“He met me somewhere on a dark beach and told me the secrets of the land of the dead before he was called away…”

“This poem is a variation on the story of True Thomas or Thomas the Rhymer, a Scottish poet who was said to have been given the gift of prophecy after a tryst with the Queen of Elphame. In this updated version of the story, Thomas is not a medieval Scottish poet but a modern man, lying in bed unable to sleep as he broods about the past.”