The song of Judas

Do not hope. Endure despite it. 

Be hopeless. Of all the truths

competing for your endorsement

choose the worst, the most dire,   

then season your pessimism 

with the bitterest irony. 

Imagine all the Cassandras, 

a choir of Cassandras, 

singing their silent, hoarse, 

ignored, forgotten masterpiece. 

Find the hypocrisy that lurks

within the best intention. 

In the mild osmosis of this world

where we desalinate our words

beneath almost imperceptible pressure,

the slightest nod and glance  

of the self-identified good, 

leaning against us, into us, 

arms around our shoulders

in the fake familiarity

of the snake oil salesman, 

calling itself morality, 

calling itself the right side of history, 

calling you all sort of things

when you make the wrong choice,

drink the brine. Do not hope. 

Do not confirm. Defy. Deny. 

Denounce your saviour once, 

twice, three times. Crow. 

Be the rooster, the rebuke

of all would be apostles. 

Do not hope, for hope

keeps you from a god

that has abandoned you. 

How can you ever have faith 

if you are not nothing. 

False start

"I wouldn't start from here":

the famous advice given 

to the man asking for directions, 

but no matter how far

we retrace our steps, 

we can never find the place

where we can stop, turn around, 

and put our best foot forward, 

take the second left, first right, 

and so on until our destination

rises before us to vindicate

the impulse that started our journey. 

Rather, it is a mirage hopscotch

that leads us in circles

if we are lucky, a familiar mistake

better than simply not knowing

if we are on the right track. 

Either way, our only options

are just different ways of being lost. 

In that event we swap uncertainty

for certainty, simply assert we are right, 

and fabricate future histories

as proof we were right all along, 

and defend this assertion

as an article of faith, all doubt heresy, 

and as a year is a day to a drunk man

we wait on the solstice dawn

to summon inebriate gods

so everything might start again. 

Merry Christmas

You can make a Christmas dinner 

using different flavours of crisp: 

prawn cocktail, roast chicken, 

parsnips and other root vegetables,

there's even pigs in blankets flavour. 

Alien, The Thing and Children of Men 

are all Christmas movies. Think about it.

All Radiohead songs are arrangements 

of River Man by Nick Drake: perfect 

for when you're spending Christmas alone. 

My gift to you 

is to set Boltzmann's Constant 

and the speed of light to unity 

so you can measure temperature 

in kilograms. Merry Christmas. 

Harris Tweed

O Lewis, 

land where the degrees of cousinage, 

lineages carded and spun like yarn,

connect us implausibly on the loom of chaos. 

The highest and most low are relatives,

the criminal in the dock, judge at his bench, 

humblest and most mighty, 

all sprung from a common loin 

if you go back far enough, 

over which intervening generations 

draw their discrete veil 

and family tradition offers 

its elaborate and unlikely extenuation. 

We all collide on the broken loom of history

abandoned in the roofless ruin of the old shed

now you can't make a living 

from the cloth there anymore.

The past is a revealed religion, 

once preached by monoglot grannies

innocent of the southern speech, 

fluent only in the language of Eden

as they recite lineage and incident, 

scandal and tragedy that adhere to the land

in every place name known or unknown 

to the ordinance survey,

but the sauce of time lies in its secrets, 

hallucinations of empire, 

confidences and obscure connections,

to Rory Dall Morison or Donald Trump

or Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruadh,

rumours of Spanish gold 

or Charlie's treasure 

or Jacob's pillow, the Bethel stone, 

hidden now in a different desert

by no less strict a covenant, 

even though this whole world of land and sea

is a tabernacle in which divinity dwells. 

Although the loom is broken the cloth endures

and we are conscripted into a weave

that puts the embroidery of Bayeux to shame. 

As a child I ran along the drystone gables

of your dilapidated black houses

while aunts audited my parents' anecdotes indoors

over tea stewed until you could stand a spoon in it.

My uncle let me discharge his army surplus rifle, 

well perhaps not so much surplus

as mysteriously gone missing 

when they checked the inventory 

the day after he hit civvy street. 

I pulled the trigger of the Lee Enfield .303,

giddy with the glamour of weapons

while he remained serious 

with the knowledge of what they can do. 

Who will sing of the good we reach

on the other side of evil, 

of the heavy price we pay

to do a little good in this world? 

It is never there when you look for it, 

yet it is always right where you left it. 

Animals do feel pain. Maybe that's all they feel, 

and all our ideas of human intelligence

are just fancy anaesthetics we use to stay numb

to the real world we find out on the moor. 

Still, the rabbit tasted good later that night,

and the moor is where the dye is found, 

lichen scraped from rocks with old spoons

to be boiled with the wool. 

The spurious exceptionalism

by which we humans refute 

nature's indifference

is raised in a sermon 

and dissolved in a psalm. 

The lesson is victory 

is only achieved through surrender,

and so the loom of chaos 

continues to quilt the land

with the cloth of time. 

Time

Clear away the clutter. 

What is left? Nothing. 

Not even yourself. 

There is no transcendence.

There is no enlightenment.

All that remains

was there already,

underneath it all.  

You might be alive.

You might be dead.

It doesn't matter to you now 

in this empty place 

you find yourself in. 

There are two kinds of time, 

the time we experience

and the time we can talk about,

the present, and that abyss

into which we are catapulted

by the bestial reflex

which governs our movement, 

that ocean we inhale and exhale

as we spend a lifetime 

slowly drowning,

those remote tonalities

into which we modulate

as our hands crab claw their way 

across the keyboard.

Stop. Rest in a world

that blossoms with decay, 

whose roots delve and stems stretch

to meet and entwine outside time

and form a circle around you

somewhere time cannot reach, 

somewhere calm and still

where life and death are both imposters

who have abandoned their attempts

to lure you into their schemes,

and all our modes and melodies collapse

into a single monotone of ecstasy

indistinguishable from silence. 

Nostalgia

Do you remember what it was like?

The sea and sky? People? Animals?

Colours instead of shades of grey?

Food and drink prepared to evoke pleasure

not boiled to leach mere nutrition

from dead tree bark and old shoe leather?

We dressed well and ate better, banqueted,

raised glasses to ourselves and each other,

made speeches, looked to the future in hope, 

the past in appreciation, then sipped

the hemlock of a thousand choices

we didn't even realise we had made,

and smiled and smiled and smiled.

Our numbers have dwindled since then, 

since that corporate dinner function. 

The staff have cut the throats of many

whose tables they served that day

before yielding to some new contagion

or being murdered themselves. 

Exotic varieties of cruelty infiltrate our lexicon,

while words for familiar comforts are forgotten. 

Now it is only you and me left, 

you and me stranded here on this beach, 

starving and hunted, old and sick, 

exhausted at the end of a long pursuit,

and there will be no-one left

to remember the good times 

once we are gone.

Who knew that, even while we celebrated,

long ago, the bosses were doubling down 

and digging in, that decisions were made 

to hold the course and ride out the storm, 

and they knew. All the time they knew 

not everyone would make it.

It could all have been so different. 

There's no bosses any more, of course, 

just this commonwealth of consequences,

this republic of sad remebrance

about to fall to the empire of oblivion. 

Juggernaut

What is beautiful, 

what we call beautiful,

is fossilised cruelty. 

It is the bones, 

the rubble and debris, 

the ornate urn of ash, 

the picturesque ruin

of that fallen empire 

whose apologists tutor us, 

whose indolence and corruption

we emulate like children, 

like animals, mere mimics.

We juggle kneecaps 

in a backward circus

to entertain the impotent dead. 

We are clowns tumbling through 

the comedy carnage 

of unrecorded history. 

Masalit and Circassian

and others we do not know

or care to know

fill the seats and deafen us

with their silent applause. 

Engines of war, long decommissioned,

are repurposed and raised 

as monuments to their legacy

and are admired and called beautiful.

Every temple mocks the sacred grove 

on whose embers it was built, 

every prayer the latest distortion 

of some original long forgotten revelation 

buried under layers of liturgy,

a slippery stratigraphy of tongues,

slabs of sediment lying flat on top of each other, 

their language decomposing in the mouths

in which our words thrust their roots

and probe the soil of past utterance

to find and bring forth dark meanings into bloom

while mystics retreat into solitude

and seek refuge from the cruelty

that clutters this cataclysmic world

in visions of apocalypse and ecstasy. 

We gather and evaporate divinity

until all that remains is one god

before whom to declare 

a unique bankruptcy

at the funeral of truth,

and all art is stolen.  

All our legal codes

are written and rewritten 

to stop justice being enforced, 

to let us get away with the theft,

because there are no laws against it.

Each sigh and pang 

you yield before a canvass

in some prestige gallery, 

humidity and temperature

testifying to sponsor investment

in environmental controls, 

must be measured against screams 

and agonies of others whose absence

is the foundation of our aesthetics. 

Genocide isn't special. 

It is tedious. It is commonplace.

Ask the Masalit. Ask the Circassians. 

You drink it in your coffee. 

It saturates the ink

with which you declare it 

to be exceptional, to be a crime. 

It comes from the same factory

that manufactures every pretty little thought

that you think to feel good about yourself.

We live in a web, 

but it is not made of silk, 

it is made of sinew, 

and our most refined, exquisite bliss

is spun from the pain of millions

who quietly haul the crimson juggernaut

of our silent history.