Young Poet: Isaac Silver

saac Silver comes from Norfolk and is studying Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He started writing poetry in 2015. In 2018 he was the winner of the Poetry Society Young Poets Network Timothy Corsellis Prize.

First Kisses

My first first kiss was drunk and sloppy,
two awkward mouths pressed into
acrylic paint smears and shame,
shame afterwards for the shallowness.
My second first kiss was delicate,
like the still dusk of sunlight through
curtains.
She leaned her face down to mine and it
was all a brush of hair and innocence,
and I said something moronically dumbfounded
like ‘that was nice’.

My first kiss was a complete mystery,
lost to time.
I was lost too, everything about you is misted over –
hot breath on a window,
impossibilities and dream sequences,
real kisses forgotten and
moments rewritten,
false memories reprinted a thousand
times.
I wanted never to forget my first kiss
and yet for the life of me
I can’t remember.


untitled

The house is overgrown with flowers
like some twisted florist’s dream.
Blue, pink, yellow, green,
green.
Dead petal dust motes seek cover when
I open the door to receive another
bunch. Lilies, how
appropriate.
Yes, these will complement the
tableau of decay
nicely.
We had to buy more vases. I smile thinly,
lily-white paint grin, at the
absurdity.
Where does it come from, the floral
condolence of a life’s abrupt standstill?
When we must confront death,
in our own little way all we can do
is kill.


If only to evoke

Intangible is that nagging thread
of an elusive truth, a fragility, the hint of
the essence of
a feeling. It’s in the soft,
spacey music of early hours,
of lilac and lemonade harmonies.
It’s in the whisper of a forgotten dream
and outside the polaroid frame of memory.
It’s in the diffusing smoke,
the unidentifiable childhood smell,
the blank space between the lines,
the higher dimensions…

As a boy I looked at horizons of grassy sloping
fields and imagined
the sea was just on the other side.
There is something profound
in the inexpressible,
if only to evoke