Patio

We travel in the greasy grey,

the zone behind the filter,

where words swim before they form

and find a tongue to slide off, 

and everything worth saying

is worth the same as what's not. 

We hold vigil between the worlds:

the diffuse pale light in the room,

and the naked face of the Moon

outside. The gauze curtain billows.

Its hem sweeps the threshold.

We step over it. 

"What can you see?" they ask.

They say we see too little

because we don't describe it,

but we can't describe it

because we see too much. 

We are rigid with spasm 

where they see sloth. They think 

they have all the answers.

We understand how little we know.

We travel in the greasy grey,

the zone behind the filter,

where words swim before they form

and find a tongue to slide off, 

and everything worth saying

is worth the same as what's not.

A cappella

This world 

didn't appear from nowhere, 

nor has it always been here.

It is sung into being every day, 

in a thousand sunrises, in the cry 

of a thousand newborn infants, 

and even the grave is a furrow

in which the world takes root, 

as Hamish told us, once, in a song.

 

Everything is impossible. 

It ceases the moment the song stops,

so we must sing. Look around you.

Look at the everyday miracle 

that palpitates in everything you see. 

To see is to run your finger

along each line of sight

as if it was the rim of a glass

and make it sing with light. 

Musicians are more than humble.

They are ashamed. They know they're frauds. 

They know their most precious melodies 

are discovered, not made, 

but must claim to have created them 

to sell them to those who can't hear the song 

but understand the coin they use to buy it. 

The song belongs to no-one.  

From Gaelic psalms on a Hebridean Sabbath,

to Ligeti's micropolyphony in Jupiter orbit,

to Bach riding Voyager through the heliopause,

you don't sing this song, you surrender to it. 

It sings you. 

Double exposure

He didn't cry. His heart was not broken.

It had never been whole. He walked through life 

like it was a dream, or as if he was a ghost. 

Everything was confused, inside out, upside down, 

back to front, hostile, held at arms length:

he cherished the memory of her smile forever,

long after she forgot he had ever moved her to smile, 

yet he betrayed the solemn vow he had made to her, 

that she had relied upon for all her happiness.   

There was nothing he could anchor it to.

He breathed his words into a balloon 

that slipped out of his grasp and floated away, 

and so the image of that smile was all he had, 

and he superimposed it over all the others, 

all the moments he collected as he drifted through life,

ruining it for others as he passed. 

Excuses

I'm not interested in your excuses.

Just don't misinterpret me, 

criticise what I didn't say, 

then claim my disavowal as victory.

We seem to agree it's not my fault, 

yet somehow you're still not to blame?

Just leave me alone then. Leave me alone

if that's all you've got to say. 

I'm not interested in your excuses.

Behind enemy lines

"Ihre papiere bitte". 

My papers check out. 

You think I'm one of you. 

I'm not. They're forged. 

I don't know my mission. 

I was never briefed. 

Indeed, I don't remember

ever being among allies. 

How do I know I'm not now?

Because everything's an act,

and that only makes sense

if I'm behind enemy lines. 

You say you're on my side. 

How would you know?

You've no idea 

what it's like to be me. 

I don't even know what war 

we're supposed to be fighting, 

which is just as well:  

I don't know how to fight.

How do I feel? I don't know. 

You can't afford feelings

if you're going to survive

behind enemy lines. I feel 

how I'm supposed to feel,

do what I'm supposed to do, 

never let my guard down 

and trust no-one. 

Playing with matches

Wee Jo's forearm was bent

where the doctor set the break wrong.

Danny used to eat worms to disgust us.

We never really thought about

what went on behind closed doors.

I saw Mark at the window one day

crying through the rain. His mum 

said he wasn't coming out to play.

The memory haunts me now. 

We lost touch long ago.

We played with matches in the woods. 

We never got the bloody things to light.

We showed each other things we'd stolen.

We threw live rounds at each other. 

Mark took them from his uncle's cupboard,

left unlocked while he sat passed out pissed

in the armchair in front of the game.

Sticks served as machine guns

while we dreamed of the real thing, 

and offered ourselves to each other

as temporary nazis to kill with impunity

over and over and over again,

pirouetting in elaborate ecstasies of death. 

Hedge porn, passed like subversive literature,

celebrated the broken dialectic of the flesh,

the furtive despair that instructed us

from first masturbation to final matrimony. 

A bag of glue was passed like sacrament

as we spent the afternoon by the canal 

in contemplation of the sanctity of filth.  

Later, the giddy lighter fluid buzz made us coil,

crumple and collapse like the incense of vespers

in the cloistered underpass, its graffiti gospel

of gang affiliation and sexual exploits

illuminated by the fluorescent flickering 

of our municipal lumen de lumine, 

our unreliable lux aeterna. 

Remember the thrill 

of walking along the high wall

around the dump! If we survived the fall

into upholstery springs and glass

at least we'd have scars to show

to Danny and Mark and to wee Jo  

in that world of rain and ash

where we played with matches.

Valentine

The impossibility of life 

and the impossibility of poetry 

are the same impossibility. 

This is why poets are qualified 

to talk about miracles, 

and miracles are everywhere:

nothing we experience would happen

if what we believe to be true was true. 

Poets know this extends to faith itself, 

and so offer the only explanations

that can survive contradiction. 

Sometimes they must break words

the way you break a badly set bone:  

because language is crippled,

and unless we break the words

the words will break the world. 

Instead they bind the broken world 

with words, and their faith is love,

because in the end the difference

between meaningless and miraculous

is love. Some flowers are red. 

Others are blue. What matters to me

is what they mean to you. 

 

Scotland 2043

Vanora was awoken by the noise of drunks fighting in the alley behind her hotel. She would have avoided this journey to the dilapidated old Scapa Spaceport if she had had the option. Derelict launchpad facilities and disused fuel depots attracted people who would attack the detrivore drones.  These scuttled everywhere like car-sized pneumatic crabs across a sterile concrete seabed of industrial decline, pausing to strip debris for spare parts, tucking them into a basket on their back as they recovered discarded technomass for recirculation in the economy. Crippled survivors of the HaViD-29 pandemic, the hantavirus plague of 2029, a zoonotic haemorrhagic fever that originated in guinea pig enclosures in the Andes and spread to decimate the population of the world, would disable the drones and take the technomass to use in their own scattered settlements rather than surrender it to the global administration, the benevolent but remote Kardashev Programme. 

The sun was coming up, and in the stratosphere a hazfap’s wings glistened in the dawn. Vanora’s earpiece pinged to indicate an incoming call, doubtless relayed via the network of high altitude solar powered highly autonomous pseudo-satellites, one of which she could see reflecting sunlight at an altitude of 20,000 kilometres. It was Francis. 

“Stop chasing ghosts, Vanora,” he said. He was looking out of the window of the Satinwood Suite in Glasgow City Chambers, where he had spent the night. A herd of deer was grazing in the long lush subtropical grass in George Square under the disinterested stone eye of the lions silently guarding the war memorial, and the bronze eye of a half-forgotten history that had thrust statues of men into prominence on plinths but their names into obscurity in the memory of subsequent generations. A lynx lazily surveyed the herd as it lounged on top of one of the monumental lions. The wolf pack that patrolled the deserted streets north of the river was occupied elsewhere with a carcass in Glasgow Green, prowling around the statue of James Watt whose insights there during a Sunday stroll one morning in May 1765 had precipitated the reckless consumption of energy reserves accumulated over geological periods of time that wrought devastating changes on the climate. 

“You’re needed over at the Rockall Platform. You need to take the elevator up to geostationary and catch a shuttle to the Belt. They need you to help with construction on the Scottish sector of the circumsolar helix. You speak Gaelic after all.” The habitat being constructed from material in the Asteroid Belt was helical so that rotational gravity and a diurnal cycle could be generated by a twisting motion as it orbited the Sun. Scotland had been assigned one sector and had designated it àite-obrach Gàidhealach, in line with the Obair tro Mheadhan na Gàidhlig policy, making it a Gaelic medium workplace. 

Vanora wondered when she would be able to return to her retreat in Linn Park. It was peaceful and secluded in the middle of woodland. It had been a crematorium once, but since everyone was composted these days and buried beneath a sapling in a memorial forest when they died, it had been abandoned until she renovated it as her home. 

Although Francis was an anthropomorph, a single physical instantiation of a networked artificial intelligence, rather than a human, he was still an MSP and a member of the Advisory Board of the Kardashev Programme. The global administration was elected by LPTP: last past the post. The number of candidates elected for each party was determined on the basis of the total votes cast, to establish proportionality. Then constituencies were assigned to parties in reverse order. Candidates for the party with the least seats were assigned first, in those constituencies where they had performed best, until they had been allocated their appointed number of seats. Then the seats for the party that had performed second worst were allocated in a similar way, and so on, until all seats were allocated. This meant that even if a party had only local appeal and stood in a small number of seats, if it performed well in those seats, the arithmetic of the system meant they would still win them. A threshold was applied to ensure no constituency was represented by a member of a small extremist party they had rejected. Therefore, legislatures at all levels of government, from Scotland all the way up to the Advisory Board of the Kardashev Programme, could be elected by a single uniform process applied worldwide, and the scope of governance at each level ensured peace prevailed.   

Vanora summoned a drone to take her to the Rockall Platform. After a few minutes an autonomous aerial vehicle arrived, its ceramic power cell humming with inductance from the superconducting currents it contained. The leading edges of its plasmafoils crackled as arc discharges ionised the air, to be accelerated to their trailing edges over surfaces that glowed blue and existed only as electric fields, incurring no drag. The drone rose to a height of a few hundred feet and accelerated to hypersonic velocity, the shockwave dissipated by the plasmafoil. Soon she reached the Rockall Platform: a circular shelf of ice several kilometres across, anchoring a ribbon of braided graphene connecting it to another facility in geostationary orbit. Wave energy acquired by an array of point attenuators pumped air to pressures of a hundred atmospheres at a depth of one kilometre. The heat generated by compression supported aquaculture that fed the world’s remaining population. When energy was recovered from the compressed air reservoirs, the air cooled on expansion, freezing the sea water to form the platform. As she ascended the elevator to rendezvous with the shuttle, Vanora looked down at the artificial iceberg. 

Hesperus

I am from where
the sun meets the sea.

These words are shipwrecks.
These words are washed up
fragments of broken vessels,
beach-combed to build
a more modest boat
from bits of ships
that sailed among the stars.

These words are jewellery
wrought by the finest craftsmen,
dropped from the throat
of a drowned princess, 

pulled up in a fisherman's net

and melted down to make coins
suitable for your petty bargains.

Perhaps one day we'll make enough
to buy our way back into heaven,
if we don't squabble
and squander it all first
on doomed demands,
spent as the fuel of futility.

Perhaps one day we'll build a ship
that takes us to the sunset,
to meet ourselves at that moment
when our poetry was degraded
to make it serve other purposes,
to elevate the ego, to motivate the mob,
to praise the tyrant inside ourselves,
that moment language was born

from the ruin of poetry. 

We'd tell ourselves to turn back,
remind ourselves we're not anything
unless we're nothing first,
confound the astronomies of man
whose telescopes are tools for trade,
silt-up the harbours of our commerce
and snuff out each impertinent Pharos
that guides those ships that usurp
the office of the solar barge

with their cargoes of pale fire

snatched from the bowels of dead beasts

buried beneath the deposits of deep time.

We can find our way back.
These fallen words are defined
to hide their former meaning.
Their purpose is to convince you 
that you could never understand,

but we are poets!

We can fool words

out of their false meanings!
We can unmask!
We can reveal prophecy,
and we can clone gods
from the blood stains
at the crime scene
of their murder,

and if you cannot build that ship
you'll hear that sunset dialogue anyway,
if you listen, faint and far off though it is, 

still, I promise, you'll hear it if you listen

to the whispering evening star.

Statement

Nobody has anything constructive to say. 

In fact the less constructive their contribution

the more important they seem to think it is, 

and the louder and more stridently they state it. 

Give me an idea - simple, quiet, and correct -

that changes the perspective of those who hear it

without them even knowing it. They can continue

to bitch and bicker and insist and denounce.

I'd be happy to make myself redundant,

to retreat into anonymity and remain silent

if I had something to say I only had to say once.  

Dark companion

One night the Moon
decided to remain full.
She liked being big and bright
so she stayed that way

and suspended the changing

of her phases. 

Astronomers were perplexed.
Tides were recalculated. 

They had to be, of course.

Seasons passed 

with no tally of their months,
but eventually people didn't mind.
They quite liked it actually. 
She drifted through the zodiac
at the same leisurely pace as the Sun,
always in the opposite house of course.

She had acquired a dark companion,
a mass whose presence
altered her Lagrangian,
a counterweight whose unseen orbit
introduced a perturbation in hers
that looked like stability.

She didn't want to wane,

and why should she?

Why should she? She could now insist. 

The dark companion loitered unseen

eluding our most cunning efforts at detection.

Her trajectory might have been inferred, 

if not directly observed,

had she been a simple lump of rock

that had spurned the chance

to snatch pale fire from the Sun,

surrendering that opportunity 

to the Moon instead, to sequester light

within the palisade of her fullness,

but she was not,

and so the mystery remained:

a nebulous presence, 

everywhere and nowhere, summoned 

by the Moon's sudden vanity.

And when you look in the mirror tonight,

do you see your beauty's dark aura?

Night ride

I eavesdrop on an intercourse of silence 

in whose empty hours the children sleep

on the back seat of the car

during the overnight drive to the ferry.

I speculate about what might be said.

We are on our annual pilgrimage 

to the island of our origin,

where the mother tongue 

that is now their second language

was spoken by their forefathers 

who built the house we'll stay in.

The impertinence of my words could fill a page, 

but all poems are unwritten in the end

by the passage of time. Imagine: a bullet 

takes a young poet's life on a battlefield

in one of the twentieth century's wars

whose histories we teach our children

before he can write that masterpiece

by which he would have been remembered

if things had gone otherwise, 

but his premature death anticipates

its inevitable obscurity anyway.  

Perhaps he came from our village.

Maybe we are separated from his silence

by the degrees of cousinage

counted in an old woman's reckoning. 

It is a silence shared with everything 

that has already been forgotten. 

Between the futile and the obscure,

not being born and ceasing to exist,

between being created and forgotten,

in the otherwise of that interval,

across that gap between the silences

time arcs like an electric discharge

and sheds its brief light. That poet

has taken an alternative route.   

His unspoken words rest in silence

with yesterday's empires

without the burden of speech or echo,

apology for their pomp 

or protest at their crimes,

an anthem of the unknowable 

summoning the abandoned and discarded 

to deliver their unheard testimony

in a celestial court whose members

are the indifferent stars. 

Our glancing headlights ricochet off hillsides,

as we follow the winding back road

to our destination, and in the dark

we dream war in heaven. 

We dream their testimony. 

We dream journeys of lost heroes

trying to find their way home.

We dream prophets rebuking errant kings. 

We populate the silence with tales

that postpone our execution for a thousand nights

tales that will share the silence 

with all the other unsung songs in the end. 

We sing them to our children while they sleep. 

We imagine what might have been said. 

We eavesdrop on an intercourse of silence,

while the sky turns and the orbits of the planets

inscribe their spiral on the surface of the night, 

rifling the barrel that will deliver us to morning.