An ùrachadh na bliadhna

Anniversary

My other self, my me I prefer to be,
the sense and soul of all I want to see,
I love you in a way my wedding band
is not enough to show or understand.

Let's find our way together to old age,
and laugh at the advice of every sage
whose experience can never match our own.
We make the rules, the family, the home.

Smile

The day is embedded in lead:

                motion is impossible during its hours

                clasped within this grey wet clay day.

A weird and weightless glass

                has been poured over the mechanism of the clock,

                smothering every cog, infiltrating every gear

                and has stiffened and set hard and fast.

I peer and pore over

                the blueprinted view of every exploded infinitesimal,

                the meticulously recorded minutes of every moment,

                the bewildering instructions for assembling each second,

                unwrapping each flat packed part, matching it with the manifest

                and wondering about the purpose of the bits left over.

And then suddenly you smile,

                and the glass is cracked

                the plans are ripped up and cast away

                moments melt and fuse, boil and rage,

                in terror and exhilaration

                as the spring of time uncoils at last

                and my heart is catapulted into the unknown once again.

A rock and a hard place

I am sure I was not alone in waiting for two things last week (seasonal festivities notwithstanding): the Scottish government's Brexit proposals and the UK government's response to them.

And as much as the Scottish government's proposals were a clear, constructive and reasoned set of options that charted in detail all corners of the possible, to the same extent the UK government's response was inflexible, dismissive and dogmatic. The compromise offered by one was matched by the chaos, contrariness and contempt with which it was met by the other.

In so far as the UK government has been able to formulate a coherent position at all, it seems to consist only of veiled threats and vindictiveness. They seem to be asserting that a post-Brexit rUK will be able to arrive at a trade deal with ease with every single country in the world with the sole exception of Scotland, which we must assume will be subject to some vague but unique punishment from which all other members of the Single Market will be exempt, should it seek to pursue its own interests within the Single Market in the event of a "hard Brexit" and the rUK leaving it.

When they can no longer maintain the logic-defying contortions their position inflicts on them, they resort to another tried and tested tactic of the abusive partner, the "no-one else would have you" gambit. "But Spain," they say, rejoicing in every obstacle Madrid raises to impede our progress.

Spain is eager to avoid any precedents that may be applicable to the situation of Catalonia, they point out. But can Spain count on their support when Article 50 negotiations turn to the subject of Gibraltar? Will they continue to exert themselves as strenuously to promote Spanish interests when the Rock is on the table? What is the Spanish for having your cake and eating it?

A government that favours Spanish interests over Scottish ones is not fit to govern Scotland.

To rule by scorn

The Scottish Government publishes proposals regarding Brexit reflecting the referendum result in Scotland of a nearly 2 to 1 vote for Remain. European leaders respond by saying they are positive and constructive. The president of the European Commission indicates they are worthy of consideration. The Green Party observes that they represent the "maximum extent of compromise" in relation to accommodating the UK Government's requirements.

What is the response of the UK Government? It is threefold:

1) Rejection of the proposals within 3 hours of publication, that is, before they could even have possibly read them and developed an informed opinion.

2) Repetition ad nauseam of the "trade fallacy" - the idea that Scotland relies on trade with rUK and so would be at a disadvantage under the terms of any differentiated arrangement. No detriment is possible without offering Scotland less favourable terms than the rest of the Common Market, which is not only vindictive, but undermines any possible Article 50 negotiating position.

3) Invidious promulgation of the "SNP hate the English" meme through mainstream and social media and their own loyal cohorts to distract from and undermine the Scottish Government's proposals, and divert attention from their own deeply embarassing lack of anything resembling a coherent plan.

This is not governance we are seeing from Westminster. It is chaos and naked contempt. And to rule by scorn is not to rule for long.

The trade fallacy

It is necessary to nail the trade fallacy now.

The trade fallacy is the idea that a differentiated Brexit solution for Scotland (whether that is remaining in the Common Market as proposed yesterday or, for that matter, full EU membership as an independent state) would be detrimental to trade with rUK, which represents our largest export market.

Although untrue, this fallacy has the merits of simplicity and superficial plausibility necessary of a memorable scare story used to install a truth-resistant knee-jerk aversion to the differentiated solution(s) proposed.

The refutation of the fallacy is also simple, however:

• The terms on which Scotland trades with rUK would have to be less favourable than the terms on which the rest of Europe trades with rUK as a result of Article 50 negotiations for those terms to be detrimental to Scotland. 

So rUK would have to deliberately single out a member of the Single Market for separate, special penalties, undermining the entire basis for any negotiations at all.

So every time any unionist repeats the trade fallacy ask them to clarify if they really mean Scotland in the Common Market would be offered different "punishment" terms from the rest of the Common Market? That is how you nail the fallacy - by demanding that clarification. Because the only detriment to Scotland would be deliberate punishment, and that would derail any broader negotiations.

And this is without even considering the fact that the terms on which Scotland would trade with Europe would be more favourable than the terms on which rUK would trade with Europe, and that most of Scotland's trade with rUK is destined for Europe anyway.

The feast

I watch the clock's broad face high upon the wall:

                it blossoms and bursts with hours,

                it is a prettily posed hour-flower,

                each segment is a bright petal, pivoting

                upon the slender stem of midnight. 

Blade secretly palmed,

                time caresses the flower, then

                presses hard his hidden inner edge

                and with a single, swift stroke,

                removes the day to fold and press and thumb it

                into his book and slot it on the shelf forever.

Ice chimes in my glass   

                and black, pungent absinthe

                coils its tendrils around my heart,

as I tease the volume from its interstice

                and peel the pages left and right

                about the spine of time

My finger finds the lines

                for which the lanterns of my eyes were lit.

Since the day I was woken,

                expelled from the womb, all light burst open

                and split and spilled and slid tumbling out,

                diurnal sun displacing mother’s heartbeat as my timepiece,

                and the gentle glowing sunrise in which I endlessly slept

                usurped by a waking tyranny of sunrise and sunset,

I have been embarked upon

                a secret search for lost intimacy,

                a dark and secret thing of shame

                in this wide open world of unforgiving light.

It was not found

                among the gentle deceptions of tenderness

                where deceit knots and coils itself tight

                around the roots of every winter rose

                that lingers in the stiff marshy cold of that garden

                where I watch breath hang in the air

                despite the heavy lie it carries, 

and so I expose myself alone

                in remote, violent and desolate wastelands,

                rust red deserts that no heart-pump can irrigate,

                knowing that my own destruction is more sincere

                than the smiles that pillowed my soul among men

                while their smoky words were still shifting in the air.

I will rip out the wolf's windpipe with my teeth,

                and steal his howl and with it bind the moon

                and take it down as a dish to lick greedily

                at my own oblivion. Every snail is a tongue

                with which I find clean unsullied soil to consume.

I inhale the fatal moonlight,

                burrow into atoms to find their sullen stolen souls,

                shuffle spectral lines to deal death's gambits

                upon idyllic pacific ocean island atolls,

                from a clear blue sky beset with the twisted spine

                of man's con-trails and con-tricks.

I fall slug-tongued upon the famine-feast of burnt dirt,

                and shovel through apocalyptic ash

                seeking to digest my own disintegration

                but all I find is you, here, now:

feast on me.

The dreamers

I am suddenly awake.

The still air

is buttressed by shafts of light

descending from high windows,

infiltrating gaps

where curtains were drawn too hastily

the night before.

Dust circulates, and slips unseen

into the dark,

a traffic of shadows across the light,

and my dream lingers.

A secret defect,

involuntary testimony of fear and desire,

reflex unrestricted by conscious inhibitions,

residue of dreaming,

a trace of sand in the mind’s eye,

remains in my waking thoughts,

lies and lurks behind and beneath

the pristine surface of appearances and impressions

which my thoughts shuffle, rank, process, prioritise,

as I awaken and begin to impose order on the day ahead,

a piece of interstitial grit lodged between life's layers.

Laminations of obsession, slick with shame

shift and slide upon each other

spreading the rheumy secretions that gather around the defect,

like a leak, like a wound, like a pearl, like pus,

bleeding between the inert slabs of glass

that rest weightlessly upon us,

or stand insubstantially between us,

through which we see each other

as we emerge from the our own dreams,

sight smeared with flat blades of their invisible colour,

a transparency and refraction seen just by us,

a world within the world,

sitting between our eyes

and what everyone else can see,

and from these stained visions of each other

we can make the rose window of our interior cathedral,

the oculus and iris of our love,

hung above the threshold of the seclusion

where we finally find peace and respite,

where we can be together.

My thoughts of you re-assert themselves

in every moment free from interruption.

No ceremony or vows can sanction what we have,

or acknowledge what we are,

in our sanctuary of silence.

We are dreamers.

We are refugees.

We are a single self,

divided at the start of time,

and testify in our waking sleep to the light

cleaving our dreams of each other apart,

unleashing the gleaming river that lies between us,

the unfordable torrent across which we reach,

our fingertips one hair’s breadth apart.  

Oath of Unallegiance

I will not be bound by any oath. 
I pledge allegiance to the unaligned. 
I promise to question every value.
and uphold the sovereignty of doubt,
and all her lawful heirs and successors,
no matter what the consequences.  
I salute the rag with which I blow my nose, 
and scorn every frontier, cross every border, 
and then make every ditch I find a Rubicon
with which to irrigate your indivisible territory. 
I affirm that I will hold my duties in disdain.
and leave absent any office 
that you should presume to bestow on me, 
as though there had been a break in,
and you will have to frame your laws most subtley
to pretend my actions in any way imply obedience
for I will be a moving target, slipping from their aim,
eluding the cross hairs of every constitution
escaping the net of all its amendments,
for you will not govern me,
so help you, Almighty God. 

Working class heroes

So the varnish peels
on toys bleached by time
in a bright attic
where the Sun has succeeded
in photographing the shadows
of the skylight's lead beading
onto the grain and sinews
of the exposed wood
and grandchildren rejoice
as the laminated
balsa wood sharks
rescued from the '70s
circle in the bath
with their disintegrating teeth
of putty and chalk,
and plumes of chalk dust,
pyroclastic in the bath water,
form the passing wraiths
of their vindication,
as a feeding frenzy
of accidental cannibalism
ensues.

Alter ego

We will have to be together apart, in silence,

and find each other in the stillness of our lives.

We have discovered that everything we craved,

everything felt deprived of when we were young,

is not worth having. We transgressed every convention,

flouted every petty foible, ignored every remonstrance,

and all we found is that they have no power,

and Everest itself is a molehill.

                               

The hurdles we vaulted in life melt behind us.

There is no achievement to be had.

Every crime we secretly excused with the redress

we thought accomplished by its commission is pardoned. 

The lacerations of guilt are tucked away,

folded into the deepening wrinkles of fading memory,

hiding with forgotten horrors in the shadows

that rise between every ridge in the fingerprint,

every gyrus of the brain.

The task of taming the world becomes

an act of nostalgia for our own youth.

We would have to violate the summit of Kailash

before we are able to find that mustang moment

that does not cower and kneel, already secretly tame

before the test of our notorious presence.

I murdered love on the altar of ego,

burned children's tears to fuel my joy-ride,

to sparkle and fizz with the transgressions of youth

was my promise, but I was an imposter.

We are all imposters.

Life is a doomed rear-guard action against entropy

made precious by futility,

and after constant strenuous effort of the soul,

with no hint of remission,

we are left with nothing to show

but this miracle of fatigue through which we sink,

each inching towards death

in our own little pool of quicksand,

and we take our monsters with us to the grave.

Solstice

Ancient people watched the dwindling of the days each year as the winter solstice approached. They wondered if this time the light would continue to wane until they were deprived of it entirely and consigned to eternal darkness, or if the pattern their ancestors had observed and communicated to them would be repeated once again, and the world would be saved, and light restored.

For without knowing the mechanism by which the days began to lengthen, the restoration of the light each year was not guaranteed, and the first dawn after the solstice on which they could discern that the sun rose earlier than it did the day before may have provoked rejoicing but did not signal redemption, did nothing to allay the fear that one year the sun might fail to find its way back to us from the depths of winter. The darkness remained, as an ever present threat, a prototype of evil, destructive and inscrutable, unamenable to any bargain, consuming worlds not out of hunger, but out of boredom and caprice, in an age before we invented the devil.

This palpitation of the seasons was ensnared at last within the shaman's feverish delirium at the back of the cave. And from his trance the first truths were given. The terror of the dark was curtailed and attenuated by insights extracted from his ravings, narratives teased like a thread from the general simultaneity of experience tangled up in priest's hypoxic convulsions, to become camp fire tales of zodiacal heroes endowed with superhuman strength and divine gifts pevailing in contests set by gods over champion monstrosities whelped in a cave by Echidna, Mother of Monsters. And so we began to feel reassured, and slept the first human sleep, and enjoyed depths of slumber unknown to animals still tormented by constant threat.  

Within the safety afforded to the precincts of our dreams we built shining cities, like cascades of glass tumbling down through the sparkling cataracts of falling empire, and in the glistening procession of millennia in these shining cities some among us at last discerned the workings of the world, and the dark at last was shrunk to fit the sleeve of science.

Astronomers and musicians taught us about position and quantity and change. Truth swung so low in Her orbit Her necklace hung within the astronomer's grasp. And as the musician sought solitude in the forest he found She strayed so tame and unstartled across the forest tracks and lingered so long within earshot that Her song was overheard and learned by heart. Those who discovered this experience were the first musicians.

And so astronomers and musicians taught the rest of us everything we needed to know to describe the world.

But the dark was not defeated. Within our marrow we remembered it.

Last Winter the solstice came again. We met it with expectations whose fulfilment had grown so tedious that any other sequence of events was inconceivable. But the instead of returning, the light continued to spiral down night's dark drain. Assumptions that had stood the test of generations suddenly seemed naive and idealistic as the natural order was suspended and the solstice asserted itself as an irresistible pole to which we were drawn and where we were devoured by strident new solipsisms.

“Darkness is good ... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power ... [it] will be as exciting as the 1930s," claimed Steve Bannon, US President-Elect Donald J. Trump's chief strategist.

The project commenced to stall the solstice, to seize this point around which the year is slung back out of shadow, and take it captive, until all of 2016 became one long continuation of the solstice in which long forgotten fears were restored to unhappy prominence.

2016 was the year when things changed. The extended solstice of the mind became our contemporary solipsism. Thought was afflicted by a paralysis, and the sense of superiority that accrues from being "in the know" took priority over actually being well-informed. Accuracy became irrelevant. Tribe trumped Truth - the self-identified digital alt-right tribes of the "woke" who shunned information in preference to confirmation of any conspiracy they can then claim to have seen through to claim a place round the totems that have replaced Truth.

The fascists were winning because while no-one was watching they had thoroughly rehearsed their tactics in a series of limited theatres of discourse that did not attract widespread attention. The practice of dismissive labelling; the assembly of massive edifices of falsehood too detailed and elaborate to ever be fully refuted before antagonists had to confront the next; the presentation of every favourable decision or development that goes their way as final and definite, that goes against them as provisional and temporary: they had practised and perfected their tactics in theatres such as climate change denial and Gamergate. Trump did not happen by chance. He was the vanguard of a well prepared blitzkrieg. 2016 was merely the year they showed their hand.

We missed it because we didn't take them seriously. There were always more important political rivals to defeat. Rather than unite in opposition to fascism, rather than finding common cause in its overthrow, we jostled among ourselves for position and influence, harnessing logic and evidence to prove our points and achieve our objectives. There is always a more important political rival than the fascists right up until there are no rivals anymore.

But they grew strong because they did not rely on such effete, decadent contrivances as reason. They adopted an approach that did not require them to be consistent. They forged alliances as a matter of temporary expedient rather than alignment of ideas, and discarded allies as quickly as they found them if they ceased to be useful. And so they grew strong unseen without being restricted by the constraints we observed as a matter of course to preserve the validity of our assertions. They had no such need, finding no fascination in Truth, finding fascination instead in nothing other than the darkness.  

And so people started using statements that resembled expressions of information or knowledge in every formal sense but one. They no longer required that these statements were accurate. They used them as a way of belonging, rather than knowing. The statements were not listened to in order to find out about the world or what someone else believed about it, or spoken in order to communicate what you had found out to others. Explanations were no longer descriptions of reality but shibboleths, noises, like the call of an animal, passwords that conferred on the speaker and the listener membership of a privileged group of people. Being "in the know" was more important than actually knowing something. Truth was replaced by conspiracy theories that served as totems to gather round. Since this was the only requirement of the fascist statement, these statements became truth-proof: they could be contradicted over and over again without losing any of their power to convince, because they were never supposed to be accurate in the first place.

In this way the people could be redeemed. People made desperate during the hours between approval of the payday loan and the chance to lose it in an online poker game could be saved and made "great again." People made homeless and jobless by remote forces manipulated by global elites could "take back control." Steve Bannon denied being a "white nationalist." Instead, he claimed he was an "economic nationalist," concerned with exploiting conditions created by the macroeconomic catastrophes that befell his predecessors over the previous decade, such as low interest rates, to undertake massive investment as the basis of restoring job security to his constituents.

The only problem was that this approach had been tried before. Hjalmar Schacht had generated an economic miracle for the Nazis in Germany during those 1930s that excited Bannon so much, before he ended up in a concentration camp. And the use of statements to define groups to belong to rather than to accurately describe the world they found themselves in had disastrous consequences but three score years previously as well. The justification had been the same: the redemption of man by means that put his self-appointed redeemers in the dock in Nuremberg.

And so the world was distilled into competing paradigms while all the actual data were discarded. People gathered each around their own isolated camp fires of burning books as the cold night descended, and told tales of how the others gathered around some other camp fire visible nearby were their enemies. Their priests told them the Sun was a myth that had been used to enslave them, making them toil together at all the tasks that are possible during the day, and that they had been set free by the darkness and that this night that the priests had summoned would now last forever.

Huddled around their camp fires they whispered rumours of distant wars, of unimaginable evils stacked up on top of each other over and over, until they could be propped up supporting each other on the shelf where all our competing histories justify and condemn each other, where all our accusations embrace each other like exhausted boxers, while in the dark beyond the light of the camp fire, beyond the flickering familiarities to which people clung in its unreliable light, the solstice prowls in the dark, its sable pelt velvet and invisible, unknowable, waiting to consume them.

Everyone felt a new kind of fear penetrate their marrow to prepare it for the spasms and paralysis of death. And when a lone voice was raised declaring the new constellations of this distorted astronomy to be false, it was ignored, or ostracised, and truth was now a solitary rather that shared experience, known only to the outcast, if it was known at all, a kind of knowledge approached through mysticism. Science was dead. Those whose ambitions never rose above the basest and most materialistic agendas could not comprehend the motivation of those who pursued a higher purpose, and so scientists stood accused of all the crimes of which their accusers were most guilty.

Winter solstice approached again and the hope grew that the season would not fail this time and 2016 would merely be a hiatus from which we would recover. But the fear remained that 2017 would only prove to be worse.

Ghost dance

The Lakota could not have done it
without the veterans,
but the veterans could not have done it
without the Lakota,
and I see the ghosts of Little Big Horn
and Wounded Knee
standing together at Standing Rock,
reconciled in their Seventh Generation.

Full English Brexit

In 1705 the English parliament passed the Alien Act. This penalised Scottish trade with England, and included a trade embargo that impacted about half of Scotland's trade at the time, since around around half of Scotland's trade was with England and her colonies (which at that time included colonies in North America and the Caribbean), while the other half was with Europe (which was unaffected). The act allowed for the suspension of its provisions should Scotland enter into negotiations for a union of the parliaments of Scotland and England. It was therefore one of the main inducements for the Treaty of Union that led to the Acts of Union of 1707, resulting in the formation of a single trading bloc, the United Kingdom.

Why is this relevant today? Our trading relationships with Europe and England are once more up for discussion as a result of Brexit. Ever since the 24th of June, Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Government have been leaving no stone unturned in an attempt to "square the circle" and explore every option that preserves Scotland's interests in the Brexit negotiations and respects the choice of the Scottish people to remain in Europe short of Independence.

For example, the possibility of Scotland having a separate relationship with Europe to the rest of the UK, sometimes referred to as the "reverse Greenland" option (while being a Danish possession, Greenland is not a member of the EU while Denmark is), or other arrangements that allow Scotland to remain in the Single Market (the EEA) through membership of EFTA (like Norway and Iceland), while following the rest of the UK out of the EU, have been discussed.

However, it is reported today that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has ruled out a separate arrangement for Scotland. There will be a single UK-wide negotiating position. Nicola Sturgeon is to accept "the will of the people," by which he presumably means the British, rather than the Scottish, people, in principle, which is the will of the English in practice, as starkly illustrated by the outcome of the referendum on the 23rd of June.

We are no longer being told to "eat your cereal." Now the cereal has been replaced by a full English breakfast.

Hammond points out that Scotland currently exports four times as much to the UK as it does to the rest of Europe, and claims being outside the UK’s arrangement with the EU would “be a disadvantage overall to Scotland”.

But this is a gross and deliberate distortion that defies logic. When you consider the options, there is no scenario that places Scotland at a disadvantage with respect to its trade with England, and only scenarios that place Scotland at a disadvantage with respect to its trade with Europe:

(1) Trivially, if no separate arrangement is made for Scotland to remain within the Single Market, and Scotland remains instead within the UK as a distinct trading bloc, Scotland's position in relation to trade with England remains unchanged (although her position in relation to trade with Europe is changed). This is the UK-wide approach favoured by Hammond.

Otherwise, if Scotland is allowed either a (2) separate arrangement enabling it to be a member of EFTA while remaining within a UK that has left the EU, or indeed (3) retains full EU membership by the simple expedient of Independence, then the trading relationship Scotland will have with England will be the exactly the same as the trading relationship of the rest of EEA with England. There would be no tariffs applied to Scottish imports to England that are not also applied to imports from everywhere else. There would be no competitive disadvantage in relation to Scottish exports to England. There would only be the competitive advantage that Scottish exports to Europe would have over English exports to Europe.

Indeed, given most of Scotland's current imports to England are subsequently exported on anyway (e.g. Scotch whisky, which comprises fully one quarter of total UK food and drink exports, having first been imported to England from Scotland), options (2) and (3) provide an opportunity for Scotland to avoid the penalising tariffs that will be imposed on the basis of option (1) by directly exporting to the destination market instead.

So option (1) disadvantages Scotland with respect to Europe, but not the rest of the UK. Options (2) and (3) do not disadvantage Scotland with respect to Europe, nor the rest of the UK. But options (2) and (3) potentially offer Scotland advantages not available to the rest of the UK. Therefore Hammond prefers (1).

He justifies this position by suggesting that in fact options (2) or (3) would disadvantage Scotland with respect to England. There is only one scenario in which this would be the case.

(4) Scotland would only be at a disadvantage if the rest of the UK made different arrangements for trade with Scotland than with the rest of Europe. Scotland would have to be singled out, to be treated differently to Ireland, for example. In effect, England would have to punish Scotland, to apply some sort of special, differential penalty to Scotland relative to everyone else, for Scotland to be placed at a disadvantage.

What would be required is a new Alien Act.

So when Hammond claims Scotland would be at a disadvantage, he must be asked how? On what basis? What is the mechanism for this disadvantage? How would Scottish trade be affected differently from trade with anywhere else in Europe? Is he proposing a new Alien Act to punish Scotland and force it to comply? Even though singling out Scotland like that would leave any arrangement with the rest of the EU in tatters? Because that is the only basis on which Scotland can now be placed at a disadvantage.

No, I haven't forgotten about the position that an Independent Scotland would not be allowed into the EU or EFTA and would therefore not benefit from the uniformity of any arrangement that applied to members of the EEA. On numerous occasions senior European politicians and officials have made clear the ease with which Scotland remains in the EU, potentially as the successor state to the UK, in the event of independence.

However, would unionists really want to rely entirely on a position where, having said in 2014 that we must remain in the UK if we want to stay in the EU, they now say we must remain in the UK because we are leaving the EU? Which is tantamount to saying it doesn't matter what you want, which is really no basis for staying in the UK at all.

The fire

Everything we turn our hands to becomes tinder

for an imagination darker than we can comprehend.

We make a map of our thoughts,

spread it wide upon the unmowed grass,

weigh down its corners with odd pots and jars

half-filled with sunlight and laughter.

We plot a course among the stars,

and with our friends, bold astronomers of hope,

bend canvases of indescribable colour to a wind

that takes us anywhere and everywhere,

only to see our sails slacken, sag, melt, blister,

and yield to the breath of a strange and secret sun,

like cepia celluloid jammed in the projector gate

surrendering to a bulb whose bright heat is worse

than the darkness in the windowless picture house.

We are stranded alone in a mute and starless void.

Memory does not fade, it burns, with a hot rot

as senseless and stealthy as a melanoma

fuelled by the flesh it silently consumes

and everything eventually becomes tinder

for an imagination darker than we can comprehend

We have a choice: fear the fire that lights up our lives

and fills the darkness with twisting agonies of smoke;

or celebrate together the sky into which they billow,

a sky to which a pale moon lends her beauty

among cathedrals of cloud where we gather

in the moonlit ruins of our hope.

(This was written in response to the Glasgow Art School fire of 2014, witnessed from a window on Bath Street)