The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For December, we are delighted to publish three new poems by Jack Houston. The third of these, ‘for a few dollars more’, is published today.

(Note: if reading on a phone, please read in landscape format)

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i have been trying to forgive                           this long feud

 

the snuck pockets                                            of those who have

 

the plangent call of prosperity                       elsewhere

 

the internal weather                                        of the more fortunate

 

surely lying                                                       over comparably dry plains

 

kindred vultures                                               aloft in lazy circles through our high

 

and holy bowls                                                 such similar tumbleweeds

 

rolling through                                                  the one-horse town

 

our                                                                      two gunslingers

 

pace                                                                    out

 

Jack Houston is a parent, writer and public librarian from East London whose work has appeared in The Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, The TLS, Wild Courtand in a debut pamphlet, The Fabulanarchst Luxury Uprising (The Emma Press).

 

 

 

Image by John Lavin