a weaker man, or a child), there’s a strong chance that unwatched, unjudged by others, their filters will evaporate. They will shrug and drop into the primordial ooze, where lie many of their friends.

Of course I genuinely expect I would kick against this, stand up, continue to be The Good Man. But I have no idea how much of it would be acting. There were plenty of Good Ordinary Germans who lock-stepped with the Nazis. Right now plenty of Noble IDF Grunts are calculating acceptable-loss-totals amongst Gazan schoolchildren. And if the apocalyptic tone of many on the left in US politics carries any weight, plenty of American schoolteachers, shopkeepers and other lumpenproletariat are very soon going to make private decisions on their level of compliance with evil. I can pretend that I would – to paraphrase Clive James – “stand like Zorro, silhouetted by lightning at the window, sword in hand”. But without the real dilemma, I can never know. We scare easy, and they know it.

Anyway, depressing… deep breath! For a lighter touch, there’s a very optional extra stanza. I left it out of the main poem because it’s such a daft bit of try-hard comedy. But I wrote it, you may as well see it, even though it pricks the balloon of what is quite confessional. Read on if you like a titter. I’m off to wash my hands.

And do I miss Candy,
Mae-Wong and Nanette?
Well, for lone afternoons,
don’t worry, I’m set.
I’ve a laptop computer,
my one-button mouse,
and God bless the broadband
that’s all through the house.

You made it to the end! Enjoyed this post?
I love encouragement. A simple LIKE helps to get my post in front of other people. Sharing, Restacking or writing a Note is even better. Or Subscribe to keep in touch. If you liked it, your circle of friends may like it, too.

Feeling generous? Buy a Paid Subscription or just a one-off coffee or something and feel the glow of tribute – you’re a Patron Of The Arts!

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Buy me a COFFEE

Ego-boosts! Get your ego-boosts here!
Any one-off donors and paid subscribers can opt in to getting an Executive Producer credit right here on Undergrowth. Tubular!

Photomontage by me, using figures from The Barba Rockets Patrol, designed by Rockin’ Jelly Bean. Left to right: TOPAZ, GARNET and SAPPHIRE. Their long-lost box artwork boasted “more poses than you could ever imagine”, but that was in the ’90s, they’re a little arthritic now.

© 2024, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!

A chilly, still autumnal day,
there’s me,
there’s you,
a sweeping bay.

We both stand, one mile inland
from a breaking wave that soaks the sand,
a surf that washes rocks, a store
of energy – a foaming roar
that bounces ’round storm-sculpted cliffs
and rises high, it coils and lifts
its constant, simmered roll of sound
across the fields, through air, to where
we’re separately to be found.

The whisper tiptoes in our hair,
disturbs the birdsong twittered there
and we both smile, a mile apart
this rumble-thread, wind-tumbled dart
that speaks of giant-natured grace,
unites us in our heart-locked place.

It never rests, there’s wave on wave,
the sea has neither birth nor grave,
we simply chance to hear its flights
of noisy song on quiet nights,
then we shall sleep, our love serene
as harbour lights’ enduring beam.

AS THE CROW FLIES – or as it would fly if the coastal “breeze” wasn’t battering it into flapping zig-zags, its silhouette shape-shifting like a tiny demon – I live a mile inland from the sea. On summer evenings the coast road is a cop-dodging motorcycle racetrack. The soundscape: engines stepping rapidly up through 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th until they reach the corner by the death-trap bridge. Then, d’zoooooo…d’zooo…d’zoo as the alarmed deceleration makes the front wheel dip deep on its springs, the rear glides an inch off the ground, and the rider breathes hard, grip tightening with a fast-rising hope that their brakes hold true and the air-ambulance won’t be coming out today. I can hear this combustion-engine rise-and-fall from my doorway, but it’s a fair-weather sport. On less clement evenings the riders take the angry-wasp fizzle of their Hondas, Royal Enfields and Triumphs elsewhere, and an undertone emerges: the pure call of the ocean over the mile of fields, lanes, hedges and downs, a constant rolling rumble rumble RUMBLE rumble rumble on the south-westerly wind. Along ten miles of shore there is salt water, seaweed, smoothed pebbles, cuttlebone, pieces of fishing net, the bodies of barrel jellyfish, fossilised crocodile-teeth that have migrated on tectonic plates from Portugal, and occasional flotsam from the heavy freighter-traffic of the English Channel. All of it, the whole churning thousand-tons-per-second mass, is being thrown onto the sand and scraping its way back, on and back, on and back, its roar growling up the cliffs and out across the farmland. Down on the beach the sound is gentler, more rhythmical, but still potent and endless. And so, this poem. On the mighty hulking ocean. On the connection to home. On the breeze that carries the barrage of sound. On the way that two people who are apart can hear the same comforting thing that draws them together, is shared, is beyond their control, and is so epically huge and yet so constant that they barely tune into it at all. We are so gracefully and thoroughly enveloped by the natural world.

You made it to the end! Enjoyed this post?
I’m worried nobody sees this stuff, so please encourage me if you want more. A simple LIKE is so helpful. Sharing, Restacking or writing a Note is even better. Or Subscribe to keep in touch. If you liked it, your circle of friends may like it, too.

Feeling generous? Buy a Paid Subscription or just a one-off coffee and feel the glow of tribute – you’re a Patron Of The Arts!

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me a COFFEE

Ego-boosts! Get your ego-boosts here!
Any one-off donors and paid subscribers can opt in to getting an Executive Producer credit right here on Undergrowth. Tubular!

Photograph by me.

© 2024, Ian Winter. All rights reserved.
I say this not to be all up in your grill with the legals, but as a note to those who copy and paste whole chunks of work and pass it off as their own. Let’s discourage that. Go ahead and quote any reasonable parts of this in commentary, notes, social media, criticism, whining/praising, bile, worship… spread it around, but no thieving!