The roadside diners glimmered like bookshelves, little glowing bookshelves. (‘The Solex Brothers’, The Solex Brothers)

I’ll hawk him like a watch. Like a watch. (‘The Esplanade’, The Solex Brothers)

There are horrible opinions everywhere:/Like oil slicks (‘Halatnost’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

The prison sits on the horizon like a great ash-tray (‘The Murderer’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

‘Look,’ he said, shaking it out like a pigeon. (‘Baltimore Orioles’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

The unshelled peanuts pour down the flue/Like a throng of ecstatic bald men, dancing. (‘Nut Factory’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

Friday mornings we leave the factory, dancing,/Like unshelled peanuts pouring down a flue. (‘Nut Factory’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

His voice is stiff as an English actor in an American movie;/Like he’s reading from a scary tattoo. (‘Tape Thunder’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

He[…]looks into my eyes as if he is peering into a malfunctioning hose pipe. (‘Eyes’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

his mouth is tidy like the slot in a piggy-bank. (‘Mouth’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

you are nevertheless beleaguered by a doubt — like a tack sticking through a carpet (‘Morals’, The Harbour Beyond the Movie)

my laughter overflows like water from a blocked cistern (‘My Friend’, The Migraine Hotel)

A fault on the line made the intercom pop sporadically like a man about to say something difficult. (‘The Dusty Era’, The Migraine Hotel)

His eyes are like an aerial view of two empty jars of peanut butter. (‘Four Neighbours’, The Migraine Hotel)

Friendly but guarded, like a dolphin’s smile (‘Childhood’, The Migraine Hotel)

His eyes like a junior doctor trying to give you bad news. (‘A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children’, The Migraine Hotel)

He walks sideways, like a man who’s just made an offensive joke/Sidles out of the conversation to get another mojito.(‘A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children’, The Migraine Hotel)

His thoughts flicking away like shrimp. (‘The Last Days of Advertising’, The Migraine Hotel)

H. sat on the place like a sticker,/Like a word misused for years (‘The Last Days of Advertising’, The Migraine Hotel)

He doesn’t love it, the town, like a monkey/Presumably doesn’t love trees. (‘The Last Days of Advertising’, The Migraine Hotel)

The eye plunges through your holes like a great bear losing its footing on a waterfall! (‘Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre’, The Migraine Hotel)

Too many journalists are like too many biscuits. (‘Gravedigger: The Movie’, The Migraine Hotel)

She turns//on me like a security camera (‘Oh, You Don’t Agree?’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

House like a dozen bookshelves fished out of a canal./House like a stranger’s Christmas. (‘Oh, You Don’t Agree?’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

I’m going to break the horizon over your head like a porcelain baguette. (‘Mink Farm’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

Unconsciousness like an apple falling into a bowl of soup. (‘More Sad News From Your Stupid Planet’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

To read an amateur novelist you’d think thoughts arrived like emails. (‘Snob’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

In its glass the toothbrush leans forward/as if condescending to admire a child’s painting./It is like the face of an old man whose eyebrows/and moustache have grown to cover his whole head. (‘The Environment’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

Butterflies are like bits of something. (‘Stupidest Words In Dumbest Order The’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

This is a day of joy and terror for everyone,/yet I feel like my chest is covered in flat pebbles;/like someone I respect just showed me porn on their mobile phone. (‘I’ll Die If You Distract Me’, Planet-Shaped Horse)

The cork sounds like a stupid person being/mildly surprised. (‘Wolf Shibboleth’, A Lost Expression)