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.