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.