"The end of the age of fire" by Peter Clive (Lulu, 2021): Review by Charlie Gracie

This is more than a poet’s reflection on the state of our planet; this is a cry of castigation. There is hope too in this fulsome collection of poems from Peter Clive. Just a little. And that feels apposite, given its publication so close to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

From start to finish, the poems are written with sharp focus. They don’t stravaig across history and landscape and human relationships; they stomp. Clive’s rhythmic and alliterative instincts are strong, and this adds engaging purpose from the very start: see the well-honed Prediction; and the meditative qualities he brings to Dies irae: Drought and deluge, fire and flood, / famine and strife have left an arid Eden. / There are no more graves.

Several long sequences allow the poet to explore central themes in depth: humans have already tipped the scales, cast the dice; the conflation of individual human experience and planetary destruction; the links between ecological and social justice. He deploys religious and other philosophical imagery very well in these pieces. In the title sequence (with twenty poems), XIV asserts: We think there are no miracles. / There is only the absence of miracles, / our perception is that the miraculous is exceptional / rather than ubiquitous. Even, as here, when Peter Clive reaches for optimism, it is muted, contained by his scientific and sociological knowledge and his spiritual instincts. This is not a depressing book: too many of the poems have such overwhelming logic that they inspire acceptance rather than anything more debilitating. That’s a great skill for a poet, to point the reader outward and inward simultaneously, and hold that balance. What despondency there is, is framed in lines that are clean and clear, such as in For Siddhu and Decade, whose opening lines say: Time’s up. / The masks have all slipped. / All evils are revealed, / smirking…

This collection from Peter Clive is ultimately a very human thing. It is laden with contained anger, with layers of history and scientific thinking, with a sense of the inevitability of our condition. Yet, even when it seems we will remain unsaved, he holds on to personal relationships. This shines out of poems like Ashes: You see those stars? / That’s the world burning down / in ten thousand little bonfires. / That’s how much I love you…

The poems in the end of the age of fire are worth sitting with and revisiting. They are engaging and enraging. The depth of Peter Clive’s reflection on the human impact on our one-and-only home planet is a creative gift for the reader.

Charlie Gracie is a poet, novelist and short story writer, originally from Baillieston, Glasgow and now living on the edge of the Trossachs: http://www.charliegracie.scot/

"The end of the age of fire" by Peter Clive is available from Lulu: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/peter-clive/the-end-of-the-age-of-fire/paperback/product-vnr4kd.html   

Ex nihilo

We are the mouthpiece of midnight, 

the means by which absence interacts

with all the illimitable instances of itself. 

The sounds we make connect silences. 

They are the growl of distant engines overhead

that leave white con trails between continents, 

threads briefly stitching together mute hinterlands

before they melt into the still more vast blue sky. 

My eyes, coming to rest upon you, evaporate, 

and settle on the ground as an astronomy of frost. 

Time laces up his boots, stands and salutes,  

and leaves a footprint in it as he marches past.

It thaws into a dew, then sinks into the earth,

where the otherwise impregnable dark 

dreams of a rose in Winter, 

and the precarious sleep of subterranean stars

contains new worlds waiting to erupt into bloom,

impetuous, petulant, petal-lipped petted-lips

that whisper curses in the orchards of the Moon

so that the season of silence can worm its way 

into every forbidden apple. Constellations

are the net we cast to catch ourselves, and fail, 

leaving complaint as our only communication.

Better to be silent. Better to listen to silence, 

the hinge of midnight, and walk through. 

Casabianca 2021

The boy stood in the sinking boat

in which from war he fled.

The waves that o'er the gunwale broke

filled all therein with dread.

Yes, beautiful and bright he stood,

but could not rule the storm,

nor, crueler than the cold wind's blast,

the bitter bigots' scorn.

The waves rolled in - he could not go

without the coastguard's aid.

Some called them on the radio

as others hoped and prayed. 

They called "Mayday Mayday Mayday,

we're tempest-tossed and drenched,"

and then they heard the coastguard say

"you ought to try the French".

"Please help us," once again they cried,

"so we may yet be gone!"

- And but the static hiss replied,

and fast the waves rolled on. 

I could go on, and tell of how,

in lyrics fine and fair,

he look’d from that lone post of death,

in still yet brave despair,

but those who sing of splendour wild

we're never really there,

the faithful, gallant, noble child

described from their armchair 

a myth. His needless sacrifice

did not empire preserve.

It is the cost of fear and lies

which nobody deserves.

(27 refugees drowned in the English Channel when their dinghy sank on 24th November 2021, including three children)

Cabbage

Perhaps it's too late. 

The rot has become 

the load bearing part 

of the structure. 

Corruption is built in, 

crime systemic, 

apathy the default, 

ignorance cultivated 

and outrage reserved 

for the expression

of prejudice. 

The state is held hostage 

by an almost imperceptibly 

slow motion coup. 

Democracy is the ruin 

of a cabbage 

after an evening of slugs. 

We need to start again. 

We need to plant seeds

and create conditions 

for them to grow. 

No score draw

Imagine, if you will, rather than a debate, a game. 

There is a question we need to answer.

Something is being disputed, whether we like it or not. 

We are seeking an outcome, a decision, a judgement, 

so let's frame the process we've undertaken as a game, 

with a winner and a loser, eventually, in theory, except: 

1) There are no rules, at least, none that everyone agrees on.

2) Anyone can join any team as and when they feel like it, 

swap sides, step aside, give up, change their mind, 

join in again, and follow different rules to everyone else. 

You can't choose who's on your side or how they play the game. 

3) There is no normal play, only unlimited extra time, 

during which the final whistle is blown continuously,

which can be a real headache, hence all the booze and drugs.

4) Multiple games must be played simultaneously, 

on the same pitch but towards opposite ends.

5) Each team is considered collectively responsible 

for all fouls committed by any individual member, 

even if you refuse to recognise them as a team mate.

6) Reality is what the commentators say happened, 

not what actually happened. There is always an angle

where the replay contradicts what you thought occurred,

which can then be discussed at length on radio phone-ins 

where every fool airs every fallacy.

7) Appeals are not made to a referee - there is none - 

but to motive, probability, analogy, consequence,  

as whole teams of straw men "play the man,"

a game otherwise known as "ad hominem,"

and words themselves become footballs,

their meaning dependent on who is in possession.  

8) Only own goals are counted when keeping score.

Everybody knows that everyone is wrong. 

The mirage of a rule may emerge, evanescent, 

against the run of play, from a sequence of passes, 

but ultimately it will succumb to entropy, 

as the move breaks down. Only advantage remains.

Nothing is ever settled, everything is at stake,  

and no-one takes any prisoners, except, perhaps,

during a Christmas truce, once, in no-man's land, 

when a real game was played in the interstice

that opened up briefly between the lines. 

So how should we then play this game? 

Should we be angels

as Aquinas describes them: deaf-blind people

walking through a world that they memorised

before the deity they obey rewound the tape, 

seeming graceful among the chaos in playback

as they avoid the tackles, 

looking like they were right all along? 

Should we be demons 

playing to galleries of sin in a whirlwind stadium 

where the terraces are the eyewall of a storm

that slides across and slowly devastates the Earth,

happy to be wrong if they can take everyone else

down with them?

Or should we give each linesman a white flag to wave,

offer our surrender for all to see, though none will accept, 

and spread our picnic on the centre spot, 

to enjoy the spectacle of a no score draw. 

The feast

Enjoy! This crisis is a feast,

an opportune disaster prepared 

in the kitchen of our history.

Our host pillaged the forest

to lay this plunder on the table.

The hall is lit by sunsets summoned

from the veins of long dead beasts

and conjured into midnight candles.

We drink wine pressed from grapes

plucked from the vine before it burned.

Tree roots and the arteries of animals

tangle like a bed of noodles on the plate, 

and there, on top, still beating, 

pumping blood black oil to dress the rest, 

the heart extracted from your empty chest.

Eat, for there is nothing left to grow. 

This is the last food ever. Enjoy!

Extinction level event

An asteroid strikes a planet. 

Geologists discern a layer of debris, 

a dark ripple in the strata.

A boy throws a pebble in a pond.

Radio emissions radiate into space. 

Aliens try to decipher our trivia,

ancient by the time it reaches them,

its point of origin now an impact site

where silence is stacked upon silence.

No offence

I feel I have offended you somehow. 

I don't know exactly when or how, 

but it seems the only explanation. 

I offend lots of people, sure, 

not least myself, but usually

I have a clear idea of what I am or did, 

in retrospect if not at the time. 

In your case I don't know what I've done. 

I think it's one of three possibilities.

There was that time you might have felt

I gave you the cold shoulder. 

I recall I didn't want to seem over-familiar,

and realised later I had over-compensated

and probably seemed quite unfriendly. 

Once I wrote something that might have seemed

a criticism of the naivety of your youth.

I take it all back without reservation if that's the case. 

Then there are opinions I hold, or rather, 

opinions you might believe I hold, 

as no-one forms opinions anymore, 

they are ascribed to them by others

for the sake of argument, 

so we can be placed in opposing camps. 

I know none of these possibilities is the truth, 

and in fact, far from feeling offended, 

I do not cross your mind at all, 

but maybe I would settle for your poor estimation

when the alternative is the oblivion of being unknown

to someone as entirely wonderful as you. 

Compared to that even regret is enough. 

The eagle

The high eagle passes 

between the worlds

while vultures stop to feast 

below. Everything is forgotten 

but nothing is lost. Beyond 

the misty veil of memory

where all amnesias merge 

into a common absence,

there is a cliff, featureless 

except for where it nests

and rears a brace of chicks

that will grow to soar 

over worlds we can't imagine. 

Bags packed

Blah blah bullshit

Have you any coal?

Yes sir, yes sir.

Burn it all. 

Burn for the bastards

who feel no shame

and burn all the evidence 

of who is to blame.

(Response to the change of the wording of the Glasgow Climate Pact from "phasing out coal" to "phasing down coal")

Loss and damage

There is a lot of entirely justified anger at the outcome of COP26, and what is an inadequate response to a global emergency. I'd like to focus on one part: providing finance for loss and damage in the global south is a crucial test of the democratic credibility of the international order. 

As George Monbiot has said, we are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. For decades we have used moral arguments. Although compelling, these have made negligible headway. They appeal to altruists but not to the psychopaths in charge, who are literally incapable of comprehending them. 

However there are entirely mercenary arguments too, that should convince even the most self-centred, myopic psychopaths. For example: climate change related insured losses have increased 5 fold over the last 3 decades; the cost of energy from new-build renewables is now in many instances less even than the marginal costs of generation using fossil fuels; and so on. 

The issue is uninsured losses. These have increased by an order of magnitude more than insured losses. These are accrued by people in the global south with no insurance who are left destitute by extreme weather, not people who make a claim against their insurance in the north. 

Their only recourse is our imperfect democratic institutions. 

So if the UNFCCC Conference of Parties is anything, it must be capable of being a sort of peripatetic world government to which those without insurance but with a vote can bring their claim via delegates appointed by their democratically elected governments. Otherwise the international democratic order has failed, leaving only unaccountable mercenary psychopaths to solve our problems in accordance with their own narrow self-interest.

Technomass

 On a recent family trip to London I saw many interesting exhibits in the Natural History Museum. We visited the "Our Broken Planet" exhibition. One display in particular caught my attention. It showed the variation in the mass of living things (animals, plants, fungi, microbes) and human-made materials (concrete, metals, plastics, gravel, asphalt, glass) over time. The mass of the living material, which ecologists refer to as biomass, has been relatively stable over time at just under 1.2 teratonnes. The mass of human-made material, in contrast, has increased dramatically, growing exponentially to the point that it is estimated to now exceed biomass as of last year, 2020. 

It is tempting to call the human-made material technomass, to distinguish it from biomass. I hesitate to do so yet, though: it will become technomass once the amount of it has stabilised in a manner analogous to biomass. This is because the stability of the amount of biomass is a consequence of the way the natural processes that generate and circulate biomass manage an energy budget. Once we have achieved the same with human-made material we can assign to it an analogous status: technomass. The amount of human-made material is growing exponentially precisely because we have so far failed to do so. 

Living systems entail complex food webs, interconnected food chains, through which energy flows. The energy an organism invests in creating a complex chemical is not lost when the organism dies. Other organisms recover that energy. Of course, living processes increase entropy globally, but maintain a low level of entropy locally in the biomass that expresses these processes. Energy is acquired primarily from the Sun by autotrophic organisms, such as plants and algae, to create living matter from inert substances through processes such as photosynthesis. That energy is then used by heterotrophic organisms such as herbivores (and then carnivores). When they die detrivores break them down into nutrients that also sustain autotrophic organisms. Throughout this process the energy budget required to maintain the low entropy of the biomass is managed through processes that on the one hand acquire energy from the Sun, but on the other, retain energy in the form of complex chemicals that have been synthesised by living organisms and are recirculated by biological processes.

In contrast, human systems require the extraction of raw materials which are processed primarily using energy released from fossilised biomass. The human-made material, and the investment of energy it embodies, is typically discarded after it has served a single purpose. More raw material must then be extracted and processed in progressively more complex ways, using more energy released from fossilised biomass, producing by products like carbon dioxide, and resulting in an exponential growth in the total mass of human-made material precisely because the energy initially invested in creating the human-made material is not recovered by the recirculation of that material in the system. If the energy budget this processed material represents was properly managed by re-using, re-purposing, or re-cycling the material in a manner analogous to biomass, it could be considered technomass, and the amount of it could be stabilised. The solution of other problems, such as the consequences of the by products released by our activities, would be incidental to the stabilisation of our technomass.  

The analogy with biomass can be extended further. Wind turbines and solar panels are examples of autotrophic technology, on which other, heterotrophic technologies depend for energy. We might even contemplate the equivalent of detrivorous technology: some day, perhaps, we will open up once more long disused landfill sites and let small autonomous robots scavenge for technomass we disposed long ago to recover the energy embodied in material we have discarded as inert and reassimilate it into our economy. Indeed, we will no longer talk in terms of recycling, as this will be assumed. Instead, the disposal of material without recovery of the energy embodied in its manufacture will be termed decycling. We won't encourage recycling, we will discourage decycling, as I have discussed here. Ecology and economy then become the words that describe processes that pertain to biomass and technomass respectively.  

Technomass is an alternative description of what we would call the circular economy, a different perspective on the same objective. It is a useful representation because it makes clear that the value of technomass arises from the extent to which it is part of a processes, rather than from the scarcity of the material and its accumulation. Gold is worthless if it stays in a vault when considered as technomass. It is valuable only when utilised because of its particular properties. Speculation erodes the value of technomass if it removes it from circulation. When assigning value to data and its manipulation by digital assets it is often said that increasing the value of data requires you to "connect, don't collect". Technomass is the corresponding approach to physical assets. 

I have said that technomass is human-made material whose amount has been stabilised systematically, in a manner analogous to biomass, through the proper management of the energy embodied in its manufacture. That amount is ultimately determined by constraints associated with available raw materials and energy, and the limitation of environmental impacts to a sustainable level. However these restrictions only apply on Earth. In general, a space-faring society will consist of more technomass than biomass. Consider a moonbase, such as the permanent presence on the Moon currently planned as part of Project Artemis. Inevitably the amount of human-made material will exceed biomass under these circumstances. However, if we are not tourists, if we genuinely intend to stay, it must be managed, rather than abandoned as trash, and nothing can be wasted. It must be treated as technomass. One can consider the challenges we face at the moment in relation to climate change, and establishing a permanent human presence here on Earth, as being the equivalent of establishing an earthbase. 

This brings me to my final thought on the subject: if biomass and technomass are so analogous, will we at some point cease to distinguish between them? Will our cities be considered to be concrete coral thrust into the air just as coral of biological origin adorns underwater reefs? What happened, so that we even began regarding the artefacts of human effort to belong to a different category of object to the residue of biology? 

I have discussed elsewhere the dynamic whereby innovation allows us to transform the material representation of wealth. This rescues its value from erosion by obsolescence and unsustainable environmental impacts. As a consequence the privileges enjoyed by those to whom the wealth is deemed by society to belong can be preserved. Indeed wealth is how we encode privilege. When this process of wealth renewal proceeds smoothly the inequalities it maintains are generally considered to be equitable, a fair reward for skills and initiative from which everyone benefits. When the process stalls, such that wealth dwindles and must be concentrated in a smaller number of piles teetering ever higher, the sense of equity is lost and so the inequalities become stark and undeserved, provoking strife. 

This dynamic has its origin in the distinction we made at some prehistoric stage in our development between biomass and technomass. A primitive materialism of disposability arose when objects could be put beyond use for ritual purposes, for example, as grave goods. The process of decay rather than renewal to which these objects were subject was observed and we introduced a concept of linear time to describe it. We invented supernatural otherworlds where these laws did not apply, and we could escape from the linear time we had invented, a place where the ancestors could reside, and, once they became too numerous for the genealogists to recite, the gods. 

We sometimes consider the task that confronts us just now, resolution of the challenges that arise due to carbon emissions, as a 50 year journey, from the time in the 1970s when the dynamic of innovation I describe, that could have pre-empted much of what has subsequently occurred had we taken the opportunity then when it first presented itself unequivocally, stalled, and denialists set the agenda on behalf of vested interests unamenable to the change and transformation that was necessary. Sometimes we consider it a 250 year journey, encompassing industrial capitalism from the development of efficient steam power by James Watt and the voracious appetite for coal that stimulated. But we are at the end of a million year journey, a path corresponding to linear time itself as manifested in our culture and its artefacts. The ultimate destiny of these artefacts is to become technomass.  

Cainnt-mhire / A pun

Thuirt Greta "blah blah blah"

ach thuirt an t-saoghal "blàth blàth blàth".

Bha iad a' bruidhinn mu blàthachadh-cruinne

an déidh a h-uile càil,

iompachadh adhar theth ri cainnt-mhire.

(Greta said "blah blah blah"

but the world said "blàth blàth blàth" 

["warm warm warm" in Gaelic, pronounced "bla bla bla"]

They were talking about global warming after all,

turning hot air into a pun.)

Birthday

There was an old man 

who fed the birds birthday cake 

every day. He would go to the co-op, 

buy a cake, and take it to the park, 

and feed it to the birds. 

"I'm old now, and don't have long to live,

so why can't every day be my birthday? 

Why should I only celebrate once a year? 

It's a miracle I'm here at all."

No man's land

In the end 

what we had thought matters most, 

even to the exclusion of all other considerations,

turns out not to matter at all. 

What turns out to be important

is something we have completely overlooked 

the entire time, and so

I'll meet you in the no man's land 

between equivalence and dichotomy, 

between competing certainties, 

and we'll spread our picnic by some crater, 

paddle in waters we've muddied with fallacy, 

while artilleries of argument 

cough contradictions at each other over our heads, 

our only audience skeletons 

stumbling through wire barbed with ambiguity 

strewn over earth peppered with shrapnel-seeds of doubt, 

their last grimace of conviction melted from their bony faces,

until the only truth left for them to witness

is a wren perched in their empty eye-sockets for a while, 

and our irrelevant truce, while it lasts, 

before this permanent warfare intrudes upon our pleasantries, 

shall be all the world knows of peace.  

We'll talk about the ethics we discover 

only once we run out of excuses, not the morality 

we use to express ideas of compassion 

and understanding and responsibility

but that sense of obligation that remains 

even when we don't understand, have no clue, feel no pity, 

but from which we draw meaning nevertheless, 

because the alternative to credo is chaos, 

and so we stay loyal to the unknowable,

follow rival codes to conceal our common ignorance, 

blame each other for their ambiguities, 

and chase tattered banners across contested battlefields, 

rather than confess, humbly, that we cannot explain our cause

any more than a shadow can describe the Sun.

Here in no man's land we find what we need without seeking it.

We find it in each other. 

The courage to confess comes as a surprise. 

We are most fortunate in our misfortune.

The dinner lady of Pantglas

"Wake up Nansi," the children whisper,

tugging her dead hair in the heavy dark,

five children saved beneath one dinner lady, 

become Egyptian sky goddess in a Welsh valley,

painting stars on the firmament of their future

in the starless depths of their present. 

Digging

Digging through dread, not digging in hope,

not anymore, you've been digging too long,

not knowing how long you have to dig,

you dig knowing already the only thing

that will bring your digging to an end, 

the only reward waiting for you under the mud,

will be to take into your arms at last

something that until now only existed

in an imagination darker than the deepest pit,

born, made real, beneath the fallen mountain,

two hours before half term was due to start. 

 

The salmon

I roared among men in all the places

we chose to shout at each other,

formed the circle when required 

and stood in the centre when it was my turn, 

but in all my days of boasting, my stout heart

was empty, just a woven willow basket

in which I hoped to see a salmon someday, 

a fish out of water, like me, the thought thrashing

in my blood for a while, beating it like cream

to a curd I could display in triumph 

to those whose esteem I truly craved, 

a salmon plucked from the stream

that flows through my youth, 

on whose banks the shieling of memory stands, 

now roofless and derelict with failure, 

and I return now to where the lies

with which I protect myself from shame

and disgrace wither and shrivel to tinder 

strewn over the marsh, and my heart breaks

again and again, and the towers of glass

where men fold and file their paper estimation of me

are oceans distant, and the fish still eludes my caress

as it has since before I was born and will

to the end of time, and time takes possession of me, 

and there is no escaping from it into dreams, 

but then the salmon turns and I catch its eye,

and time becomes my prisoner

as I stroke its chin and share my doom with it, 

let it take my doom from me as I hoist it

into the air, see it land on the wiry gauze of heather

and gasp, but there is no triumph, 

I have been saved from needing victory anymore, 

and eat without appetite, wear their crown

as briefly as expectation permits, concede what I must

before departing, and go at last, to live. 

Abandoned

I seclude myself from the world,

and clear my thoughts of worldly things.

I let myself become aware of the universe,

slowly, calmly, but when I reach out and touch it, 

all I feel is sadness. Infinite sadness. 

I try to find a music that shares this with others

because the universe is lonely. We abandon it. 

All it can do is exist, while our fictions are fatal 

to that which only has the capacity to be real.

It is an absence our myths step around, 

a shadow in the labyrinth of their dance, 

a silence implied in every word they speak,

and everything we say and do in emulation. 

It can never accept an invitation to be our friend. 

We must leave our friends to be with it,

and then only in that one single respect

in which we share its infinite sadness,

but I do not think you are ready to give up

everything you must abandon simply to exist.

The message

The intended recipient of the message

was not some extraterrestrial intelligence

residing on some distant planet orbiting another sun

towards which alien vegetation turned, its leaves

not green, but tuned to a different spectrum.

The probe slid through the interstellar void,

its plutonium heart not palpitating, but alive,

still, with a fading hiss of radioactive decay

that raised its core temperature above

the cosmic background in which it bathed.

The message it carried was not meant 

for any creatures like those that built it. 

It was not incised onto a golden plaque

along with images showing its origin 

and representations of its maker, naked, 

hand held up in a gesture of goodwill. 

It was conveyed purely by implication. 

What it said was this: "this place is not lifeless.

I bring life with me. Wherever I am,

my presence alone is gospel of intelligence,"

and this it said to the infinite dark itself. 

Feral

I was not raised by wolves.

They were not needed. 

I was not abandoned. 

I had a home among men,

but still I wondered, sometimes, 

would I not have been better off

with wolves? I imagined that snout

discovering my different scent,

accepting it, and moving on,

my divergence obvious, unremarkable,

not a cause for suspicion, 

not perceived as a threat,

not something to reject.

So, even though I was not feral,

I was something less and more. 

Part of me was raised by men, 

and part of me was never raised at all. 

October 2021

Everything is progress towards the light

and so must begin in darkness. 

The sun sets for the last time in October.

The new year germinates in the belly of Winter,

secret and unseen. We converse with ghosts,

wear masks, burn the bough that bore the fruit

we spice with tales told around the fire,

and observe the solstice' star beam puppetry,

as the Northern Lights draw a luminous curtain 

across Polaris. The rumour of Spring 

does not yet intrude upon our conversation,

but though our revels echo in the dark

we will be rescued by the recoil of the seasons,

and forget the hollowness of time, 

the cavern whose mouth exhales another Summer

onto the pastures of our happy amnesia. 

Bouquet

Futility of words, wilted bouquet

offered by a lover one day too late 

to press a suit, sincerity now in doubt 

in the dawn of shame, and forever. 

All epistemologies are wrong,

all garlands wreaths for yesterday's certainty,

for nothing can be known, 

or if they tell us anything at all,

it is the wasted teleology of the withered gift,

the fallen petal, the broken promise, 

betrayals committed and endured,

so accept these words, my love, 

their pointlessness evidence

of the point they had, like all meanings 

understood only by its absence,

as voids leave shadows in a scan,

and tides are known by debris at high water,

and believe in the full heart without which

these empty words of mine would not exist.

Welcome to Kenmurania

We ken wur ain,

Jock Tamson's bairns,

in Kenmurania,

an' there's nae shame

tae mak yer hame

in Kenmurania.

Oor country concertinas,

an' aw streets become wan

if they try tae lift jist wan o' us.

We'll end their best laid plan.

We ken wur ain,

Jock Tamson's bairns,

in Kenmurania,

an' there's nae shame

tae mak yer hame

in Kenmurania.

Feart an' furtive was the raid

afore the crack o' dawn,

but still got stuck in oor blockade,

an' thegither we were strong.

We ken wur ain,

Jock Tamson's bairns,

in Kenmurania,

an' there's nae shame

tae mak yer hame

in Kenmurania.

The cat's birthday

It doesn't matter what we do,

or what we say, or what we hear.

It matters what we mean, 

like the cat's birthday. 

You may never understand

why people do or say

what they say or do. 

Just know that they love you.

Nothing has any other purpose.

The jackdaw

Wandering friendless in the woods

I found the jackdaw on the ground

in the overgrown ruins of an abandoned house.

Not yet fully fledged, 

it seemed to have fallen from a nest.

At first I thought it was dead, 

but then it started to move.

It was remarkably tame. It let me pet it.

I concluded it had fallen on its head.

It was still injured. I took it home,

put it in a shoe box padded with a few towels, 

gave it a bowl of milk and bread 

to help it regain its strength,

and left it in the vestibule to recover.

The next morning I found its remains

scattered over the lawn.

Some feral cats had got in. 

The shoe box was now a coffin. 

What do we learn from these occasions?

We feel sadness, and sense a loss of innocence,

betrayed by a world that is so bitterly unfair,

whose promise of perfection lies in tatters,

and a different child left that jackdaw's grave. 

I was twelve. They said I was a loner. 

Head hunters

We have shrunk so small

we live our lives in snow globes

and travel on ships in bottles 

to fantasy destinations

across an Earth as flat

as a map spread on the dining room table.

Our little legs are so short

they have to move twice as fast

to go half as far as before,

so we are always running late, 

and time dwindles from the symphonic sprawl

of a languid evening at the concert hall

to the wrist watch and the ring tone

and the terse excuse and hasty promise

in the traffic jam or subway at that precise moment

half an hour after you should have been there 

and half an hour before you now say you will arrive. 

No time to talk over drinks at the interval, 

our attention is not invested in the intimate.

We can spare the time it takes to like a meme

and check our notifications. 

That's the most we can manage.

Once we spoke in confidence 

and made confessions to each other. 

Now conversation is scandal and exposure, 

and risk averse, we hide our hearts.

We have nothing to hold onto anymore

but nothing has moved out of reach.

We ourselves have shrunk and can no longer reach 

as far as we once did. All our grasping

has made our arms wither. Do you remember?

Do you remember when we shared experiences

rather than retweeted second hand remarks?

When words joined us in joy and in pain,

rather than stabbed us and split us apart? 

So now we remove our skulls, sew our lips shut, 

boil ourselves in herbs to preserve our skin, 

use a block of wood to fill our heads, 

decorate ourselves with beads, 

and put ourselves on display like trophies. 

Music is a lie

Music is a lie.

Music is the truth. 

The truth is a lie, 

because, as the music reaches out, 

and finds its way to all of us,

scattered across the world,

some of us dead, others unborn,

experiencing performances

in concert halls that have burned down

or have yet to be built,

tuning in from different times and places

to different performances, 

it says these are all the same performance, 

or versions of the same performance

that happened once, in one person's mind,

and everything else is elaboration and echo, 

and we are all one and united

in the music, and the lie is true

because although we are constrained

to let the notes spill one after another,

and stride across different registers in pitch,

and stutter across differences in tempo and pace, 

and sometimes whisper, and other times shout, 

we hear music because we hear what they are saying,

which is that there is only one note,

seen through the prism of the mind,

and only one mind, and the truth is a lie

only because it has to be told by many, 

and the lie is true

because music lets it be told by one. 

Constellation

All encounters with reality 

are mediated by necessary fictions 

because we are ourselves illusions: 

artifacts of incomplete information, 

a series of coincidences amid chaos,

a pattern that remains coherent 

for the duration of our trajectory, 

like the brief alignment of stars 

that eventually succumbs to parallax.

Nor is any atom inscrutable, 

whispering riddles that make us pause 

at their principled uncertainty. Rather, 

it is us that are written while we watch,

us that our apparatus records, 

us the needle scribbles on the chart. 

We are not the observer but the observed.

The atom interrogates us, its quantum convulsions

and seizures spasms in our own understanding, 

our science the intercession of the immediate.

We treat our unfinished lives like symphonies 

complete, rehearsed, and conducted by us 

at the closing concert of a grand festival,

when we are merely novice instruments, 

frets fumbled by stiff unpractised fingers, 

lending voice to a piece whose notes 

first appear in front of us  

as the page is passed at the premiere.

Only the stars are real, 

from whose dust our bones are made, 

from whose exhalations we draw breath, 

and we borrow that reality, 

raise our eyes to find our image among them

among the patterns that we choose to see,

and return to our inexhaustible source 

with the last breath that we draw.

Know your enemy

You are holding a time machine in your hand.

You are looking at the future, not the past.

Every report you read about what happened

is a premonition of what's to come,

yesterday's carnage tomorrow's news today. 

As you prod this glowing rectangle

to receive updates about the latest disaster

you are your future tapping yourself on the back. 

Put it down. Turn around. Look yourself in the face. 

Flourish

"Welcome to Glasgow, delegates.

Here is our Glasgow coat of arms.

See, the bird, the tree, the bell, the fish? 

And we have a story to tell about each,

but none that you might already know,

nothing about saints and kings from long ago.

We've updated them for contemporary relevance, 

so: here is today's bird that never flew

because habitat change overtook it;

today's tree that never grew

but burned down in a wildfire instead;

today's bell that never rang,

because there was no point, 

why would you ring an alarm 

when we've ignored every other warning; 

and the fish that never swam, but perished 

in oceans swollen by melting ice, crimson with algae, 

and turned acidic by our industries' exhaust fumes.

While you are here please give us a new tale to tell,

about how you solved what we don't need a saint to fix,

because none of us are saints, after all, 

and it really doesn't take a miracle

to write a story about birds that fly and trees that grow

and fish that swim and bells that ring in celebration 

of a future in which we let the whole world flourish."

Horizons

What horizons do you see, o bird, 

bending your blue sky high flight

around the curvature of the Earth?

We sit on a flat picnic blanket world

stretched between the cardinal points

of an inconsequential conversation

navigated with compass kettle

and sandwich map until evening,

its edges horizon enough for us 

until we fold the world away,

abandon the sunset and retreat home.

What worlds do you weave

for the Moon and stars to rest upon

between your horizons, bird? 

We lay a launch pad on the Earth,

and substitute a rocket for the kettle.

It punctures the sky and skewers the stars. 

We ride it and have our picnic on the Moon, 

see an azure world rise over a grey horizon, 

watch a thousand sunsets 

blushing with wildfire ash

curve around the red meniscus of night 

from our perch in orbit, and talk about life.

The swift pursues the insect. 

The hawk interrogates the meadow

until it gives up the rodent it was hiding.

We use the world entire for target practice now.

What horizons do you see, o bird? 

Storm in a tea cup

A lord, over a cup of tea,

of crisis and emergency

in his morning paper read

and "storm in a teacup" said, 

to diminish its significance,

and justify indifference,

but while he stirred his tea and sipped,

the climate curdled, seasons slipped,

cyclones swirled, tipping points tipped, 

and forests burned down to the ground

while frightened people looked around

for second chances, but time was up, 

and somewhere, from a larger cup

a dark lord of inestimably higher rank

deep draughts of dire disaster drank.

Dies irae

Our lives are increments 

by which the world changes 

from a garden to a grave, 

the sexton's spade a plough 

turning the soil since dawn in Eden 

to the end of days, and He 

who first enclosed this acre,

has returned, as was foretold,

to decide what now becomes of us. 

A fanfare announces His arrival, 

scattering sounds like seeds

to root through every tomb in the land,

and in their soil find hidden sins 

to bring into bloom. What graves

will the Gardener find rank with weeds, 

to scythe into the fire? What fragrance 

will our souls yield for Him to cherish

and preserve? Or will He be too late?

Impatient for judgment, 

we have judged ourselves.

Drought and deluge, fire and flood, 

famine and strife, have left an arid Eden. 

There are no more graves.

The stone of every tomb crumbles to dust, 

and is swept and stirred by hot siroccos 

into anonymous drifts, heaping in dunes 

our indistinguishable delinquencies,

our inextricable souls beyond salvation. 

Ashes

You see those stars?
That's the world burning down
in ten thousand little bonfires.

That's how much I love you:

I don't have time

to show you all the ways

- I'd need to be immortal -

so instead, I set fire to the world

to light the way to world's end.

I'll be gone, but my love will endure,

and you will find it waiting there for you, 

my wedding ring among the world's ashes.

The false men

All landscapes are ritual landscapes,

their routines coiled up inside each other,

slowly unwinding in a world of overlapping lifetimes,

from the beat of a bee's wings, to the heaving of tides,

to the pulse of the seasons and the centuries 

and the sediments and slow upheavals of geology,

and men raise circles, like gears with teeth of stone

to mesh with and turn the machinery of heaven,

the Earth cartwheeling with the constellations.

The monuments established lines of sight 

that draw the eye to star set on the world's rim,

but all that men learn now are repertoires of desecration, 

perspectives limited and priorities curtailed

until everything is reduced to chaos, 

and every step becomes a trespass in this place

where once we walked with gods. 

We must unhitch ourselves from the apparatus

by which we are bound to reckon the ebb of wealth, 

the chaotic tides on which we have set ourselves adrift,

stop counting the seconds that sentence us 

to the custody of coin and the cultivation of cash.

We must expiate the theft by which we possess it,

and hear other rhythms instead of these drums

to which we march in our own country as if in conquest.

Perhaps then we too can raise monuments

that will endure like these stones, 

surrender ourselves to that place beyond remembering

where those who built them now dwell.

When tongues are confused, speak in silence.

Let stone carry what we have to say

beyond the circumference of the clock we abandon,

which keeps time for the affairs of men today. 

They call you the false men, 

ancient giants turned to stone,

for refusing to accept the word of the Lord, 

but who is guilty of the greater error, 

you or your accusers, who have disappeared 

with the season of their squabbles and insinuations 

and the virtues they bestowed only upon themselves. 

Lies were told but truth endures,

even without men to speak it. 

(An information plaque at The Callanish Stones reads "locally the stones were known as 'Na Fir Brìghe' ('The False Men'), giants who had been turned to stone for refusing to convert to Christianity" 

[N.B. "Brìghe" seems to be a misprint on this notice, which should probably read "Bréige" - "Na Fir Bréige" would indicate "the men of lies" as opposed to "Na Fir Brìghe" which denotes something like "the men of substance". Perhaps the misprint is trying to tell us something.])

The pity

There is more to condemn in this world

than there is time for censure, 

more to celebrate than there is time for praise, 

and in between we fall to rancour 

only to prove how little we have learned 

about this world, and how little we know 

about each other. We presume to speak for others

and yet remain strangers to ourselves,

are quick to raise our voice in indignation

but stay silent when what is required is remorse, 

assemble to denounce criminals but grieve alone, 

while forgetting we should all pity and be pitied

for there is more to condemn in this world 

than there is time for censure, 

more to celebrate than there is time for praise. 

Tether

The fire and flood,
the plague in our blood,
the rich in the sky,
while poor drown and die
or struggle for breath:

those who dodge death
to orbit aspire
while Earth is on fire,
and I truly hope
the virus and smoke
that makes millions choke
is found out in space.

When you win your race
the ribbon's a noose
for all the abuse,
and every excuse
twists into a rope.

Prediction

We live in the era
of the weary Cassandra,
the jilted Jeremiah:
all prophecy exhausted, 
the oracle is hoarse,
too tired to testify,
witless with witness fatigue. 
You heard the warnings.
You chose to ignore them.
It's your turn to scream.

Winter

That change from wonder to fear:

it was not the thing we fear that changed.

Something else spoke to us.

We would have been indifferent

but for a rumour whispered 

in the leaves of last year's autumn. 

We summoned courage to chase ghosts. 

The woodlands waited for us 

to realise we had been tricked,

even while rivers froze and snow fell

during the season of our neglect.

We cut their limbs for the fire

around which we told tales of heroism,

of dragons slayed, and the part we played 

in defeating the monsters we had heard of.

They waited as if our imagined histories

might eventually cure us of the rumour, 

and while they waited I left the circle 

and went outside and waited with them,

my breath crystalising into a thousand stars.

Pebble

On the shore, a pebble:
a thumbnail sized lozenge of stone
lying among larger siblings.
The sea, insistent as a mother,
nudges shingle over and over,

tucking it in, tumbling and polishing it
into smooth pale breasts of quartz,
tight black fists of basalt,

speckled eggs pregnant with the ancient past,
round grey stones banded
with the truncated rainbow of geology

like miniature grey scale Jupiters,
or with cupric greens and ferrous pinks,
where veins of ore once infiltrated
layers of rock folded like dough
four hundred million years ago.

Further along, stones are larger again,
edges not yet worn away:
debris from winter storms.
The sea put its shoulder to the land
until it yielded, and there, an outcrop
from which a rock, still showing
a clean break, was cleaved recently:
the pieces still fit. In this mass
all fragments once met,
before waltzing with the sea
along the shore, losing the shape
that show they were joined, individuated
by forces that diminish them.

I place the pebble on the rock,
not to return it from exile to its source,
nor to commemorate my own presence
but simply to show that time exists,
for how else are we to make sense of this. 

Lament for a bad poem

A poem is a poet's act of faith in the reader.
Things are said that require no explanation,
but the poet also breaks faith, inevitably.
The poem levitates on an updraught

for a while, but eventually stalls. 
The poet always looks down at some point

is stricken with vertigo, stops trusting

the reader to lift their poem's wings

with the meaning they find in its words,

and explain themselves, and a bond is broken.
The tether that kept the poem, kite-like,
from being lost to the world's winds,
falls from the hand.

Some things require certainty,
and at the same time can't survive it.
It takes longer to say what must be said
than the interval of time in which the spell
that must be cast to say it can endure,
and so some words will always be heard
only by the stars at midnight. 

Sides

One side calls the other a bad word.

The other says it's just a slur.

The truth is, some are, and some aren't. 

The truth is, distinctions are blurred.

The truth is we never choose sides

based on what truly divides us.

Midsummer eve

We raise the prospect of apocalypse

only as a monument to ego.
Better to lose oneself in a solstice sunset
as it lingers late into the summer night,
taking its leave and promising to return,
to witness worlds end in the peony's ruin
its petals strewn across the midnight lawn.
Why elevate one end over all others?
Every second sounds something's knell,
and fear and hunger pursue what remains.
This symphony of sacrifice,
these rags in which worlds rise and fall,
deserve more and ask for less
than any grand finale can provide.
No hands joined in prayer or applause
can celebrate the sparrow song of now,
and the million petty doomsdays
that open and close their eyes today.

Park bench

I speak, and the words appear in front of me,

simple, clear, and obvious. I cannot imagine

how anyone might misconstrue their meaning. 

Time passes. I speak other words. New words.

The first words feel neglected and wander off. 

They recede into the distance, exploring,

finding new places and things to describe, 

but still occasionally turning to wave at me. 

My new words are my best friend now though. 

The old words cast a final glance towards me,

then disappear out of sight. I have no idea

what on Earth I was talking about before. 

My new words are all I have to say, 

but now my new words become curious

and start to explore. I speak again,

more for the company than the meaning

this time. Time passes. More words are needed.

Eventually people wonder why I mutter to myself.

If I didn't I would be surrounded by strangers.

"We’ve already lost. What a mess"

Two articles were published this week within 24 hours of each other. On 15th June 2021 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published the article "It is obscene: a true reflection in three parts". The third part in particular describes more clearly and incisively than I ever could how a discussion that requires good faith and mutual respect has become so utterly degraded.  

Meanwhile, on 16th June 2021 Ayesha Hazarika wrote "Cruelty and hate in the trans debate on both sides is terrifying — moderate voices must be heard" in the Evening Standard. Hazarika discusses the situation in terms of "sides," talks about "mindless cruelty and polarisation which is ripping apart progressive politics and making enemies of people who should stand shoulder to shoulder," and hopes "more moderate voices have the guts to speak up". Various commentators have pointed out moderate voices have been trying to make themselves heard for years without success. 

Because it's too late. As Shona Craven, in her article in the National of 6th March 2020 "Does Nicola Sturgeon have a Plan B for resolving SNP gender row?" concludes, "in the wider struggle [...] there will be no winner. [It has] damaged inter-generational relations, allowed smears and slurs to become part of everyday political debate, and turned allies into enemies. We’ve all already lost. What a mess." 

Precisely.

This is one example of how identity politics has destroyed left wing discourse. In the now morbidly familiar terminology of epidemiology, we need to recognise the spread of this toxic debate has long since passed containment and delay phases. We're beyond mitigation. The damage is done. All that's left now is to learn lessons and rebuild a discourse in which we can disagree better.

How did it start? Where did this toxicity come from. I'd suggest it started with post-modernism playing fast and loose with the relationship between universal & contingent observations, escalating the significance of subjective experience and undermining the basis for shared criteria of truth and reality necessary for constructive debate. Did it then take root like a virus in a Wuhan wet market in the intellectual debris of the ruins of the 4th Republic? Did it spread like an Australian wildfire through 5 decades of frustration the Left experienced as wealth concentrated and progress stalled in the stagnation following the economic shocks of the '70s, when cash fled offshore in the trillions leaving the rest of us with trickle down? Who knows? 

The practical consequences are two-fold:

• Presumption of bad faith is treated as an adequate refutation of a statement
• The person making the statement, rather than its content, is treated as fair game

So we see statements analysed not for the validity of their content, but for the relationship of that content to presumed ulterior motives: "you would say that". This appeal to motive is an informal fallacy that is typically accompanied by others - other ad hominems, tu quoque (whataboutery), false equivalences and dichotomies, misleading analogies and mischaracterisations of an opponents argument, and so on - all of which are tolerated for the sake of the cause. Affiliation to the cause takes priority over logical coherence in its service, and discourse is mangled. 

An example of how topsy-turvy this has left our discourse is when particularly sophomoric contributors cite Popper's Paradox of Tolerance to justify their attacks on people, when this is precisely the opposite of what Popper says. We find activists shouting "no debate" when Popper was warning us about precisely those who disengage from debate. Another example is how the language of zero tolerance developed to fight violence against women has been weaponised to justify sickening abusive language, intimidation, and threats of violence towards women by these same activists. 

Left wing discourse is particularly vulnerable to these centrifugal influences. It is a forum for ideologies of insurgency, seeking to change the status quo, where right wing discourse is a home for ideologies of incumbency that defend it. Ideologies of insurgency must present challenges to the status quo with a degree of logical coherence not required of ideologies of incumbency. They compete and risk fragmentation where ideologies of incumbency can coalesce and consolidate around the locus of power. This is why the left is tearing itself apart over this while the right seems unaffected. And identity politics has been the logic bomb the Right has lobbed into the trenches of the Left like a grenade to precipitate this disintegration.

The need for the left to cultivate ways of disagreeing better, of being able to accommodate disagreement without becoming divided & falling to rancour, is more acute for this reason. Now, just when we need a coherent left wing alternative more than ever! In fighting a culture war we are campaigning on ground chosen for us by our enemy, with a divided leadership, committing the left to a disaster of generational proportions. 

What we should normally do when confronted with a situation in which opinion on an issue is split between what starts to be described as two "sides" (as Hazarika describes it) is to realise the "side" opposed to us is not a single monolithic position. We look at the range of opinion it includes and realise it ranges from one extreme where any point of view seems to be little more than a pretext for unacceptable behaviour, all the way through to people with whom we realise we probably agree more than we disagree. Similarly, when we look at our own "side" we see opinion that ranges from the nuanced and circumspect to people who believe points are not to be proven through critical appraisal but to be rallied around in a struggle that prioritises simplicity over critical scrutiny.

Normally the conversation would be directed by those who recognise that the "sides," while they exist at all, are artifacts of our limited perspectives and the incompleteness of our information, rather than those for whom the "sides" become an identity, a ground that must be defended at all costs. But those who fear the conversation, the rationality and reconciliation it enables, the deeper understanding and potential for more meaningful collective action that can emerge, would rather those who analyse any utterance in terms of its alignment with identity and affiliation were in charge.

It may seem paradoxical, but the "conversation," this consorting with the "enemy," is actually the best way - the only way - to preserve the integrity of your own position. You may think this requires the purity, purpose, and single-mindedness of those who understand your position as simply something that must prevail, must be made to prevail. But there is no purity. Any "side" that is allowed to exist long enough becomes colonised and corrupted by those for whom it is merely a pretext for conflict, until there is no longer anything left to defend that is worth defending any more. 

We must be nomads, continually re-negotiating our mutual accommodation of each other in a changing world, to survive. Our opposing cities will always fall, and the clay of their bricks crumble to dust co-mingling in our shared siroccos. There is no foundation we can build that can bear our ambition. Our thought must be constantly renewed by engagement with those who disagree with us.

Surfing

We're blood surfing. 

We're surfing on blood,

riding waves of genocide,

oblivious to the history

that unleashed the flood

until it breaks over us,

and we feel the current tug,

and the twist and struggle starts.

We recline in the jasmine

of an atrocity garden

where bees don't drink nectar.

Our ancestors' avarice

is in full bloom and smells so sweet,

we don't think of the mass graves

beneath our feet, 

and beneath them, that's not magma 

on which tectonic plates shift and pitch. 

Trading blocs collide and subduct

on oceans of blood. We're blood surfing. 

We're surfing on blood, and dreaming 

of beaches you only reach by drowning.

Our corpse is washed up 

and revived by cocktails.

Ambulances with minibars arrive,

offering mojitos instead of defibrillators.

We sit up on the sand, smile, laugh, stand,

and join the dead dictators at the chiringuito, 

and watch the tide come in, and raise a toast

as it takes the other bodies out with it.

Midnight

You can find eternity in an instant,

in each second a seed of infinite worlds,

in every whisper the echo of creation.

Imagine a clock actually contained time,

kept it all safely locked up tight inside, 

and let it drip out tick by tock by tick

and if, instead of letting it strike midnight

we stop its pendulum and take an axe to it

and let its metal entrails rip and spill

around our feet. Then time, like blood,

in a dark flood of sudden simultaneity,

leaves us swimming in stars, all journeys 

ending where they began, all distance shrunk 

into a common nowhere, and what we think 

is time is just the search among the debris 

for what we think we lost along the way. 

So wear history as pearls, failure as a hat,

and mount disappointment as a trophy on your wall,

for all paths and perspectives decorate futility. 

Geology

Some things land like asteroids,

suddenly, changing everything, 

and some build up like volcanoes,

their eruption not a total surprise, 

and some are a legacy of glaciers

absent save for evidence of passing,

while others are still with us, 

depositing sediment, changing course,

like the rivers with which we wrestle 

and convince ourselves we subdue.

Some people point to one of these

and say "you must be like this"

but the truth is never so simple

when you are dreaming of a future

as enduring as the past. 

Slam voice

What do you want?

Relatable content?

Emotional honesty?

Fuck ... off. 

You want to hear me

signifying significance

with my hesitatation

between syllablification

and all the iterations

of my alliteration? 

Fuck ... you. 

I am incomprehensible. 

I am deeply uninteresting.

I have nothing in common with you,

with your hectic, exciting, dangerous,

glamorous, important, exquisitely

interconnected lives. 

You couldn't begin to relate

to my toxic emotions, 

to the shame, the anger, 

the despair and loneliness,

so fuck off. 

Tank commander

People always disappoint us

and yet we still love them. 

We love them as individuals

and in the abstract, as ideals,

carrying slogans on placards,

building barricades, defending them,

shoulder to shoulder, singing

in praise of our infinite possibilities,

imagined futures of freedom and justice,

that we speak of in a single voice.

I sometimes wonder if the allure

of those infinite possibilities, for me,

is the possibility of escape they offer

from my limited reality of exclusion

and solitude, ostracism and loneliness.

Do I love them merely not to hate them?

Do I find in the great cause a surrogate

for a fellowship withheld from me

among their everyday transactions,

wrapping myself in political pamphlets

because I feel like the discarded packaging

of pleasures they consume without thinking?

While they soar like eagles in imagined futures

I remain trapped in the cockpit of the present,

so when they stand in front of me,

asking me to join them, to step out of my tank,

abandon my post, and take up their struggle,

I know they aren't really talking to me. 

They are talking to an imaginary person

that could join them in that imaginary future,

and I know that is not possible, 

because that person doesn't exist. And then

I remember another comradeship and solidarity

that came from wearing a uniform

and when the order comes I find it easy

to lift my foot off the clutch pedal

and let the tread roll over them.

People always disappoint us

and yet we still pretend to love them. 

I can't pretend anymore. Someone else 

will have to pretend for me from now on,

and I will do whatever they say I must

to help keep up that pretense. 

Sirocco

Remember we're but vagrant ash

pursued by hot sirocco selves,

a dance of dust, a pirouette of earth

whose partner is the passing gust,

desire and drought dry despair

carve hollow caverns in the air,

until our ashes rest at last,

commingled in a common peace.

The opposite of violence

You have your pain. I have mine.
All I really know about yours
is that it hurts. I can't share it.

You can never know my pain
beyond what it has in common
with yours. Our wounds

belong to each of us alone,
and yet we know enough, I think.
If we can trust, and listen, and love,

we know enough to hold each other,
to understand what we can,
acknowledge what we can't,

and undelete what crueler hands erased,
restore colour to those memories 

made monochrome with pain,

and maybe I can finally forgive

those who hurt me
as I beg my own ghosts, 

the ghosts of who I was 

and who I hurt,

for forgiveness.

Kino

We glamorise the void

so we can recruit monsters from it

with a clear conscience, 

raising celluloid and silver screen

to mark the perimeter they patrol,

the vanishingly thin membrane

that divides the darkness of the auditorium

from the bottomless pit on whose brink they stand.

While we sit distracted and safe and soda-bloated

they stand, drenched in blood like greasepaint,

converting carnage to farce, breathing fire

into balloon animals before they maul us,

but while they perform the alchemy

that turns fear to entertainment,

before retreating back into the abyss

from which we summoned them

as the credits roll and the theatre empties,

returning on cue as the programme requires,

imagine how they regard us. Imagine

the void we represent to them,

the horrors we portray in our indolence, 

our eloi-indifferent indolence, and be grateful

they don't stride off the screen

to slaughter us like morloks.

הָעֲקֵידָה / The Binding

Abraham bound Isaac upon an altar

and the angel of the Lord came 

and stopped his hand. Today 

one child of Abraham binds the other,

and there is no angel to stop it. 

Prayer

Dear Lord, hear my prayer. 

I pray to you for forgiveness.

God knows - that's you, after all - 

I'm a deeply flawed person, 

but at least I'm trying my best. 

Well, maybe not my best. 

I mean, if this is the best I have to offer, 

what does that say about what I'm capable of?

Not very much, it would seem. Ok, well, 

at least I am trying, in some form or other,

to some extent. At least I'm trying. 

Although, come to think of it, 

when you consider the effort I put into sinning

can you say these attempts at being good

really amount to trying at all, in comparison?

Ok, so, at least I know I ought to be trying,

even if I am not actually trying terribly hard,

or at all, for that matter. At least I know,

but what do I actually know?

I mean "consider the lilies" and "the fall of a sparrow"

and "the eye of a needle" and so on? It's not clear,

not to me, at least, what I am supposed to try to do, 

so you can hardly blame me for not trying very hard,

so, as I say, forgive me, Lord. Hear my prayer. 

Hear it, at least. 

I don't expect you to do anything about it.

I mean, why should you if I can't be bothered

to even try to be good. Come to think of it,

why am I even raising my voice in prayer at all? 

Dear Lord, sorry to have bothered you. 

Amen. 

Ascension

We are born. We eat. 

We die. We are eaten. 

Our bodies become something else. 

Our atoms have no memory.

We grind our grain to make our bread, 

our daily bread, to give us strength 

to work our fields and raise the crops 

in which this memory is absent, but

there was a man, of woman born,

who broke the bread, as bodies break,

and said "take, eat, this is for you,

this do in memory of me,"

and when he died and rose again

that memory rose with him.

Death was broken. For forty days

and for all time with us he stays,

and from a hill near Bethany, today,

where Lazarus awoke, and every hill,

and every day, that body without end

in glory into paradise ascends.

Blackbird

It is May, and the day is on fire. 

The tongues of a thousand sparrows

are the flames with which it blazes,

while in haste and hesitation, in the distance, 

through the shimmering passerine chatter,

the single melody of a blackbird strides

and stops, casting the notes of his song 

like seeds within the radius of earshot,

and tuneful roots push through the sound

from which the Sun rises bright in bloom. 

Palace

Sitting in my shed,

Radio 3 at midnight,

a backdrop of rain 

whispers at the skylight,

contraband whisky 

in camping enamelware:

there are no palaces,

because what palace

comes close to this?

Sitting in my shed

at midnight in May,

listening to Radio 3 

with whisky and rain.

Isaac

Justifying the death of children?

Are you really justifying 

the death of children? 

Provocation?

Extenuating circumstances? 

Retaliation? 

What future do you think, 

do you believe, you procure,

because this is about belief after all,

what future does your belief buy

with the blood of a child? 

You killed peace.

There is no peace. You killed it. 

Don't talk to me about peace.

That is not what you 

are in the market for. Fighting? 

The children were fighting?

So we kill them? 

Your abacus of blood

will kill us all. 

The desert is airless,

hot and airless. 

What did we teach you?

You will die of thirst

unless you drink my blood, 

and I will die of thirst 

unless I drink yours. 

So do not drink blood. 

Pray for a miracle. 

Pray for a miracle

as though your faith 

depended on it. 

My word is a blade

across your throat, 

your word a blade

across mine. No-one believes

in words anymore, only blades,

but a miracle is still possible

beyond our understanding. 

Pray for a miracle,

unless Isaac is to fall at last,

no more than a pagan slab of flesh

beneath two blades,

and where the angel once intervened

there is instead now only laughter

and the ugly jubilation of bullies.

Pray for a miracle.