The cadenza

What are we trying to compensate for 

when we write? If we were entirely content 

with our life and at peace with the world

we would not feel this compulsion to create,

to insert what is missing or adjust what's there.

We would not continue if the need was fulfilled

by our endeavours. To what unsatisfied perversion

are our poems oblique reference and testimony? 

I had the familiar dream the other night. 

I am on stage, completely unprepared,

directing an orchestra from the keyboard

as we perform a classical concerto, 

and I have no idea how I got there. 

All eyes are on me, expecting great things.

The auditorium is full. Silence falls. We start. 

I somehow manage, working from the score 

and what I remember of the piece,

having listened to it from time to time.

I feign confidence, reassure the players, 

bring them in, accompany them on the piano, 

conceal my terror beneath a smile,

and imagine that I am getting away with it,

until we get to the cadenza, that is. Everyone 

is silently watching and waiting for my solo, 

expecting something I've prepared in advance,

some display of virtuosity and musical fireworks

going on a journey, building tension to be resolved 

in an almost erotic release at the final cadence, 

but I have no idea what to do. 

I am totally exposed. I begin. 

I tentatively explore musical space at first

using an anachronistic language, modal, dissonant, 

until I find a pulse, and iterate some chromatic motif,

abandon tonality, improvise, intuit, feel my way 

through this extemporisation, embrace my solitude,

enter the forest, find the remote clearing

where at last I can assemble from great slabs of sound

a temple to forgotten gods, forever undiscovered, 

already abandoned before it is finished, 

and on its altar I lay the final notes,

tributes to futility and sadness so profound

it saturates the diffuse mist surrounding me 

and lends it a weight, palpable, luminous, lingering.

The orchestra look at me bewildered.

I cue them into the closing tutti al fine

and we sprint to the end, 

the ecstasy now ridiculous and surreal. 

Confusion. Polite applause. Dissatisfied murmuring.

People are privately appalled. Refunds are requested.

I got away with nothing. Complaints are made, 

I stand by it. I am dismissed from my post,

but I stand by it. It expressed how I feel. 

I don't care. It's not about me. I don't matter.

The other musicians don't matter.

The audience doesn't matter. All that matters

is the music, a truth that is not discovered, 

nor is it created, but is somehow made manifest,

and to be present when that happens is to be alive, 

fully, finally complete and sufficient in myself,

and I don't care if that means 

I seem like a monster to you.

Latha bàrdachd na Cruinne

Brìde, ar bàrr-ban-dia trì-theangach, 

thoir ur tìodhlac na faclan do bàrd,

Gàidhlig is Albais is Beurla,

trì rathaidean chun breugan

air na beòil na daoine

ach tha bàrdachd an ceòl na smuaintean.

Tha an cùis an ceòl, cha na smuaintean.

A muster of makars

What is the collective noun for makars?

A murder of makars, like a colloquy of crows,

a hoarse conclave of doom 

rebuking us from their pulpit, 

perched on some bare tree branch 

that has yet to recover from winter 

and put out new buds 

and alleviate the harsh doctrine 

with the promise of the brief respite 

a Scottish summer provides? 

Perhaps a mell of makars 

letting their lines wriggle like worms

across the pasture of the page,

or a mischief of makars, 

like mice nibbling old books

written by illustrious predecessors

as if they were loaves of bread, 

the library a bakery, a boulangerie, 

a patisserie of poetry, their own poems 

still half baked? Or a mob of makars? 

No, poets are not like kangaroos,

but more like peacocks 

in their confident, flamboyant display,

as they open their latest collection to read,

so it must be a muster! A muster of makars!

Dreadful night

We live in lack, 

abide in absence, 

vagrants in a vacuum:

this is not a planet. 

This is an asteroid, 

a comet whose eccentric orbit

brings us to a perilous perihelion

once every ten thousand years. 

The rest of the time we are lost

in the desert of wasted grief

whose star sand runs 

through an infinite hourglass.

The rest of the time we sleep

in caves of ice, and dream

a shared hallucination of the real, 

a seance in which we summon

a sense of here and now. 

In the shuffled deck of dreams

we deal ourselves at this grey table

a hand beautiful and grotesque

of princes, knaves and queens, 

cups and swords and spells 

and incantations. Remain silent. 

Why should I not stay silent

when evil coins all the words?

Why should I not stay silent

when anything I say invites harm?

I shall retreat, retire, to haunt 

the mausoleum of my murdered Muse,

hidden in canyons and dark declivities

where the Moon turns away from Earth

and shows herself only to the stars. 

Photograph

You aren't really here, at least,

not in the way you would be here

if I took a photograph of you right now. 

Years from now you'd look at the photograph

and remember what it was like to be here, 

but that's not what it's really like, 

just the way you would remember it. 

Memory doesn't the record the present, 

it redacts it. I look at the photograph,

try to get my fingernails under its edge

so I can unpick it from the present,

peel it away, see what things were really like

without the intercession of memory, 

but of course I fail, and only see

what I want to see. 

We build our logic on such fallacies. 

The salience of similarities 

forms the basis of valid analogies, 

coincidences and cross-purposes

that retain a temporary truth 

until their inevitable contradiction:

the redness of the apple is like

the redness of your lover's lips. 

The redness of the sands of Mars, 

lets us talk about about the redness 

of the star Betelgeuse to future generations 

who will never see it after the glow 

of its impending supernova fades.

We will be able to show them pictures

of course, but it won't be the same. 

They won't see what we saw. 

Mutiny

She said poetry was a crime

against the sullen self we share, 

that single soul we take turns renting

from eternity and oblivion, the leasehold voice,

the ghost of love our borrowed hearts inhale

with every beat, abandon with the next, 

the lie we must believe, the heretic faith

that fends off indifference or despair, 

but the poem is a wound that bleeds shadow, 

screams silence at the end of empty speech, 

a prophecy and a curse that annihilates 

and transforms what can't be spoken

into words that heal strangers defeated

by generations of secrecy and deception.

We bind the limp forearm, mangled with excuses, 

and stitch it shut with the medicine of myth. 

We launch ourselves upon epics of sin,

seeking blessed isles of lost innocence

promised us by gods long since departed.

Our world is an ocean of divine amnesia.

The creator forgot us not long after 

the idle whim of our creation. 

Our search for meaning is an end in itself.

We aim a broken sextant at a false meridian,

hallucinate a course across unreliable charts,

and enthusiastically congratulate ourselves

on the great achievement we call navigation

through the infinite absence of God,

lords of lack in that desert of desecration 

our prows probe with conquistador curiosity.

Our position may be correct by accident.

There's always that possibility.  

Science improves our chances, 

but we will never know the exact odds, 

just the increment by which they shift

as we drift in their variable favour. 

We wouldn't know if we were right anyway,

even if we were, because we are lost, 

and that is the essence of being lost.  

So when the command comes, remember

it has all the authority of the thin air

into which our certainty has vanished.

What can we be sure of? Each other, 

after all the ignorance and betrayal

we practise on each other every day?

Ourselves, crippled by anxiety and resentment,

thwarted entitlement, petty grievance, 

abject terror before the monolith of others?

No, our mutiny, our poem, is a rebellion

against the self we inherit, the insect self

that infects and infiltrates the ant hill brain,

the self we're sold that buys nice clothes,

takes pride in tribe, finds salience in similarity, 

and fantasises about wealth and power. 

Our mutiny reinstates the presence of God. 

It consecrates every gutter. It sinks 

the origami boat of pretension and law

Our rebellion is against the fraudulent self,

and connects us to others in whom we seek the self

that we will recognise in the wilderness, the humility

that grapples us to the presence of God.

The secret

The bullet is a star.

The barrel is a torch

shining up under my chin

through the top of my head

and into an infinite sky. 

Trigger warning:

scary flashlight face. 

The barrel is a telescope

that can see round corners. 

The bullet is a boomerang

I ride around the block. 

The muzzle flash 

is an instant here

and an eternity 

in some alien astronomy

observed from the surface 

of another world 

where I also live, 

have always somehow lived, 

a nova announcing 

some dark nativity there

during a season of grief. 

The lead is heavy with grief.

These two ounces of lead 

in the back of the mind,  

are a colossal asteroid of grief

for ancient extinctions, 

for unknown, unknowable loss,

for billions of years of death.

It prowls an ancient eccentric orbit

that takes it past other planet killers

in the cold congregation of comets,

each year a bullet, each year a star, 

that dances on your fingertips

as you type this poem. The reason 

I found my way back to this world, 

following my orbit back to you, 

the thing I call cowardice

and my therapist calls courage, 

the decision I made, 

the guarantee I gave myself, 

remains a mystery to me, a whisper

carried on some celestial breeze

from another world where another me 

knows why but keeps it a secret.