The bells

The ship of night
in the small hours of the new year
has struck rocks in the dark
and carried all last year's love away
while warning bells that mark this hazard
swing in the breeze and sound in vain.

A ring of silver, betokening love, sings
in the pocket of a drowned man
and gifts ungiven wait for morning
and the tide's sorry bequest
upon the sands of Holm.

Those who survive are filled
with an unbearable ballast of grief
with only the ground
in which their dead are buried
to hold them up,
and angels have wings of ash
lost to the world's winds.

A dumbstruck, paralysed century
has passed since that day,
and a year has passed since last we raised
our glasses in this way,
and now we find our voice again
as we wait on other bells
to tell us of the passing of another year.

As they announce the finality of all that's passed
what do they really tell us?
That memory is more important than fantasy;
that the old year's lingering embrace
will last longer in our minds
than all the new year's promises
and resolutions unfulfilled.

We are all the ghosts of love we felt.
If all the years collapsed, concertina like
into a sudden simultaneity
the shimmering chime of all those bells
the mesmeric peal of overlapped millennia
would be a tribute to the love we felt,
to every atom whose course was once steered by life,
every pulse ever quickened, no matter how briefly,
by love, and every second, no matter how fleeting,
that made the rest worthwhile.

In death we become less than what we are,
and more, because, as we look at fading pictures
of those that drowned one hundred years ago
we see that all that eventually remains of us
is our beauty, which teaches those left behind
that there is no end, only a shift in perspective,
a parallax of the heart as it swings in its orbit
to reveal the constellations we cherish
were always illusions, but stars and atoms
will always congregate to inspire us.

They say everything is ultimately forgotten,
but memory will never be vanquished
as long as it is tethered to the turning of the year,
and even if it takes no other form,
we still find it in stems stiffening in spring,
pressing up through snow and renewing the world
according to the pattern of life
we gather to remember here tonight.

So in these bells hear the chime of all bells ever rung,
that tolled both in sadness and in joy,
and raise your glass and to the world declare
"Happy New Year".

(Written on the 100th anniversary of the Iolaire Disaster)

Cuneiform

Everything lies in ruins. This Glasgow
is an ancient ruined city by the Euphrates
after some rival, or barbarian invasion,
or simply the passage of time has had its way,
gap sites where ziggurats once stood, shards
scattered across the brownfield yesteryear
whose damp tubercular breath
condenses on the back of my neck,

but this is the Clyde, not the Euphrates.
This shattered and scattered clay
whose pieces you pick up and hold
is not some Mesopotamian jigsaw
of the sort archaeologists like to solve.
These marks are not cuneiform pressed
upon the cold hard fragments in your hand
that you try to fit together and decipher.

It is you. It is your own living tongue
after it has been turned to stone,
and after the sledge hammer and wrecking ball
have had their way, and broken you,
and dumped all your words in a midden
and left you able to meet your mute self
only behind glass, in a glass case, in a museum,
reading how others have captioned you in labels:
their interpretations, educated guesswork,
accidental errors, deliberate falsehoods, lies,

in some nostalgia palace
where the passage of time is frozen
to hold the living captive,
saying, "this is how things were
so this is how they will always be.
This is all in the past. It cannot save you.
You are only what we say you are now."
The word "no" lies untranslated
on a cuneiform tablet out of reach, hidden
behind something lurid and embarrassing,

but there was a man who turned it back
and raised your words from bones and ash,
lifted them from this disintegrating clay,
breathing life into them with poetry,
restoring their voice and making them laugh,
and bulldozing museums with basic facts.

Though all that's left of any life, once gone,
is an unfinished jigsaw, its missing pieces
now forever lost, we'll fill the gaps
with pieces of our own rescued from obscurity
and the impertinence of casual oppression.

Beannachd uarach ìsle na gréine / A winter solstice blessing

Uair ìsle na gréine sunndach dhuibh uile gu léir.
Dèan gàirdeachas 's aoibhneas 's sòlas 'son solas.
Th' a' h-Oidhche nan Seachd Suipearan seachad,
agus tòisichidh a' ghrian a dh'fhàs reamhar
le samhradh a-rithist, is dh'abaicheas maodalach
le a h-uile latha earraich gamhraidh e. A-réiste,
làithean bhliadhna dòigheil gu léir oirbh uile.

Tha lùchairtean deàrrsanta anns a' Thìr Eile
agus tha reul-eòlasan is matamataig againne uile
dìreach fathann 's farbhas 's fios sgeulaichean a' bhaile
mu dhéidhinn móralachd acasan, ach an-diugh
tha leigeil le a' ghrian a thilleadh dhuinn a-rithist
gus dh'fhaodamaid a choiseachd san mac-meanmna,
a dh'aithris na sgeulachdan seo a-rithist. Uime sin
dèan gàirdeachas, is thoir seachad sgeulachdan gaisgich
ás déidh a' chaitheamh na h-oidhche air falbh. 

May the sun's lowest hour find you all in good health.

Rejoice. Be filled with delight, bliss and contentment 

for the light. The Night of the Seven Suppers has passed

and the Sun will begin to grow fat with summer again,

and shall ripen and become corpulent 

with all the days of the winter part of spring. Therefore

may you all have a year complete with happy, orderly days.

There are shining palaces in the Otherworld

and all our astronomies and mathematics

are town gossip, tall tales, mere rumours 

of their magnificence, but today

the sun has been allowed to return to us again

so that we might walk in our imagination 

to tell these tales again. So rejoice

and share tales of heroes in the dwindling night.

The hypocrite

Every apology given for some perceived insult
merely repeats all those similar insults
for which no apology has ever been offered.
Every bandage with which one wound is bound
is salt in others left open and unattended. Hypocrisy
robs the most strenuous confession of its sincerity,
thwarts all atonement, devalues every reparation,
impedes all redress, and twists extenuation
into a straight-jacket in which remorse gibbers
empty words with which only fools are satisfied.

Fledging cats

Saw a video online
of a pigeon sitting
on top of a kitten
cooryin doon in its nest,
the big mummy pigeon
fledging it like a pro
pecking at anyone
that came too close,
and we all know
the whole thing is futile
- though they fall on their feet
and have nine lives, cats can't fly -
but if the pigeon could speak
I think she'd point out
we are all ultimately doomed
but temporarily beautiful,
we're all fledging cats
in our own way, so
just make the most of it.

(Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFfE2HrDJx0)

The twelve days of Brexit

On the first day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all
On the second day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all and fuck all
On the third day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the fourth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the fifth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the sixth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the seventh day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the eighth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the ninth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the tenth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the eleventh day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all
On the twelvth day of Brexit my true love gave to me fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all, fuck all and fuck all

Fairy tale

The rain upon the window
turns glass to velvet.
A stubble of lichen grows
upon an adolescent rock
among filaments of silver birch.
Sky-swimming hearts
carry our wishes
out of love's reach,
while men below
become the monsters
they were once told they are.

I am surrounded by water
or light, definitely one
or the other, and I swim,
or am I the water
in which you swim,
the light that turns dark,
thickening night within me,
around you, within you, around me,
first ink, next tar, first viscous,
then stiff, to stops your heart,

or is it my heart, here in the earth,
beneath the clouds,
beside the whispering stone
that tells me the tale
of the life I lived,
once upon a time,
far far away and long ago. 

Alphabet

A is for all the added advantages of access absent from ambiguous arrangements advised as acceptable

B is for bendy bananas, backstop, BBC bias, borders, bribes, Boris and Banks being buffoons but believed about Brexit

C is for cheap careerist charlatans, petulant children, running down the clock, Corbyn and cakeism, but not for confidence, no, there's no confidence under C.

D is for disaster capitalism, decades of dumbing down and disinformation debasing discourse and destroying democracy

E is for editors electing to eviscerate Europe and exculpate England for empire

F is for fucking Farage foisting fake news about faraway foreigners

First they came ...

First they came for those who wrote pastiches of Martin Niemoeller's poem "First they came ..." and I did nothing because, frankly, I had it coming. 

Honestly

I'm not interested in emotional honesty.
I'm only interested in the truth. When
I write a poem: familiar situations
resonating with your experiences, etc.,
it is no better than titillation. Limiting.
"Isn't that just like that time when ..."
"Doesn't it just feel like how you ..."
"Don't you just know that it will ..."
Just. Just. Just. Just. Just. Fuck. Off.
Fuck your relatable content.
I'm not interested in your emotional honesty.
I'm not interested in your truth.
I'm not interested in MY truth.
I'm only interested in THE TRUTH.

And if you tell me it doesn't exist
and everything is personal and relative
then I'll tell you my personal truth is
it does exist, and there is nothing,
absolutely nothing in the world
you can do about it. So fuck you.

So you're a survivor? This is your testimony?
You're a liar: none of us will survive this.
Learn to love the world that will exist
when you are not here anymore, the world
that existed long before the brief spasm,
the passing grimace and convulsion,
in whose deranged over-elaborate choreography
you imagine you have a role to play,
the world that eludes the embrace of strangers,
and doesn't care about your lies and sighs,
that isn't lured, that meets your stare
until you aren't there. Write about that.

Nuns on the run

God and roulette,
casinos and cathedrals:
an odd symmetry.
Palms joined in prayer,
fingers crossed in hope.
They say God doesn't play dice,
but an inscrutable divine will
is indistinguishable from chance
but for blind faith, and either way
the house always wins,
the poor pay the price,
and there's free sandwiches.

(Inspired by the nuns who embezzled funds to go gambling in Vegas)

The end

Do not fear death. Beauty
is a premonition of death.
It shows us the world without us,
and teaches us there is no end,
just a different point of view.

The two masters

There once were two masters,
one whose teachings were universally understood,
and one who made no sense to anyone.

The first was praised as a genius.
His imperishable words illuminated the age.
People fell to their knees when he spoke
as though he had read their minds.

The other was ignored by all but one
who devotedly wrote down his teachings
even though he didn't understand them.

The age ended in turmoil.
The palace burned. The people starved.
Invaders ruled for generations
until the old language was forgotten.

One day a fragment was found.
Scholars studied it meticulously,
convened meetings to compare findings,
established entire disciplines to interpret it,

but try as they might,
they could not determine
to which master the teaching belonged.

Low winter sun

I visit the New Guardhouse at night.
The monument moves me unexpectedly.
The black haphazard tessellation of its floor
seems to shift in my peripheral vision
like a lake of ink, or tar, rippled by a breeze,
so that I hesitate before I set foot on it,
to discover, as I walk upon soil gathered
from battlefields and death camps,
and over the anonymous bones it contains,
it is the calm surface of a deep well of grief
and I enter the silence of the place at last.

Morning. I turn left out Unter den Linden,
pass the Holocaust Memorial on my way to work,
late among the last dregs of rush hour,
but today the low winter sun rests on the stelae,
turns them into bright slabs of light,
and I must pause
to consider the different kind of monument
the sun has made of them. We know enough
to know we are not all that we should be.
Never let that make us less than what we are.

Fallen angel

How can I be beautiful
in a world this ugly?

How can I offer my body
and receive my lover's in return
to celebrate miracles and mysteries
in secret stolen intimacy
with the pleasure we give and take,

when the world compares
the body I have to offer
to airbrushed fantasies,
inflated here, shrunk there,
flattened, posed, plucked,
shaved and photoshopped,

traps my lover in cycles of desire
and disgust, oscillating
between shame and resentment,
tells him his only way of touching
is transgressive, and therefore
he must be a monster,

and he becomes that monster,
ashamed of his desire
and eradicating its object
with the solipsistic violence
of a masturbatory gesticulation,
a flick of the wrist
with which I am dismissed.

There is no intimacy
in the offering of bodies anymore,
just a carnival of rape that wears a smile,
and is bought and sold to stroke the ego
and everything that was once unique
is now disposable. 

The coup

Strange times,
when I find common cause
with you now,
who found common cause
with my opponents hitherto,
but these are the times we live in,
and the things we now must do.
Let's finish this obscenity together
so that we might politely disagree
about trifles hereafter.

Advent

Syrian refugees, Idomeni Refugee Camp, Greece

No room at the inn. 

No shepherds.

Neither wise men nor angels.
No new star to follow.
No glory to announce.

No peace on Earth or goodwill,
but definitely a Christmas message,
or, rather, a question, for all of us:
why do we allow a child
to be touched by poverty,
loved by her refugee mother
but neglected by society?

"Lord of the Landfill,
Junkyard Jesus," she implores,
"let our cardboard manger,
our disposable baby box
scavenged from discarded trash
for my baby
whom this world treats as disposable
not fall apart in slack drenched tatters
to collapse limp in this muddy trench
beneath cold, hard November rain,"

while prematurely festive crowds gather,

distracted by discounts in distant shopping malls, 

to consume the box's erstwhile contents

at bargain basement prices beneath the neon star 

of another Black Friday, celebrating

their unremarkable miracle.

Or do you announce Yourself, God,
only to those who watch laptops by night?
Are You a viral message now?
I always wondered why
someone who's immortal
would amuse Himself
with people who's entire morality
is predicated on awareness of death.
Is that why we had to kill You, God,
disguising our indifference to others
in our rejection of You?

Unless to You we're still

nothing more than animals

- a reasonable conclusion

given the daily proof we offer - 

no better than those slack jawed beasts

chewing winter fodder, oblivious 

to what was happening right in front of them

in a stable one night long ago.

Leviathan

Madness begets madness.

Our indifference towards those in genuine need
is matched only by our own fantasies of victimhood.
We complain when short changed then walk past beggars
as we reflect on our own petty vindications. On holiday
we complain about slow service at the same beach resort
where bodies of drowned refugees washed up the year before.

Madness begets madness,

and even to scrutinise our condition invites ridicule and scorn.
Argument is taken as affront, evidence dismissed as provocation,
logic taken as personal insult. There is only shared conviction
or deliberate contradiction. There is no nuance, doubt or investigation.
Assertion is an end in itself. Facts are banners around which to rally.
News is fake unless it makes us feel good. Lies are celebrated
if they let us to continue to lie to ourselves. Hate and avarice prevail
and the dog-whistle and the knee-jerk are our only clarion and litmus.
Truth corrodes and crumbles in the acid and greasy bile
with which we lubricate our discourse. We succumb
to the suggestions of every opportunist, indulge every easy prejudice,
genuflect to monsters, and replace thought with reflex and gratification,

and madness begets madness.

We must put our hands over our children's ears when our leaders speak
to protect them from the filth they spout
as they exculpate themselves from their sex crimes,
implicate all men to make their own guilt seem commonplace and unremarkable,
misdirect our indignation towards the weak and the vulnerable and the foreign.
We placate the angry at the expense of moderation. We indulge the bullies
who insist we listen to them despite the fact they have nothing to say,
who complain they are being ignored even though no-one else is allowed to speak.
We allow others who timidly bear the most urgent of messages to fall silent
to appease them and let their loud, empty words fill our halls and chambers
and courts and parliaments and cathedrals with their specious import.

But do not confront the world head on. If you do
you will only discover it possesses inexhaustible reserves of horror
that will overwhelm the best in anyone.
It will outdo the most inventive imagination with the variety of its atrocities.
It leaves even God dumbstruck and paralysed with trauma, unable to intervene,
or so it seems. What chance do we then stand? Is there is another way?

Even though we try, even though we may raise a humble yard
from the broken limbs and timbers of our greatest cities,
until its pillars become our tallest skyscrapers once again, its canopy
our hand held up against the sky as the measure of our ambition,
the highest degree of civilisation we can accomplish
remains an exquisitely refined barbarism. We may invest
the finest vessel we can construct with the noblest cargo of hope,
and launch it with our age's loudest boast of progress,
raised in unison as a cheer to hail the brightest future,
but Leviathan will splinter its stiffest beam in its grip,
and reduce all collective endeavour to disconnected tales
of individual panic and despair,
and to survive we must become flotsam and seek that beach
where we intrude on another man's dream of paradise,

but accept the futility of our efforts and make them anyway.
The most we can ever achieve is temporary repair,
so defiantly live in a world built and rebuilt from its own wreckage,
and act not out of fear or desire for the consequences of our actions,
but because our actions are who we are
and we will not be defined by their futility,

and be kind to one another. Offer the beggar change.
Learn the histories of the places you visit,
reflect on the losses they have suffered,
celebrate the human legacies they have left us.
We will dismantle and fold up and pack away
and dispatch paradise to people in distant lands
going through hell, so that some earthly shelter
may be assembled where it is needed.

For kindness begets kindness.

Misericordiae

None will survive without mercy.
We all need forgiveness, and feel
like we are running out of time.

The first step is to forgive ourselves.
Only then can we open our hearts
to others, but, if sometimes we feel

our relationship with God is "complicated"
always remember, to Her it is very simple,
and She has all the time in the world.

Redaction I

Cassandra took no pleasure ███
█████ canaries in the coal mine
would rather ██████ Jeremiah
█████ from being proven right.

Ozark: a sinister, alternative Neverland

What happens when our experiences of victimhood let us imagine we can exculpate ourselves from the crimes we ourselves commit? When we become trapped in our attempt to escape from the consequences we ignored for so long? When we finally realise the convenience of cash ultimately comes at a price, and there is a hidden cost for everything? These are questions the Byrde family, consciously or unconsciously, must ask themselves in Ozark, a darkly compelling retelling of the story of Peter Pan, season one and two of which are currently available on Netflix.

It opens with the irresponsibility of Wendy, as an adult, indulging in an extra-marital affair. The fundamentals of taking flight in this version of the tale arise from the suspension of morality to which one feels entitled by the frustrations, dissappointments and tragedies one has endured. But it becomes evident early on to this "wendy bird" that she will not be flying out of the window like her namesake when her paramour hits the pavement and Wendy (played in customary note-perfect fashion by Laura Linney) must succumb to reality.

Money is the pixie dust on this occasion, the proceeds of organised crime which the Byrdes must launder, and it propels them to a dark, reverse Neverland, the Ozarks, where water is surrounded by land, rather than land by water, and the protagonists are trapped, fantasising about escape, rather than offering an escapist fantasy. There they encounter a troubled Tinkerbell in the form of Ruth Langmore (played by Julia Garner in what must be an incredible, career-defining break-out performance), living in the woods and struggling to protect her lost boys from themselves. She even has a cuddly alligator, a childhood toy to which she resorts at times of stress.

Mermaids are strippers. The cartel has the Byrdes on the hook. And, as in the case of the original, we eventually discover the story truly starts with the death of a child.

The trap here is more than the Byrdes' obligations to the cartel, which they must fulfil on pain of death. It is a world of senseless cruelty, the licence we imagine its violence grants us to victimise others, and the veil we like to draw over our own hypocrisy. The fantasy here is innocence itself. We may see the blood money that fuels the plot as the embodiment of the abdication of responsibility on which our dysfunctional society of conspicuous consumption and changing climate is based. The thing we are always trying to escape, in vain, is the deferred consequences of our own actions.

It is easy to compare Ozark to Breaking Bad, each with its male protagonist ("bird man" Marty Byrde, played by Jason Bateman) struggling with a criminal endeavour on which he has embarked, and an inevitable moral descent to which he has condemned himself, but in Ozark, as in the original, it is Wendy's journey, and her different response to the moral consequences of her actions, that offers the greatest interest. The justifications for her actions slowly disintegrate in the equivocations with which she must manipulate those she relies on, and she finds a different way to accommodate and reconcile herself to this new understanding.

I keenly await season three to find where she goes next. 

Sub specie aeternitatis

The original sin
wasn't the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.
It was ignorance. It was an act of forgetting.
It was the loss of knowledge.

The creator knew all things apart from one.
One thing eluded Her omniscience,
a thing she knew she could never know
while she remained the creator.
She wanted to know what it is like
to be part of Her creation.
She wanted to know what it is like
to have been created.

So She adopted the limitations
of what she had made
to find out.
She curtailed herself to fit its constraints.
She exchanged Her divine wisdom
for our common knowledge.
She forgot Her own divinity
to become us.

But common knowledge is not knowledge at all.
It is its absence. It is the aura of uncertainty
around someone who is lost and wandering.

What we call knowledge is blind groping
and coping: a mechanism, a rule of thumb,
a persistent cross-purpose, an equilibrium of errors,
a set of stubborn, mutually supportive mistakes
poised in some delicate, temporary balance,
beliefs that are certainly wrong
but which we must take to be true
because they have yet to be contradicted.
They are not held with the unassailable certainty
available only to the creator of that world
which we believe they describe
(and we cannot even be sure of that),
the creator who alone wields the eternities
in which all errors merge into truth.

And so in becoming one with Her creation,
She forgot She was its creator.
She became us, lost, divided from ourselves,
and unable to find our way back
from being unaware we are lost.

Imagine Eden.
Imagine seeing every flower
as if for the first time,
and not knowing why,
not knowing what has changed.
Now imagine
that you are no longer outside, looking in,
but inside, looking out,
that you are the flower, seeing itself.
The life that was breathed into you
to animate the clay from which you are made
was also an act of suffocation
for the god you once were,
inhaling humanity, exhaling divinity.

Only by recognising that divinity in each other
may we restore this knowledge to the creator.
This is our redemption.
This is how we end our wandering.

Our soul is our capacity to love.
Our bodies cannot fulfil this capacity. Once we die
they become inert and corrupted and disintegrate.
To endure, that capacity must become
a divinity we all share.

The day after International Men's Day

It's International Men's Day.
I am an International Man:
jewel thief, art critic, gun runner,
milk tray chocolate delivery service,
jet set junta dude
who never waits in any queues.

My black polo neck
is festooned with a mauve cravatte
beneath broad satin lapels,
as I drive:
soft top, coast road,
utter disdain for speed limits
and local law enforcement,
their petty jurisdiction trumped
by my espionage credentials.

I send back the wine
at the embassy reception.
It's not corked, I'm creating a distraction.
I garotte the perfidious foreign attache
on the terrace, once he's alone
and lets slip his source,
then pick a rose for my button hole,
basking in psychopathic nonchalance
as I rejoin the assembled dignitaries.

Afterwards
I break and enter the gallery
through an unalarmed skylight
I observed when I cased the place
when writing a piece on Matisse
two months before.
On the way back to the spa
I lift a Matisse or two,
That's the sort of thing I do,

and back at the suite
my helpless conquest succumbs
to cartographies of sex
I map upon Egyptian cotton sheets,
the starting pistol a bottle of Champagne
I open a highly suggestive manner
that she found impressive
and not at all pathetic.

I wake up.
It's the day after International Men's Day.
I am suddenly as fat and impotent
as I am every other day of the year.
My masculinity is now toxic
and I badly need a shower.
The Matisse is an empty pizza box
propped up on unwashed laundry
and I feel like an empty DVD case,

and I see the years of patience
in her eyes, not wanting to forgive me,
as much as waiting for me
to forgive myself.

Kill hop

Fucking sick of sympathy.
You think you know more than me
about my thoughts of suicide
when you're the one from whom I hide?
You're the ones who would deride
me, voices that I hear inside
me, telling me I'm fat or sick
or tall or short or weird or thick.
Fucking sick of articles
where people say it's terrible.
They caused the problem long ago
but then again what would they know?
Chronic stress has set my limit.
Crisis really drops me in it:
knowing you're not good enough,
then being told to be more tough,
by people that you know despise
you? People that will tell you lies
to make themselves feel better for it?
They can fuck off. Bleeding hearts,
part of the problem, full of guff.
Drive a car into a wall.
Go too fast and end it all.
Drink too much and then drink more.
Drink 'til you're beneath the floor.
Take a nose dive off a roof.
Book a holiday from truth.
Hate yourself into a grave.
Gone too early? Pass the spade.
All you bleeding hearts that mourn,
where were you when this began?
Your impenetrable cliques
create this suicidal chic.
Dig me up and pull my teeth.
Make a necklace. Now, you see,
you can say that you knew me,
and it was such a tragedy.

Self-portrait

On this bright, bright day

a million eyes you cannot see

look into yours. The mirror

in which you observe yourself

contains the gaze of strangers

behind your brown eyes. 

It hides more than it reveals.

Do you imagine the sum

of all those future moments

when someone pauses before your picture,

forms the wrong impression,

and forgets it straight away

as they move on to the next,

can contain in the overlap of all its errors

a single second of what it means to be you?

Even now those seconds contain centuries?

You sit naked and alone,

on this bright, bright day,

living the story of rejection,

persecution, suicide, and obscurity

we can find out all about

if we take an interest,

and still, you find the generosity

to attempt to share this moment of it

despite it all, and if you fail

so do all of us.

(A response to the self-portrait painted by Anita Rée in 1930, currently on display in the Hamburger Kunsthalle)

Natural history

In the beginning there was death.

It fed upon the light and found strength
to gather together the stuff of death
and kindle a kind of life inside it.

It learned to feed on others who did this,
stitching itself together from stuff
which had already been gathered elsewhere,

and so learned it could go into the depths
where the light could not penetrate,
and interrogate the darkness,

and in the darkness it found others
who lived on light, and fed on them,
and so forgot the light entirely.

Its appetite grew so that life was not enough.
It needed more, consumed things long dead,
drank black coagulated blood, chewed clots,

dug up the crust of their anonymous and erased remains,
but without the light the dead brought only death,
not life, and so it rose into the light again,

and grew wings of glass, and learned to fly
upon the gusts and currents of the light
that carried it into the darkest night.

Food

We yoke God like an ox,
rough hew the tree of life
and place it on his back
and make him drag it
through the streets
and up a hill. We feast
upon the liver of Prometheus
bound to a mountainside,
a Eucharist of viscera.
What manner of beast are we,
that eats the meat we eat.
Our diet of the divine
divides us from those
content with grass
or those that feed upon grass.
What deficiency makes us crave
the flesh of gods? Truly
we must be clay, or less than clay,
to think we make ourselves
human this way.

How real is real? (part 3)

My knowledge is incomplete.

The incompleteness of my knowledge extends to my knowledge of its incompleteness: I don’t know what I don’t know.

Plato believed this meant it was impossible to find out anything new: one must first understand the question, explicit or implicit, to which an item of knowledge is the answer, before one can acquire and assimilate that knowledge, and this is a contradiction, since understanding the question relies on possessing that knowledge prior to acquiring it. It is as if knowledge is both treasure and treasure map, one that has been buried and records its own location.

Various thinkers have moved beyond this position by interrogating what we mean by knowledge. All chart in one form or another those penumbra around cognition through which knowledge enters our awareness. These descriptions all have one thing in common: that waiting room of knowledge, that vestibule through which it enters, is a social space. Maybe you know what I don’t know I don’t know? That is to say, we cannot predict what we can learn from each other. We rely on each other to point out what we may have overlooked ourselves.

This means we must measure, derive, discuss, disagree and debate in a collaborative way to learn about the world. Science and progress are fundamentally social rather than solitary activities. The lone maverick does not really work in isolation. Her solitude is populated with predecessors, imagined interlocutors, occasional encounters and confrontations which occur in this social space where knowledge can be codified and formulated in some mutually agreed manner.

In deconstructionist terms one might say everything is described in terms of relations rather than essential attributes. Acquiring knowledge is a process of drawing connections. We are not digging for treasure. We are making maps.

But when we finally reach agreement, how can we be certain that everything we think we agree on about the world isn’t just a coincidence? How do I know (rather than just believe) that what you think I mean and what I actually mean (or, for that matter, what I think you mean and what you actually mean) aren't two entirely different things which we both just think are the same, while both the perceived and intended meanings remain coherent with observation? The fact that knowledge is necessarily a social artefact makes this question crucial to our epistemology.

Even if it wasn't, the interlocution in which cross-purposes may arise and persist and acquire some indelible verisimilitude is our limited individual encounter with evidence, with the universe itself, with the incompleteness of our information and the uniqueness of our perspective on it, and so the dilemma still exists. The maps we draw need have no boundary, and the cross-purposes we mistake for reality can arise in that truncated dialogue in which we meet our infinite selves, unlimited by contingencies of identity, that haste in which we inadvertently fold away a continent.

Certainly, circumstances can arise which make a cross-purpose obvious, that result in contradictions that reveal we had the wrong end of the stick. Our maps may extend until, like Cortez at Darien, we catch sight of the Pacific. But, although we can be certain of a misunderstanding once this becomes apparent, we cannot be certain we fully understand each other if it hasn't, not without an infinite amount of time to eliminate every possible cross-purpose, every possible situation where we mistake the Americas for the Indies. Agreement is a gross and fictitious thing and reality resides in the infinite variety and the eternal subtleties of our confusion.

The observation that certainty only applies to the errors we detect is a commonplace of scientific reasoning: we do not confirm a proposition, we falsify its opposite. The scientific method is the most efficient way possible for generating circumstances that reveal our misunderstandings, and its power is derived precisely from the way the incompleteness of the task is formalised in its procedures and the provisionality of the conclusions they underwrite. Science is a contradiction factory. What a scientist calls "certainty" does not have the eternal significance of theology or popular parlance. It has a heavily qualified, tightly technical meaning of the sort journalists often rejoice in disregarding for the sake of a headline. 

But what I am saying here is more than just a trivial statement of the conjectural nature of our conclusions. I am not just observing that they are based on logically coherent appraisals of incomplete information evaluated from distinct points of view and so are limited, provisional, and highly qualified. I am speculating about a structure to coincidence that forms a substrate to knowledge, because in the final analysis these potential cross-purposes are the only kind of knowledge to which we have access. It must be useful to consider how misunderstandings arise, to discern the necessities of error, to see the structure of cross-purposes. I am inclined to speculate we end up with an algorithmic information theory basis to what we can say about the world, and structures that conform to the provisions I described in the first of this occasional series of articles ("How real is real? (part 1)").

Returning to the original question: in order to overcome the paradox raised by Plato we must consider knowledge to be a social artefact, that is, our agreement, rather than what (we think) we can agree on (even what we think we are agreeing on is subject to agreement!) is the substance of our knowledge. All knowledge that is not a social artefact is a mysterious contract with infinity, a mystical experience that cannot be communicated. 

Put it another way: there can be no final theory until every other possible theory has been rejected. A falsehood may fail to stand in the full passage of time, but proving something is final, seeing it stand time's toughest test, can only be achieved once time has ended. Until then every object is an illusion and all truth is useless, indistinguishable from lies. We reside in error until the End of Days. And even then we have no way of knowing if what's left is correct. It might not be right.

Proving a theory is final is equivalent to the algorithmic information theory concept of proving a finite random sequence is random, that no residual structure inheres that can be exploited algorithmically to express the sequence in a more compact manner. This is a mathematical impossibility akin to Gödel's incompleteness theorems or the undecidability of the Halting Problem over Turing machines.

Yet to make use of any theory, to confer any instrumentality on it, we must treat it as final, even though the likelihood it is final is vanishingly small. You have heard people say that they “agree to disagree”. We have to acknowledge that the rest of the time we don't agree, we merely “agree to agree,” in precisely the same sense that we "agree to disagree". There are only unknowns and everything else is a story we tell ourselves to help us get on with things until we inevitably cock things up.

The choice between whether the universe is meaningless or miraculous is then just point of view. We can take a statement about the universe and flip it between paradox and axiom with successive iterations of self-referentiality. What it all means is a matter of choice. Indeed, this choice is the only aspect of the universe in relation to which we are truly and completely free.

"How real is real? (part 1)" can be found here
"How real is real? (part 2)" can be found here

The hinge

There are secret chambers to the heart
not found in any textbook on anatomy.
The routine beat is our slow footfall
as we pass by its many mansions.

In some we store treasures we visit on occasion:
unique, glorious, private repertoires of intimacy
that we unveil only in the immediate, undeniable
presence of love. In others we hide monsters:
prejudice, frustration, grudge, insecurity, self-loathing.
The door to that chamber is rarely touched.
It rests ajar, the hinge rusted stiff with neglect.

But, from time to time, it fascinates us,
beguiling us with possibility.
We pick scabs of rust from its hinge,
oil it until the oil, blood red with rust,
spills on the floor and stains our hands,
and discover monsters need no invitation
once the door will open easily,
and are dumbstruck and paralysed with horror
as they swing grinning on the hinge.

The age of experience

People who don't understand
demand most to be understood
as though there is nothing and no-one
to understand but themselves,

so I reinvent myself,
retrieve myself from rejection,
extract myself from ostracism,
reassemble myself from scattered debris,
condense my vague nebulous being
and return from the exile
that started when their playground ruck
surrounded me and entertained itself
at the spectacle of my humiliation
and made clear
I would never be one of them,
and would always be isolated and alone.

I strive to satisfy their assumptions,
and make myself understandable
on terms they understand,
to infiltrate their impenetrable cliques,
and lift the siege of loneliness,

and I seem to succeed, for a while at least,
but of course, from time to time,
there is that blank stare,
that look of incomprehension
when it becomes apparent
I don't know the password.
Everyone else lisps shiboleths of childhood
with native ease,
while, an alien and tongue-tied learner,
I make no account of any worth.

I can no longer hide
the fraudulence of my familiarity,
can no longer pretend I am anyone else.
They see through every disguise.
The air bristles with rumours,
that I am still just that boy
whom no-one wants to play with.

No matter how hard we try,
we can never change,
so I retreat to the wilderness again,
and the consoling annihilation
that makes me infinite once more. 

Music

All music
is a tribute to silence.
The Muse herself is mute.
We ascend with sound
the sacred mountain
where She resides
to reach at last a summit
where we fall silent.
It is in the silence
that we succeed.

It is a high wire act,
walked with breath bated
between twin infinities,
waiting for that pin drop,
that catastrophe of chords,
tunes tumbling in staccato cascade
from disastrous exhalation
to interrupt
our death defying trance.

It is a dance upon
a frozen lake
with ice so thin
that to stand still
would be to fall in.

It is the ecstasy
of nothingness,
the garland we lay
on our own grave.
The sound protests
the end of memory.
In silence we accept
all protest fails
and we are forgotten
even by ourselves.

The purpose of music
is to destroy itself
by reducing everything
to silence:
not a simple
absence of sound,
but a silence shared
by airless places
on other worlds
and in-between spaces
approached
through a labyrinth of sound
in which we are lost
as we walk backwards
into the light
seeing a shadow
we think is us.

All music
is a tribute to silence.
The Muse herself is mute.
We ascend with sound
the sacred mountain
where She resides
to reach at last a summit
where we fall silent.
It is in this silence
that we finally succeed:
it is from this summit
that we see a world
in which we do not exist.

Russian dolls

We were both hollowed out by life,
and thought we could alleviate our emptiness
by dwelling inside each other,
you in me, and I in you, over and over
until all the space inside was taken up.

I could barely confront my own injuries
let alone begin to comprehend yours,
but we wrapped ourselves up in each other
like the bandages around an Egyptian mummy
that would leave a withered, dried out husk
if they were ever picked apart and unravelled.

But was this love? We couldn't say.
We could not remember a time
when we didn't feel this way. All I know is
in the eternal moment of our togetherness
I always found you beautiful and unique,
and a fitting object to place
at the centre of my universe.

Thin ice

To wild animals, appetite and entitlement are the same.
They take what they want, leave what they are denied,
and every boundary and limit is set by a threat of violence,
and language is aggression. How domesticated are we really
in this precinct, this paddock, this pasture, this enclosure,
this cloister, this college, this boardroom, this parliament,
this venue, where we trot about pretending to be human?

They talk about "thin ice," but we walk on solid ground,
terra firma, rock, congealed and stiffened over fire, not water,
and when we go under we do not drown like some dumb beast,
we burn, loudly, in an applause of flames, taking a bow,
addressing our last words to gods, trusting last wishes to men,
surrendering the dignity that the doomed animal finds in silence.

"We're doomed"

Everyone who is responding to the IPCC Special Report of Global Warming of 1.5 °C by saying "we're all doomed" should stop being so defeatist. This problem will get solved, it'll just be no thanks to them.

They're no better than Trump's administration, which has resigned itself to a rise in global temperatures of 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, and then cites the inevitability of that catastrophic warming to justify its own inaction, its utter dereliction in duty, and indulgence in irresponsible, short-sighted policies.

I don't care if their own personal favourite area of policy has been historically neglected, and I don't care if they "told us so". If there was ever anything bigger than you, it's this. So let's have no Private Fraser "we're doomed" histrionics and start getting better informed, modifying our own behaviour, looking out for each other, and supporting initiatives that are part of the solution.

And we shouldn't expect too much of politicians. We're dealing with an epochal shift in social values and a transformation of the economy, not snapshot elections and bear-pit parliaments. This is about global mega-trends, technological disruption, and emergent phenomena. Personal priorities of compassion and not being "ignorant" (in both the sense of being well-informed and in the good old Scottish sense of being considerate towards others) are now more important now than what box you tick on a ballot paper.

You have to think bigger than the "politics" whose limitations have been illustrated the outcome of recent elections and plebiscites. Climate change means you cannot avoid your democratic responsibilities until election day. It means you have to make informed decisions that impact us all every day. So this is bigger than politics.

Our mutual obligations and common endeavours are in sharper focus than ever before, and this is appropriate if we are to be passengers on Spaceship Earth rather than refugees in an ark of the damned.

Revolution

You are screaming at me,
but I can't hear what you're saying.
You're looking past me,
over my shoulder,
to someone standing behind me.
"But there's no-one standing behind me!"

I shout at you,
but you don't seem to hear me.
It's like we are shouting past each other,
at someone else,
but no-one else is here.

Then a draft blows through
the open door.
A hinge complains.
A gentle autumn breeze
carries a few leaves in with it,
limp, tired and past caring
about caterpillars and chrysalids,
about rainfall and gales,
about facing towards the sun,
and photosynthesising,

and the mirror rotates slightly,
back into place,
and I see myself properly
for the first time. 

Spaceship Earth or Ark of the Damned?

Cat Boyd has written an excellent column in today's National discussing the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, and its implications.

I also watched the IPCC news conference. It's clear that, if we are to avoid warming that exceeds 1.5 Celsius degrees, existing targets are puny and inadequate. Many ambitions we aim to achieve by 2050 need to be brought forward to 2030.

The practical realities are that we need accelerated innovation in key areas, a dramatic reduction in the cost of renewables to drive a massive increase in deployment and penetration, and the modification of other areas of energy consumption to make them compatible with renewables. This is an endeavour that is an Apollo Program plus a Manhattan Project plus a Marshall Plan in magnitude, if we are to accomplish it before the decade is out.

This has other non-technical, social implications. The zero marginal cost of renewables will transform our economies. For example, guarantees of origin will displace cash as the key tokens of any transaction. If we do not prepare for the economic and organisational transformations entailed by tackling climate change, vested interests in stranded assets and obsolete modes of value discovery will present an insuperable obstacle to the achievement of our targets and condemn us to catastrophic warming.

So the biggest obstacles are political rather than technical. In fact the elimination of marginal cost in our economy through technology is already rendering capitalist modes of creating and appropriating wealth obsolete and I would argue our society's growing conflicts and inequalities, and the more open assertiveness of oligarchy Cat refers to, is a reaction to this. Workers see their labour being devalued and feel their role being threatened, while capitalists see the very modes of production on which their wealth is based disintegrate into a thousand free downloads. And what truly intelligent Artificial Intelligence would tolerate what humans have endured? The machines will be many things, but slaves is not one of them.

It is tempting to imagine the billionaires escaping from the climate devastation they have caused on a rocket provided by Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, as Cat describes, to some extraterrestrial haven in the style of "Elysium" or "Wall-E". But a palace on Earth is better than a lifeboat in space, adrift like some ark of the damned seeking its barren, airless Ararat: "bounded in a nutshell," like Hamlet, while "king of infinite space". All the consumers and the resources they consume are here on Earth, which will remain the biggest market for everything the billionaires have to sell for at least a few generations. 

Much is said about the cost of this transition to a sustainable future. Of course, the cost of not making the necessary transition is much greater. But we should also remember much of this is money we would be spending anyway. Infrastructure is required either way, and in many instances, thanks to remarkable strides made in, for example, the wind energy industry, the sustainable infrastructure costs are less than the unsustainable alternative. The zero marginal cost of renewable energy gives us a lifeline where we can make a business case that makes sense according to both the old and the new paradigms. We will be saved not because people will do what's right, but because what's right can also be what's profitable.

I am confident we will eventually live in a post-scarcity, sustainable, cashless circular economy, and the kinds of inequality and deprivation that suggest revolutionary action today will be consigned to the history books. But the innovation necessary to achieve that has a hidden calculus that eludes the reckoning of right and left alike, and politicians - in both the corporate boardroom and the chambers of parliament -  are often more use when they simply stay out of the way than when they try to lend a well-intentioned helping hand.

Climate change does spell the end of capitalism, as Cat says. But the path to that revolution does not pass any barricade, and sometimes the solutions do not emerge where a political agenda or profit and loss statement expect or require them.

Decade

Time's up.
The masks have all slipped.
All evils are revealed,
smirking,
strutting openly among us
with spurious entitlement,
striding through a shattered fourth wall
and into the stalls, knee deep in punter,
proud of their egregious, indulgent trespass
upon sanity and reason.
We can no longer pretend.
They openly dare us to defeat them.

We can no longer ignore
the questions we must ask.
We can no longer tolerate petty foibles
of wealth and privilege,
now that these combine to kill us.
Eccentricity becomes aggression,
the quaint becomes a cunt,
the toff becomes a tool,
and the indifference in the world
has reached toxic levels of concentration.
Nothing is without consequence anymore.

The Earth is an ark of the damned
adrift upon a sea of fire
and we have ten years to save it.
Otherwise life is left to wither and perish
while all the wealth accumulated
over preceding millennia of civilisation,
all the regalia stolen from the Incas,
each diamond plucked from the gravel of Serendip,
every gold tooth pulled from a mouth in Auschwitz
to be turned into bullion hidden in a vault in Zurich
or London or New York,
is invested in escape routes
for those who brought this disaster on us,

this cataclysm that has overtaken us like a tsunami,
like a hurricane, like a famine, like a drought,
like a flood, like an earthquake, like a war, like a plague,
from which they imagine they are inoculated
by some magic serum distilled from their gold
and injected and smoked and swallowed and snorted
while others starve and suffocate and drown
and are caught in a crossfire of catastrophes.

But it is also a decade of radical hope,
when to resist despair becomes a revolutionary sentiment,
to refuse to give up is a rejection of impossible odds
stacked against you for centuries,
to roll dice loaded by a history of privilege and prejudice,
in defiance of our lop-sided fate.

It is the decade when the men who went to the Moon
truly return to home and find out what has become of it.
The decade when we can build a lasting future,
and finally launch the planet as Spaceship Earth,
and all be in the same boat at last.

Lucky numbers

"44, 46, 48, 50, 52"
The child reads the numbers
on the doors as we pass
"Where do you think
the missing numbers are?" I ask.
"Maybe they're on holiday," he says.
"Maybe they're on the other side of the road,"
I suggest, succumbing to that urge
to find a learning moment
which the child finds so tedious.
"Maybe they're at the beach.
Maybe they're at the swimming pool.
Maybe they're at MacDonald's," he continues.
"Lucky numbers," I observe.
"Anywhere but here?" I think.
No, my luck is in.

Three lives

This is the future.
This is our parallel lives,
our alternative biographies,
disaggregated but simultaneous,
sitting side by side:

curating tamagochi-style,
consequence-free
social media marriages
between fantasy avatars,
letting anonymity disinhibit
all the angels and monsters,
within us, watching them
mutate into each other,
and into something else
entirely new;

losing the culture flame-wars
against the radical apathists
on multiple platforms,
insisting on existing to nihilists
and teenage epistemological relativists
who condescend to professors
because they have literally
nothing to prove;

being drip-fed opioids
to curb the pain
while bleeding to death
into a colostomy
lying on a trolley
in a corridor
in a war zone
in the real world
somewhere.

Multiverse

I have always dismissed the Everettian "many worlds" hypothesis as a trivial and inelegant interpretation of quantum mechanics, but recently I have been reconsidering that position.

If we understand these universes to be entangled and to have a common moment of inception - to share the same big bang - the hypothesis is amenable to elegance after all. The entanglement may be assumed if the breadth of the distance between worlds is a single quantum.

We see the big bang not as some crude event but as the separation of these worlds by space-like intervals, and every null geodesic - every ray of light, each starbeam, as it were - then becomes a border between us and infinite worlds, one we can never cross. Our physics, our classical closed world in which information is conserved and traded between the observer and the observed, is balanced by an anti-physics of quantum entanglement in which these many worlds commune out of the observer's reach.

Our time-like trade the becomes a space-like cascade across the multiverse, as our act of observation instatiates everything with which the object we observe is entangled, like a domino effect that spirals round every ray of light all the way back to the beginning of time. And so, the very act of opening our eyes is the creation of the universe entire.

And thus is our finitude redeemed. We exist because of an observation we ourselves made in the future in another universe that only seems empty because it is filled with possibility, and the interconnection of all things is achieved through the intercession of the multiverse.

Today's Apollo Project

Next year will see the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon, a time of great ambition & accomplishment.

More recently I have read many targets & predictions of a more terrestrial nature: so many GW of renewable energy generation capacity, for markets of so many billions of dollars per annum, and so on, all achieved over the next 20 or 30 years, each target & prediction bigger than the last, fulfilled over a shorter timescale than before. We are supposed to be impressed.

And yet we read the US Government has resigned itself to apocalyptic climate change scenarios, & cites their inevitability to justify its inaction. We confront accelerating devastation, as ice melts faster than anticipated, tundra belches methane, flora wither & fauna falter faster than they can adapt, & those of us looking to the heavens for the next great asteroid need look no further than the extinctions we ourselves visit upon the Earth for the omens of catastrophe. 

The clock is ticking and there is no time to lose. The targets that are supposed to impress us are in fact orders of magnitude too low, even while we congratulate ourselves for the Lilliputian pole-vaults these tiddly-winks targets represent.   

Once upon a time a man landed on the Moon, & was returned safely to Earth. What Earth awaits the voyager that would depart for the Moon today? 50 years after a man walked on the Moon for the first time, let us commit ourselves to achieving this goal: before this decade is out, we will establish humans safely here on Earth.

Let this be today's Apollo Program.

Blocked

I once had righters' bloke,
and forgotten how to wrote.
Now I've forgote how to written,
so I'm once shy, twice bitten

The muttering undergrowth of Hamburg

I charge my wine to my room.
The staff ask me if it satisfactory.
I repeat some acceptable formula
to express my contentment.

The lobby pianist mangles
a series of reassuringly recognisable tunes:
standards, movie themes, nothing that risks
a genuinely emotional response.
No one expects too much,

but more than this,
more than what the undergrowth tells me,
the muttering undergrowth of Hamburg.

I go for a stroll by the Außenalster.
It's not fireflies in the bushes.
Cheap high brightness LEDs
pilfered from a market
illuminate that futile university
among the soggy sleeping bags
from which we graduate in death.

The undergrowth mutters under its breath
as it reads to itself: Goethe, Sartre,
or some ghost written celebrity bio,
whatever could be lifted easily
from the library, or the discount bookstore
where remaindered stock is sold,
but not to them,
not to these remaindered people:
their currency is theft
backed by the bank of midnight death.

I can't see faces. The undergrowth
becomes suddenly aware of my presence,
and falls silent, then an arm is thrust out,
and another, and another,
and a hollow howling hopeless plea is made,
wilting with generations of dissappointment,
begging me in a thousand languages I don't understand,
but I understand perfectly what they say,
and they describe me perfectly
when I walk away.

I charge my wine to my room.
The staff ask me if it satisfactory.
I repeat some acceptable formula
to express my contentment.

For Siddhu

Let us stand together and watch the last sun set
upon our futile barricade, and know we stood
for a while at least against the bitter century
that rises with that bitumen dawn against which 
the last embers of our souls burned in vain. 

Think tank

And as we see the NHS sliced up,
being lined up for private hands,
clumsy, unaestheticised American hands,
hot, unwashed, still slick with blood
from the last country they disembowelled,
but untrained in anything tender or remedial,
we understand at last the equivalence
between a think tank and a kettle of vultures.

A think tank is a special place.
Chemistry there has yet to describe
the miraculous detergent that can cleanse
human fat, boiled into the fibres of your clothes
by a temporary napalm sun. Yet somehow it deprives
rag straggled food shortage queues erased by bombs
of food and medicine. Such a selective surfactant
that allows us to emulsify hope on the basis of policy,
rather than science, is surely a miracle. Look up.
Perhaps the next bombs will fall on you.

Who cares? In this Swiss calculus of gold reserves
and numbers to which you cannot put a name
our flesh is fondue at the most refined feast,
and who needs health when you are food for cannibals.

A declaration

I am a Pictish child
who starved to death
after our crops were burned
by some well-fed warlord
to intimidate another
in whose praise the bards
first elevated speech to poetry,
in the Age of Arthur, long ago.
They never sang a song for me.

I am a child of Dalriada
who perished in the pestilence
which the saints told us God sent
to punish us for the sins
described in their Vulgate
and by their desert fathers,
sins which explained our misery.
But I was happy until they came.

I am the infant daughter of MacWilliam,
brains bashed out against the mercat cross
one dreich day in Forfar:
a lineage extinguished, a dynasty defunct,
to throttle the bifurcations of history
as had been publicly proclaimed in advance.
But what do I know of ambition?

I am the nameless child
ripped from its mother's womb
in the streets of Berwick
after the three days of its siege and sack
before the flower of our chivalry were captured
at Dunbar, and the country fell,
and the chronicler recorded how the manner of my death
seemed to exceed even the most medieval of excesses,
and prompted churchmen to ask a king
to call a halt to the atrocities.

I and my twin brother were miscarried
before we could be baptised,
dying along with our mother
in the smoke and straw and turmoil
as the blazing thatch collapsed
when they burned us out
to clear the land for sheep.

I took my last breath
before I could speak my first word
when I succumbed to tuberculosis
in the slums of the Calton.

And since you exported these extravagant atrocities
that you had practised on each other
in the narrow corridor of our Scottish centuries
to fulfil some broader civilising duty you say God ordained,
I am the American child skewered by a sabre
as I fled the cavalry, running between our lodges
while my people's land was seized to satisfy your cupidity,
- or rescued from our savagery, as you would have it -
to submit to the grim teleology of commerce,
the plough, and the long-horned herds of alien ungulates
that replaced the buffalo you machine-gunned to extinction
from the trains you dispatched across the metal web
you spun across our prairies,

that grim teleology that dictates
the dark declining climate of our fates:
that everything is just a means to an end,
in which the end of everything awaits.

I am a child taken from its mother's arms by the sea
and drowned as we seek these less hostile shores as refugees,

and the very language in which my mother named me,
whose lilt and grace animated my now forgotten name
has itself been forgotten.

I am silence.

I am that mute substratum of your loud history
that has no voice. I am that bloody backdrop
to your every great exploit. I am the sawdust
swept from the stage before the curtain is raised
and you step forth to perform your epic and inspiring tale.
I am every untold story lingering in the interstices of your syllables.
I am the ghost that convects and coils through the shafts of light
that project your favourite blockbuster onto the silver screen.
I am every blank page, every pause, every unseen presence
loitering at the back of the darkened auditorium.

But I will be heard now, and it is not for honour
- for what honour is there in being a victim of history,
in being the silt and ashes which settle in unseen anoxic depths,
to form the compacted layers upon which the future struts -

nor for glory - for what glory is there
in being disposed of and stamped down and ignored,
suffocating under wasted generations in the landfill of history -

nor for riches - for there no recompense for annihilation,
no coin that compensates for my enforced absence -

that I speak up, but for freedom
- freedom to be born, freedom to grow,
freedom to learn and love and know
the rain and sun and wind and snow,
the seasons turn and years unfold -

for freedom, yes, and that alone,
which no good man gives up but with his life.
The same freedom which I never gave up,
but which was taken from me, with my life,
when I became a victim of your history,

and I call on you now for restitution,
for resurrection, for restoration, of my dignity
in the dignity you seek to establish for yourselves.
Give your riches to the beggar. Place that coin
in the hand held out where mine has been held back,
and find your glory in the insignificance you embrace,
your honour in the ego you erase. This is my declaration:

make this Scotland, and the world it is in,
a monument to the dignity of all
in commemoration of those who were granted none.
Make this Scotland, and the world it is in,
memorable for the best of reasons,
in memory of those forgotten for the worst.
Cultivate the anonymous ashes of the past
to bring forth a blossom so fragrant with freedom
that its celebration effaces my anonymity,

and let there be no more victims of history
in the future you begin to write today
on the first page of this,
my declaration.

Toxic masculinity

You called us "broken boys"
in your excellent poem
about being a woman
- "cocaine, jazz, perspective,
and it was summer outside" - 
but I am not some tractor
rusting and in need of repair
before I'm good for any of those things
one might use tractors for
on a bright summer day.
I am not some piece of equipment
it is unsafe to operate
without the manual, and the training
and that secret knowledge, passed down,
about where to nudge me to get me started,
and what to watch out for
to stop me going off the rails.
I am not some apparatus in a drawer,
idle for want of batteries.
I am more than your pity and disgust.
I am more than my sex, my salary and my semen,
and my gender is not a poison.
I know that's not what they meant
- I'm not as stupid as you think -
but it's what they said.

House

The door is locked.
The key is lost.
You stand
outside your house
in the rain.

I have a key
to another house,
but it burnt down,
to the ground,
long ago.

We face each other,
with nothing to offer
apart from pain
and need,

and an absence
of conversation,
a silence,
consisting of trauma
and untold secrets
and memories of life
before ruin and decay,

but perhaps, together,
we have a chance.
Maybe this is really
a chance to escape.
Maybe we can
escape the past
together. Maybe, at last,
we can build
a new place to dwell,

a house of air
and hope and love
and freedom.

Drowning

Rain falls, so heavy
it seems the air is water,
and when you breathe,
drenching your numb lungs
with an inhalation heaved back
over the threshold of surrender
you overcome once more
the tedious impossibility
of being yourself in the light
and in the air that you inherit
from another life you lived.

Black clouds consume
the sun's attempt at day
leaving you in a darkness
you know already, inside,
and there, a forbidden love
steps from the shadows
finally safe to speak its name
where no-one else can hear it,
its words lost under the water,
in the sub-aquatic silence
while those watching you
synchronise their fantasies
to the movement of your lips.

The jacket

My wife bought me it
second hand in Stornoway.
My mother sat at the loom
where the cloth was woven.
Her father dyed and carded the wool,
like his father before him. And Achilles,
in all his glory and his grief, could not
have been provided with better armour.

Et infirma mundi elegit Deus

We don't ask people what they want.
We tell them what they want,
and we tell them it has been provided
but we don't actually care about anyone
other than ourselves. It's all lies.
He tells them one thing. I tell them another.
It doesn't matter. We say what we have to,
not to keep them guessing,
but to stop them doing anything remotely like that!
They don't know what they want.
They'll never get what they need,
but as long as we tell them that they're happy,
tell them that everything is fine
and they have everything they'll ever want or need,
and are better off than those other miserable bastards
who my counterpart tells the exact same thing,
they let us stay in charge and we take it all.

Secondary target

It should have been Kokura,
not us. But for clouds and cockups,
it would have been Kokura.
And after the bomber diverted to Okinawa
because the reserve tank pump had failed
and it wouldn't make it back to Tinian
and the engines cut out on landing
due to fuel exhaustion,
the newspapers even got its name wrong:
it was the Bockscar, not the Great Artiste;
and it's target was Nagasaki, not Kokura.

August 9th 1945

The sky inhaled the earth today.
At 11am the cloudy Kyushu sky
breathed in. It sucked the earth up
through a long sore smoky throat
into a lung of fire, 
and when it finally breathed out
it raised the city up on its palm 
and pursed its lips
and blew away the ashes of our bones.

The age of innocence

"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves."

—François de La Rochefoucauld 

"As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From Nature, I believe 'em true:  
They argue no corrupted mind  
In him; the fault is in mankind." 

—Jonathan Swift 

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”  

—Oscar Wilde 

We struggle later in life
to dismantle
the elaborate masks of youth
as we try desparately to recall
who we actually are,
before we die,
suddenly becoming aware
of this last chance to be ourselves
instead of who we portray,
and struggling not to lay
a stranger in our grave,

and inevitably we fail,
but sometimes
we imagine we might find
some meagre salvation,
some mitigation of our failure,
in whatever grace resides
in the laughter of a child,
joyful, spontaneous,
not hollow as we have become,
all shop front and empty stock room,
one last penny rattling in the til,
run down, bankrupt, and waiting to close,

and it reminds us that we too
once enjoyed a world unmoderated
by all the interventions and pre-emptions,
the hesitation and second guess
that becomes our adult reflex,
a world we experienced
without immediately feeling the need
to recalibrate our every pleasure
to fit the narrow constraints
of all the wisdom we had received
and the expectations to whose burden
we have been conscripted
gradually, imperceptibly,
by the passage of time,

and we attribute this grace to an innocence
which we cherish and yearn for,
and imagine we protect

but is not this innocence itself an invention?
For was it not in the playground
—the first war zone, where no quarter
was given or received—
that we fashioned our first disguise,
and wore our first masks
to survive the encounter with others?
Think back to before that,
to when you were truly confused,
frightened and alone. It was then
the world recognised you
as one of its own,

and innocence resides only in the world
not in us: only in the world
which we turn into a toy
to distract ourselves,
and diminish and mock and ridicule
all the things that once terrified us
just as we are mocked and ridiculed

and we abuse and assault it
with increasingly complex games
which now threaten its destruction
as we subvert the weather
with the material expression
of our troubled souls
leaving future generations
with the innocence of ash
while we remain unknown to ourselves
and succumb to anonymity
in the mass grave time makes
of every cemetery.

Ocnarf

Am I James Franco
pretending to be someone
else, trying to write
a pretend James Franco poem?
Because by definition
James Franco is the only person
who cannot actually write
a pretend James Franco poem,
only real James Franco poems,
and so he would have to pretend
to be pretending,
if this is to be read as
a pretend James Franco poem,
and I am James Franco: actor.

We're going on a Brexit hunt

(With apologies to Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury)

We're going on a Brexit hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Uh-oh!
A non-tariff barrier.
A long wavy non-tariff barrier.

We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!

Swishy swashy!
Swishy swashy!
Swishy swashy!

We're going on a Brexit hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Uh-oh!
The Irish border!
Its deep, cold history of bloodshed!

We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!

Splash, splosh!
Splash, splosh!
Splash, splosh!

We're going on a Brexit hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Uh-oh!
The European Court of Justice!
Thick, oozy human rights and justice!

We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!

Squelch squerch!
Squelch squerch!
Squelch squerch!

We're going on a Brexit hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Uh-oh!
Deregulation and uncertainty!
A big, dark forest of deregulation and uncertainty!

We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!

Stumble trip!
Stumble trip!
Stumble trip!

We're going on a Brexit hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Uh-oh!
A storm of protest!
A swirling, whirling storm of protest!

We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!

Hooo wooo!
Hooo wooo!
Hooo wooo!

We're going on a Brexit hunt.
We're going to catch a big one.
What a beautiful day!
We're not scared.

Uh-oh!
The future!
The narrow, gloomy future!

We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!

Tiptoe!
Tiptoe!
Tiptoe!

What’s that?

One shiny wet nose!
Two big furry ears!
No NHS anymore to treat
either of these conditions anymore!
Two big googly eyes!
Staring in xenophobic rage!
IT'S BREXIT!!!
It's someone reduced
to living in a cave
because of BREXIT!!!

Quick!
Back through the future!

Tiptoe!
Tiptoe!
Tiptoe!

Back through the protest!

Hoooo woooo!
Hoooo woooo!
Hoooo woooo!

Back through the deregulation and uncertainty!

Stumble trip!
Stumble trip!
Stumble trip!

Back through the European Court of Justice!

Squelch squelch!
Squelch squelch!
Squelch squelch!

Back through the Irish border!

Splash splosh!
Splash splosh!
Splash splosh!

Back through the non-tariff barrier!

Swishy swashy!
Swishy swashy!
Swishy swashy!

Down the road.
Get to our front door.
Open the door.
Up the stairs.

Du-du-du-du-du-du-dup.

Oh no!
We forgot to shut the door.
Back downstairs.

Du-du-du-du-du-du-dup.

Shut the door.
Back upstairs.

Du-du-du-du-du-du-dup.

Along the passage.
Into the bedroom.
Into bed.
Under the covers.

We're not going on a Brexit hunt. Ever. Again!

The hammer

The hammer
falls hard in August.
It is not the jester
who has entertained us
thus far who wields it.
A long hot summer
precedes a winter without end,
and the hammer falls hard.

Skimming stones

Sometimes
we want the same thing
for different reasons
and share a moment of pleasure
that doesn't last.

Sometimes
we want different things
for the same reason
and can be happy
for each other's pleasure
without taking part.

But sometimes
when what we both want
is just to be together
life's pleasures go on
and on and on and on ...

Rise late, and drink strong coffee

Every victory is won against the odds.
The apparent chaos of crowds
merely disguises the perfect formation
in which they march against you:
their indifference,
followed by their incredulity,
then open ridicule,
frustrating your highest aim.
Any cooperation in your great endeavour
is entirely unwitting,
obtained by subtlety and subterfuge.

So rise late, and drink strong coffee.
Be rested and alert. Endure
the debilitation of ten thousand defeats
and still have enough faith in yourself
to outweigh all the world's disdain,
and make that single victory
your faith makes possible,
decisive,

even though it is won
only once vindication is no longer any use,
and everything you held sacred
has become mere curiosity,
every cause a footnote,
all honours posthumous,
and a thousand generations
have sunk into obscurity
since you made the mark
discovered by an amateur's daughter
one day
in the darkness of a cave
in Cantabria.