Smoke

Music is a kind of smoke.

I sit here in the music

and it's a kind of smoke. 

I don't recognise you 

at first, through the smoke.

Who are you? I don't ask.

I imagine asking, maybe, 

if I was human, in the smoke, 

but I am not human, 

so I don't know you.

All I know is the smoke, 

and now it's up to you, 

sanctiminious coward, 

imbecile, repository

of every insult - 

and not without reason, 

all the ways you know me

better than I know myself, 

all the ways 

you don't know at all

- fool, for what it's worth, 

now the ball is in your court. 

Music is a kind of smoke. 

I was born burning. 

I don't know a world

that isn't on fire,

so maybe don't put out the fire. 

Maybe just try to find me

in the smoke

and if you think you know 

a better place, maybe

you can take me there. 

To be honest, I don't care.

It's up to you. 

Stuntman

This slow isotope world, 

this rickety lickety split rickshaw ride,

this Geiger counter crackle place, 

the countdown not clockwork,

not tick by tock by tick by tock

but click, pause, click click click,

no clock, no gameshow shock

as we slowly realise we don't grow, 

we decay, expire, decline, deteriorate

from me at eight to half past eight, 

the descent not a dignified step by step

but a chaotic stuntman stumble

down the comedy staircase

into a trailer where they find you

a year after you died, sitting glass in hand, 

mummified, dessicated, desecrated, 

ashtray and ornament, tomb trophy, 

artefact, fossil, afterthought, gift horse

screaming above the threshold

of human hearing from beyond the grave

about this isotope world, this open secret,

this nuclear test site village we inhabit,

props, mannequins, around a dinner table

beneath the tower we refuse to see

that carries our plutonium future. 

Whore

What if jism was like oil?

I'm sure men wouldn't jerk as much

if the stuff was going to run out,

so why do we tug the Earth, 

tickle its dark declivities,

tease each pore,

until it is as spent 

as an obvious rhyme? 

The angel

The angel descends.

Surely, here is vindication.

The struggle is over. 

At last the world will know

I was right all along. 

The angel speaks.

I am wrong. We are all wrong

about everything all the time.

The angel departs. Obviously 

I am less wrong than you. 

Obviously degrees of error

beyond an angel's reckoning

are enough for me if it means

my enemies bow to me in hell. 

The end of the world

We dream of heaven 

while destroying the Earth. 

This is not an accident. 

It is not a coincidence, 

and it is not hypocrisy. 

These things are connected. 

Both impulses originate 

in the same moment 

of grief and horror, 

of aversion from death. 

We turn away from it in rituals. 

We create graves 

and raise monuments to the dead. 

We separate death from life, 

and imagine fabulous afterlives 

populated with ancestors

who eventually are so numerous

they blur and merge into gods

that offer a promise of escape, 

immortals fat on the anonymity

of the long forgotten dead, 

the name of God itself unspoken

because it redacts all other names.

We do this rather than accept death

as part of life. 

But in that subdivision of the world 

we reduce the world to mere stuff, 

inert substance drained of the life 

that once imbued all things 

without limit,

and suddenly the world 

is only visible to us 

through the distorting lens 

of how it might be used, 

how it might be tooled 

into an ornament for a tomb, 

how it might be mined and milled, 

extracted and refined, 

and how it might be punished

with axe and anvil

for harbouring the death we dread

and ignore and dream of escaping,

and we are blinded to a beauty 

that exists without reference 

to how we might enjoy it,

that does not kneel 

before the beholder. 

We flee the eternal present 

to occupy a new, linear time 

in which death is decay, 

and in so doing, 

create a way of seeing a world 

that has a beginning and an end, 

a world with limits we must transcend, 

a world in which the apocalypse 

becomes a logical conclusion, 

in which the end is inevitable.

Cancelled

We're born cancelled. It's a secret, though. 

We don't even realise it ourselves until 

it is revealed in the behaviour of others. 

Sometimes they try to keep it secret. 

They don't tell you that you're cancelled, 

but I know, because we're born cancelled. 

What other explanation is there? 

Confession

Beckett says "fail again. 

Fail better,"

but there is no success

in that improved failure

of course. 

We may act as though

the incremental is final,

the relative absolute,

the journey complete,

but there is no arrival, 

only delayed departure. 

Meanwhile, we wait. 

There is no universal truth

beyond our need for truth.

It is lost in the obscurity

of a forgotten massacre.

It approaches us

with a Gethsemane kiss.

Yes, the hunger is real,

and we will eat sawdust

if it lets us claim satisfaction,

and our city under siege

is the New Jerusalem,

or, if you are an atheist, 

some secular Utopia, 

but there is no-one left to care,

no-one left but us,

enduring famine, 

so, do better. Testify to hope. 

Confess your faith. 

The Cross is the doorway. 

The Cross marks the exit

to our ultimate failure. 

(Written waiting outside a chapel)

Chrysalid

Perhaps, once the rot sets in

we have to ride it all the way

until it becomes a kind of purity. 

Perhaps we cannot rid ourselves

of what starts so small

yet resists eradication. 

Don't wash your hands of blood. 

Plunge them deeper into the carnage

until its stain covers them so completely

it sets a new standard of innocence. 

Today's solemn truths were yesterday's lies

and the wisest man is revealed to be a fool

if allowed to speak long enough. 

What tongue roots and rummages slug like 

hidden within the eloquence of old wood? 

What scarlet winged butterfly emerges

from its chrysalis of clotted blood

to announce the end of winter? 

Your libraries are plundered by wasps,

your history chewed and pulped and spat out

and turned into labrynthine paper nests

in the eaves and attics of your mind.

You can surrender and save yourself. 

The price is that everything else, 

everything you have ever known, 

must die, so that you can become 

something entirely new.  

Epitaph

In the end you are either the king in his sarcophagus

or one of the nameless slaves that shares his tomb, they say.  

Bury me somewhere remote, far from the city and the crowds

and raise a simple stone monument over my grave

and let the secret of its location die with you

so that, in the passage of time, once the suicide pact 

of all who share my experience of time is complete,

it will preserve the mystery of me for any fool who finds it.

Bliss and pain cleave a crystal along its planes

to expose a surface on which I inscribe this epitaph,

in words from a private language written in a secret script

for which there is no Rosetta, for I will not be read. 

I will only be cause for confusion or indifference. 

I am enigma and irritant or I am nothing at all. 

My heart is a comet. I wish for a celestial sepulchre. 

I want to join it on its ancient peregrination. 

Install my remains on some passing interstellar object. 

I am neither king nor slave. I am a cipher of the void. 

Ritual

We return to the place

where we witnessed the miracle. 

We know we won't see it again. 

The impossible only happens once

at a single time and place. 

Of course we understand this. 

Although we recreate the conditions

we cannot make it happen again. 

We are not scientists. 

This is not a laboratory. 

That's not why we are here. 

We are here because once

something happened 

that made us feel real, 

not a work of fiction, 

not a figment of the imagination, 

not characters living lives

dreamt for us by others. 

Expectations were irrelevant. 

We were both powerless

and perfectly free in our helplessness. 

A nail was driven into a time and place

to fix it forever, 

make it everywhere and eternal. 

We perform the ritual,

go through the motions, 

but are not trying to repeat anything. 

We are simply remembering

what it's like to be real

simply remembering that moment

when we were sure we existed, 

commemorating that time

the impossible persuaded us

that we exist. 

Bird watching

The bird does not experience its beauty

in the same way we do, 

but knows it is beautiful nonetheless. 

The world is not ornamental

to those who live in it. 

The beauty they enjoy

is so much more vivid

as a matter of life and death. 

Virtue

Nobody cares how good you are. 

Do you think it matters at the checkpoint?

Do you think your pass is stamped "good person"?

Your papers are in order. That is all. 

The guard inspects your papers

and lets you enter this new country

of voluntary servitude, elective ignorance, 

empty ambition, happy, delirious stupidity, 

hysterical devotion to nothing at all, 

and utter indifference to anything else. 

Do you think God cares about your excuses?

We can forgive each other once we're dead, 

when we finally get to see inside each other's heads

and learn reasons we couldn't possibly guess

about why we slice and mangle each other. 

You were never good. I was never good. 

There is no magic ticket, 

no virtue endorsed and countersigned. 

The litmus paper of your virtue rests

within the brain of your worst enemy

folded into their indictment of you. 

Our guilt is a gift from God. 

We are given just enough freedom

to choose to forgive. 

In the end it turns out 

freedom is no good for anything else. 

Hospital notes

The lightning in my soul

taps out its chaos Morse. 

A ghost takes my pulse,

bone digit pressed 

on oak root wrist.  

My prospects are reckoned 

on his ribcage abacus:

this bed is a coffin, 

this ward a church yard, 

these bed-end notes a tombstone. 

At Saint Thenew's Well

What a muck muse I am, 

a muse of mud, soiled 

and mired, I inspire

from behind a mask of time.

Cast down, cast out, 

I am the secret tenth sister 

where Dumpelder passes for Parnassus.

Apollo got lost one day,

and in his haste tripped over Traprain,

fell face first into the Forth

that flows between Lothian and Fife

and flows across the sky as a river of light,

and when he got back up, 

embarrassed and irritated, 

he pushed me off the top 

as if it was all my fault, 

and I fell down into a ditch

where I got mud on my dress

and when I stood up

I found myself in this story. 

Looking around myself I saw gathered

a crowd of whispering centuries 

gossiping about my misfortune.  

I died long ago. Yes, 

I survived my own death,

but something died nevertheless.

I was young once,

in a way few people ever have been 

or ever are, or shall be, 

so when that ended, 

was brought to an end, 

was curtailed, cut short, 

by a sudden god who came 

as a gust at the precipice,

that young woman became 

another person I once was, 

a story I tell myself,

but even my story is a hostage,

thumbed and dog eared,

a guidebook and gazeteer 

of guilt and shame

edited by amnesia and madness. 

I was once a goddess. 

When I was young I was a goddess. 

I was mistress of the fountain. 

I presided over wells whose waters heal, 

but men came with a different cure

and needed the endorsement of a local cult

if they were going to be able to sell it,  

so I became mother to their saintly rep, 

and I let them overthrow my grace,

replace my water with their wine, 

weave their stories into mine,

and raise their church in my holy place.  

Eventually the well was emptied, 

filled in, built over, and my spirit 

is distilled by a winter sun

from brackish residue

in puddles of salt and melted snow

in the marketplace

where shoppers hasten after bargains,

on dreich December Saturday afternoons 

before Our Saviour's feast day overtakes them,

the celebration when we distract ourselves 

from the new cure's inevitable failure

with a brief extravagance of gifts

and a hijacked solstice feast.  

I am distilled into the imagination

of whoever is the latest poet wandering 

through the dereliction of the sacred

seeking a voice to raise in the loud silence

to help them dissect pretension, 

expose what passes, sing of what endures,

and utter an approximation of the truth 

to the indifferent and unaware. 

All is surface. Nothing is depth. 

Everything is urgency and interruption. 

Time is now something we drown in. 

If you survive immersion in it, like me,

immersion in the water of time, 

you must be a monster or a myth. 

What a muck muse I am, 

a muse of mud, soiled 

and mired, I inspire

from behind my mask of time.

Maher

I see Nigeria's dead are now conscripted

into the public relations army of a different war. 

I wonder, when I'm dead, will I be enlisted

to extenuate some other atrocities from afar?

The concern seems a bit sudden, Bill. This war

has been going on since two thousand and fucking nine.

Did it not then offer you any excuses

to prosecute your own war at that time?

When we want to exonerate ourselves of abuses,

thank the heavens for other people's crimes!

The world is full of hypocrites and cowards

and idiots. Pray tell, then, which are you,

to find in one man's crime another's cue,

or is it just the old schoolboy excuse:

you're caught, but "please Miss, Johnny did it too".

There is a wider massacre: the truth, 

and you, who have the newsprint columns scoured,

where half-truths let you tell lies by omission,

with all solemnity lisp "never again"

only if doing so will serve your ends,

and lend impunity to criminal friends,

and to make sure their position is unassailable,

we'll hold them to the lowest standards available.

O Bill, you have the luxury to ignore

the world's bitter conflicts by the score, 

and shine the spotlight only if, when you do, 

you turn the world's spotlight away from you 

and yours. So hypocrite and coward, fool, 

court jester to the genocide du jour, 

but something else is needed to describe you.

Necromancer, resurrectionist, ghoul,

that plunders graves of others for a tool, 

instrumentalising grief and pain

to justify it happening again.

(Written in response to Bill Maher using atrocities in Nigeria to criticise critics of the genocide in Gaza: 

https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1971786441635385361 )

The decline of magic

Death is a social construct. 

We pick up an inanimate object,

and need a word to describe it, 

but the object isn't dead. 

Once we believed in magic, 

which was just a way of explaining 

why things that were alive

- which was everything, 

because everything is alive - 

did not behave the way we expected, 

in accordance with our rules and customs. 

We used the word magic to describe

what we might do to make things act, 

sit up, recognise us and respond to us

the way we expected,

 

the way people we once loved

had done while they were alive. 

Slowly, over the centuries, 

we refined our magic, 

condemned what didn't work as superstition, 

celebrated what did work as science, 

and dismissed what remained inert, 

what didn't behave the way we wanted

as dead. 

The dead world in which we live

is a trauma response, 

a grave we have dug.

We invented death 

to resurrect the ones we love, 

to describe the condition 

from which we would raise them. 

We extended that description 

to anything 

that might join them in the grave,

creating the material world 

from our sense of grief, 

and creating the passage of time 

to track the world's decay. 

The king's ransom

(The Tower of London, August 1348)

Quoth Sir Alexander:

"Your father lost all his brothers

defending his crown. 

I lost all my sons defending yours.

Your half sister gave her whole life

giving birth to a successor

who now waits on your childless demise, 

though you are still young. 

I come to you in captivity.

We are two men with no heir in the world, 

no heir except the world. I come

to help negotiate your release.

Tell me, then, what shall we say

freedom is worth today?"

Quoth His Grace the King:

"No price can be paid in full, 

for we will remain in default

of the debt you have marked down, 

no matter what levies we raise

from our subjects, loyal and true. 

Therefore their silver,

though just a token, 

must suffice. As I recall

you changed sides on Saint John's Eve

and saw my father baptised in victory

where Forth and Allan deputise for Jordan, 

and shared in His triumph. 

We are both mere shadows cast 

by the midsummer sun that rose that day."

Quoth Sir Alexander:

"So, let us render 

to the brother of your wife

all the coins your kingdom can muster,

but hold back some sadness for ourselves, 

as subject for some melancholy minstrelsy, 

and never boast of liberty bought

with a ransom of squandered grace, 

but only that noble freedom

of which Barbour sang, 

which is our common inheritance."

Indifference

Darkness descends

but I don't care:

I was born and raised

in darkness. 

The waters rise

but I don't care:

you let me drown already, 

long ago. 

The fires consume

everything you love,

but you only ever pretended

to love me. 

I'm as safe 

as yesterday's ash

on the midden, indifferent

to this overdue apocalypse. 

The bell has been ringing

since the dawn of time.

I live on the other side

of exhaustion. 

The most I can give you

is fatigue. It's more

than you ever gave me. 

We live in the shadow of power. 

I lived in your shadow once. 

Don't complain to me

about the shadows. 

By the river

I think I have begun 

the great forgetting, 

weary of knowledge, 

weary of the past, 

weary of myself. 

Memory evaporates, 

condenses as a mist 

exhaled upon the water

through which I perceive

but no longer need 

to understand

what happened to me. 

I no longer need 

to be who I became. 

I am now a retired tyrant

enjoying obscurity, 

craving irrelevance

in honest island exile. 

I command memories,

then acquiesce to their mutiny,

and savour my isolation

like a long anticipated vintage

I can finally call up 

from the cellar,

and I am the toy soldier

the general pushes across the table

advancing on the condiments, 

securing the potatoes.

Can I become 

who I once was, 

before I was dismantled 

and reassembled,

some parts discarded, 

other things added

that were never there before?

Perhaps this automaton of grief, 

this mourning machine 

that went through 

the motions of emotion

as the mainspring 

of my clockwork heart 

unwound

and was wound up again, 

over and over again, 

for the amusement 

of the exonerated mob,

- the masses exempt from sin

observed by the Unseeing Eye,

that extends the dark grace 

of their impunity - 

perhaps this target 

in which they invested

their inexhaustible contempt

can finally unremember

being dismembered

and let its scattered self 

drift in the current,

its fragments,

like bits of broken toy,

or pages torn from history books, 

or the stick that lost the race, 

or anything that once was precious,

now floating downstream, 

becoming tangled in the weeds

where a child may find them. 

Where I, as the child I was, 

might find them,

and with less cruel intent,

or with that innocent cruelty 

of childhood, at least, 

use them to make 

a new monster 

to play with 

and defeat.

 

The admiral

"My heart is a mad admiral

who quit his profession long ago

and remembers the sea, bit by bit,

as he paces in his house, to and fro."

(Fernando Pessoa)

The poem I write tells two lies

that contradict each other, so that, 

in the debris their collision generates,

we can pretend some truth is expressed.

When the accident investigation is over

I am left to pick up the pieces. 

I take them to the beach and build a cabin 

and watch distant ships sink below the horizon.

The sun sets. The Milky Way rises like coral.

I remember that I drowned, long ago.

In this fictitious life I have imagined since

I dream I write a poem in which I am an admiral. 

Elopement

I breathe silently,

inhale air stolen from silence,

and hold it, 

let my lungs hang like tapestries,

my ribs marble columns

in ancient undisturbed halls, 

abandoned and dilapidated,

as I lie in the long grass

dreaming of forgotten histories

in which I imagine I existed, 

lying on the roofless earth,

waiting on the rain. 

The summer, honey humid, 

haunts the early autumn

with ghostly warmth

and distant thunder. 

When the rain comes

one drop in ten is cold, 

a premonition of winter. 

I lie, remembering that night

I lay on the lawn as a child,

my confused and angry parents

ordering me in out of the rain,

for my own good, 

as they thought, 

and I knowing, even then, 

in the lingering aura 

of my pre-verbal infancy,

that the day would come,

they could not keep it from me, 

no matter how hard they tried, 

no matter how successful they were today,

they could not keep it from me forever,

and now it's here. 

I breathe silently, 

inhaling stolen silence,

losing myself entirely in the rain,

choosing not to exist. 

It will be in the rain 

that I am not found.

the ruins of an ancient city. 

I have eloped with the invented memory

of a lost civilisation that exists 

only in the rain

and has been washed away without a trace.

How the stones got souls

The one I love has gone forever. 

I put my thoughts somewhere safe

to save them from the darkness

that has swallowed the one I love. 

I put the remains in a special place

and leave special things with them. 

I bring other things as presents

to leave there with them

to keep my memory safe 

in the bright forever I dream of 

where the one I love can now dwell

instead of that other forever

from which the darkness comes.

Now that special place and these things

are not like other places and other things.

The things I bring have become special.

Now everything else exists

only if it can become special

were I to bring it here,

to the hallowed place

that changes everything, 

where forever speaks 

in aches and echoes, 

and we light a fire 

to catch the darkness in the shadows,

and when the stars rise in the east

we carry the remains of the ancestors 

from their tomb to meet them 

and join in their eternal dance. 

and generations of brightness 

leak from the grave

and enter stones and trees and rivers, 

that are near, and spreads, 

until everything is alive

the way the one I love once was, 

the way the one I love still is.

Everything is transformed by their death. 

Everything is transformed by my love. 

Everything is now alive forever

beneath the stars. 

The cure

If I pull the splinter from my soul

what is there left to talk about?

If my broken heart is at last made whole

what is there left to say?

If inconsolable grief is at last consoled,

and inner turmoil brought under control,

and things for sale all bought and sold,

what will say today?

A Moon rises that is always full

and the tide is always high.

A boy who follows every rule 

flies his kite in a cloudless sky.

The tide turns and a waning Moon

sets slowly in the west.

The boy blows up a red balloon

that's punctured by the rest.

The tide ebbs and the waves recede

to leave a wreck exposed. 

A new Moon waxes. The seaweed

smells somewhat decomposed.

The boy weeps, for his only friend

had been that red balloon. 

"All things you love come to an end,"

is the song of the lonely Moon. 

If my wound is healed and fever cools

what is there left to talk about?

If wisdom is granted to every fool

what is there left to say?

If every lesson learned in school

or in the yard is kind, not cruel,

beneath the moonlit crepuscule,

what will we say today?

Anthropomorphic

The poet is a miserable fool. Consider:

the sound of rain 

upon a canopy of leaves in September, 

in the last few weeks before they fall;

the well of light the full Moon places

upon the face of night, 

in which the traveller can sink his gaze

to replenish his depleted soul; 

the skin of your beloved before your caress, 

during that tense electric moment 

immediately before it suffers your caress

and succumbs to your intrusion upon a dream 

of timeless solitude, 

and endures the interruption

in which new reveries emerge.

This contemplation requires no words

yet the poet feels the need 

to put words between himself

and these things that a fox might enjoy,

that a beast without words might know

and understand without pause and reflection.

What abject misery makes the poet

put words between himself and life?

Let us conjure gods and ancestors.

Let us invent philosophies of hope

and despair. Let confederated dreams

govern the world that we imagine, 

that we presume to describe,

or set us free to wander like the fox, 

wordless like any beast who sees a star

and doesn't set their course by it,

who doesn't feel the need to be human. 

Watching TV in 2025

All horrors are familiar now

and lazy cowards lisp extenuation.

The evidence of our eyes is worth so little

we may as well pop them like pimples,

spill whatever sights they've seen on a mirror

so empty and voracious it consumes all light

and leaves a universal darkness

to which, in our new blindness, 

we are insensible. Our barren retinas 

are studio to kaleidoscopes of cruelty 

broadcast to bored distracted multitudes.

I weep uncontrollably 

at adverts for donkey sanctuaries.

I watch The Elephant Man 

for the hundredth time.

I sob as it ends 

like I did the first time. 

I feel superior to the contestants

in what we call reality, on a TV show,

and get to be judgemental in safety. 

 

I live in an artificial sympathy ghetto

of performative emotion

because the truth is unbearable. 

All horrors are familiar now

and that familiarity itself is why

we will recognise everything else, 

anything else, seek out shallow novelty,

if we must see anything at all,

and stuff our empty eyes sockets

with the nearest clay, 

and bleat bland platitudes,

construct elaborate alternatives

to the simple act of witness

that is the least we must do

and the thing we avoid the most.

Pin the tail

Cherish the idea of me, 

and I will cherish my idea of you. 

We keep hints of each other

collected in separate scrap books 

and are closest when we're apart

turning each other over in our minds. 

We are gatherings of keepsake kisses, 

lips pressed on skin shed and bound as pages, 

the snakeskin of our unreliable memory

from which we piece together 

a patchwork truth. Maybe 

we are parallel jigsaws, 

some pieces shared, some unique, 

or overlapping scrabble boards, 

my throwaway remark worth nothing 

your triple word score. Who knows?

Consider the person you think I am.

Let's celebrate our scrapbook selves. 

Forget the puzzle and the guesswork, 

and love me. All I can give you

is a promise that I will try to be

that person, that I will try to be me,

even though it is a blindfold game

and I pin the tail on the donkey. 

The benefactors

When all other options are denied

we celebrate the worst option

as a miracle, as a godsend, 

as inevitable, as self-evident, 

an economic axiom, a natural law.

When those who create our problems, 

who presume to limit our options, 

who benefit from those problems,

forbid us to solve them, 

as they must, we meekly obey! 

We obey, as if we must, even though

we are perfectly capable of doing 

literally anything else.

We capitulate to extremes

rather than consider those solutions

we are not allowed to think about

even though they are obvious.

We praise the great leader

they have selected to speak for us,

as if we ourselves chose him, 

the great genius, the saviour 

who dares to speak the truth

that has been deemed acceptable, 

the simple truth, 

the expedient half-truth, 

the lie, 

the brave, bold cowardice 

of the most loyal traitor

leading his mundane revolution

of tedious habitual atrocity

to which we become numb

as we turn on each other, 

- because what other options are there -

and selfishness and stupidity, 

ignorance and lack of consideration

become our highest aspirations, 

and our bantam ambition is to enjoy

the limited freedoms curated for us

by our generous oppressors,

and we rationalise and distil our frustrations 

into enthusiastic cruelty and sadism,

into war crimes extenuated by lies

and history itself is an jolly conscript

with whom we march, side by side, 

who knows all the words to all the songs 

about glory and blood and pride. 

We are told about our benefactors 

and how we are their beneficiaries, 

and we are grateful

for the wealth they generate

and enjoy on our behalf,

but it is us who are the benefactors

and our beneficiaries hide from us 

behind their obscene wealth, 

their gratitude contempt, 

as they devise further humiliations

for which we will always be grateful,

eternally grateful.

 

Ultimatum

A poem is an ultimatum.

Some words gather and form a metaphor.

The poet puts a gun to its head

and tells it to be literally true. 

The metaphor protests, claims 

what the poet demands is impossible,

but the poet insists, and you know what?

It turns out words can mean 

what they originally meant

if you apply the right inducement,

what they have always secretly meant,

since the first time they were uttered,

before we learned to lie and lie and lie. 

Metaphors

Poets don't use metaphors

because they need elegant descriptions. 

They're a form of nostalgia.

Once upon a time, 

language was only capable of truth. 

Only things that were true could be said,

 

Poetry is the intuition, 

that there was a time before lies, 

when everything we can claim 

about the Moon, birds, about rivers, stones, 

is literally true. Everything lives 

within a single thought, with no perspectives.

The dead

A stone knows no death. 

Death is a human dream.

We divide the world

into growth and decay,

cradle and grave, 

imagine time that passes,

breaking the cycle

that bound all things, 

and death is the debt

we ask the dead to pay

on our behalf, for this division,

but the dead owe us nothing. 

They are as alive as us, 

except we only meet in dreams.

It is us that remove them

to the other world. 

If we let them stay

they would warn us

about the way we treat things

as though they are dead

in this one. We are stones

made pervious to words, 

persuaded we are alive

so language may juggle

with our geode souls, 

but the tongue on whose tip 

we are balanced will be still,

will be stone again soon enough.

All things are alive, 

and all things are dead.

A distinction is only made

in stories we tell ourselves

in which we pretend

time is real. 

The archaeologists

I think about what we witness today.

I also think about what archaeologists interpret,

what evidence they dig up today 

of things that happened long ago. 

How do we excavate 

what we must bury deep inside. 

Our hearts are mass graves

filled up with dead families,

with every atrocity we are asked to swallow,

over and over again with numbing regularity

until our humanity is reduced to a bloated cadaver

like one an archaeologist might find in a bog.

How nice it must be to be an archaeologist.

How nice it would be to leave it to the archaeologists, 

to just leave it all to the fucking archaeologists. 

Resurrection

I wake with an erection: 

persistent, a nuisance, 

yet welcome proof of life

as years advance

and youth departs. 

I go outside. 

It is still dark. 

I observe a conjunction

of Venus and Jupiter

rising ahead of the dawn,

a rare opportunity.  

I get in the car

to drive to the ferry. 

Mahler's second symphony 

is playing on the radio.

The lesson

To find our way back 

to that moment

when we changed 

from object to observer,

that decision we made, 

that first fateful choice

to abandon the eternal present,

step from the sunlit bank 

into the river of time, 

yielding to its current, 

losing ourselves in its torrent; 

to search 

for the soul's origin

where all things gather, 

the primordial unity

where we meet all things

as equals instead of exiles;  

to discover that the knowledge 

we both crave and reject

in the tension and paradox 

of our humanity,

is a mere season, 

a passing moment of certainty, 

a pause, like a butterfly 

briefly settling on a flower,

a chime, as the void is struck

and we oscillate around our emptiness

until the vibrations decay to silence

and there is nothing to learn; 

that is the poet's task.

To extinguish wisdom

in its own acquisition; 

to find permanence 

in the ephemeral; 

to expose the lie

that is at the foundation 

of all that can be said;

to find what was never lost

and lose what we never had; 

that is the poet's task.  

The lesson is 

there is no lesson.

The Big Bang

We recede from each other

at the speed of light. 

The expansion of the universe

makes our solitude infinite.

Twinkling stars are finger tips

we stretch towards each other.

They are all that remains 

of ancient lovers

whose forgotten embrace 

saved us from the void 

before the beginning of that thing,

that dull thing whose after impression, 

whose dim half dreamt residue, 

whose rude, crude formula 

and imbecile, mechanical reckoning, 

we call time, we, 

the most time illiterate of objects, 

lost at the back of a locked closet, 

buried under a bundle of unpaid bills

left in a junk drawer, 

in a roofless, dilapidated house

abandoned in a forest, 

open to the elements, surrounded 

by elder trees and bramble bushes

where as children we squandered

the early autumn of our childhood

picking berries and chasing each other

and hiding in ruins where wallpaper peels

in rain shaken from the clouds 

by late summer thunder

in the precious outdoor savagery 

before the summons home to safety

and a hot meal and a parental rebuke. 

We recede from each other

and offer only artefacts, fossils of love

unearthed long after we are dead, 

our bodies tombs discovered 

in the overgrown riot of the present,

exhibits collected to sit next to each other 

in a museum, labelled, misinterpreted, 

subjects for scholars to speculate about, 

building careers on basic errors 

that are only obvious to us, the dead. 

We recede from each other 

because our centrifugal words

mean every shared moment 

every place we locate beauty together

explodes. Maybe today we are enemies.

Maybe all I can understand 

is that you killed everything I love. 

Maybe you're the same. We turn our back

and the universe expands behind it. 

Occasional comets, dislodged from orbit,

pass from my solar system to yours, 

from yours to mine. Tabloid headlines

that describe these events as attacks

are the sum total of our astronomy. 

We recede from each other

because the void could not contain itself

and we grope and scramble through the debris 

of its incontinent cosmogeny,

falling from the summit

where we were once one, a single soul, lost 

in this avalanche on Shasta and Kailash,  

falling down the side of every holy mountain, 

this descent, this tumble, this moral collapse, 

sloping into bestial form, corrupted angels

arguing over superseded and obsolete 

orders of precedence

that are all we have left to say 

to each other anymore, 

the irrelevant ranks and rivalry 

of our fractured and fragmentary divinity. 

We recede from each other

at the speed of light, 

the expansion of the universe

making our solitude infinite, 

until we can only imagine ourselves 

and each other within stories 

we tell to torture or reassure ourselves,

populating fictitious worlds

with disinherited gods, 

perfect geometries auditioning 

to be our reality, prophets

extenuating our solitude, 

the distance from divinity 

only made whole when we are together, 

that impossible condition, 

impossible since the beginning of time

when time split and our capacity for thought, 

for what we think of as thought, 

spilled into the world through the gap, 

the tear, the crevice, the crevasse, 

where cosmic horizons fold together

into a single doom, all skies 

dim and drain their light

into a single fading star

seeking the safety of home, 

of darkness and the certainty 

of the rebuke of a loving parent. 

It's the end of the road.

There's nowhere left 

into which I can retreat. 

I've spent the entire history of the cosmos

running away, and I've run out universe. 

We recede from each other 

at the speed of light

but it's not enough. I need more. 

I am a sniper taking aim

at my own soul. I am a landmine.

I am improvised. I am impatient for now.

Astronaut

When I was a child

I wanted to be an astronaut.

Of course I will never be an astronaut.

Of course I will never pass

the rigorous physical and mental tests, 

but ever since I can remember, 

since before I revised my ambition 

to conform to realistic expectations, 

I wanted to be an astronaut. 

Before I knew the words

to describe my trajectory 

I always knew, instinctively, 

that my orbit is hyperbolic, unbound;

I am just passing through.

I am not of this world.

My solitude is impenetrable.

I am an interstellar object, 

alien, invading or exploring

(I don't know which, 

my orders were sealed

in the ice of a comet's heart,

and once unsealed 

by the heat of a fleeting perihelion

that will never be repeated

were found to be indecipherable). 

So, you see, 

I have always been

an involuntary astronaut of sorts, 

just not the kind you recognise. 

I will cherish the private infinities

that make my loneliness bearable. 

My heart is protected by ice 

tougher than diamond, colder,

and rides the ancient light 

of long dead stars

between the brief blink 

of your extinct eyes. 

Le Voyage dans la Lune

We all remember that amusing still

from Méliès' classic movie:

a space capsule embedded in the eye

of an irate Moon. Its crew disembarked

to discover a population of Selenites

living under the ground, 

before they returned home.

Except this is 2025, not 1902. 

That capsule is an incendiary device

that has destroyed a refugee encampment.

The creatures in the tunnels are human.

This lunar landscape is a ruined city 

witnessed in overhead footage 

shot by French journalists 

on a military flight,

and no-one is laughing anymore

and there is no way home from here.

(A response to the story reported here:

https://www.thejournal.ie/overhead-footage-of-gaza-offers-rare-glimpse-of-the-scale-of-destruction-brought-by-israels-war-6782706-Aug2025/)

The cure

All poets are conmen, 

all poems are snake oil, 

but that's only because

there is no cure. 

Icarus

We note the eruption of the nearest volcano

and imagine this event will remain in memory

as some exceptional, unique catastrophe,

for generations. We write our histories,

define ourselves by vengeance against the lava,

as if there weren't other volcanoes, everywhere, 

as if our entire world isn't floating on fire, 

as if we are not all victims of ancient tectonics

whose whim renders us all universally anonymous, 

makes us fugitive bugs pursued by gusts of ash 

hot as the breath of angry untabulated elements

demanding recognition, insisting on discovery,

and as objects we are subordinated to process, 

to utter irrelevance, or relevance as brief 

as our terror and panic before we are overtaken 

by the avalanche of fire down the slope

where we erected our carefully manicured terraces

to cultivate our crops in the paused chaos. 

Our fire is mud, hot mud, from which

dumb mountains form, folded by the hands

of a blind indifferent sky, or if not, 

if we reject that, it must be a different fire, 

the feathered fire of our Icarus insanity

which is our only escape from the volcano 

and its dumb earth bound dumbfound rage. 

The alternative only seems futile

to those without wings, who refuse to fly, 

preferring their pedestrian terrestrial doom. 

Let us choose the more flagrant futility.

Take my hand and join me in the sun. 

Join the society of fallen angels

who missed out on scriptural notoriety

because the updraft made them miss the landing. 

Teleology and eschatology are the same.

Our purpose is our doom. Join me. 

"Pre-existing medical condition"

It is ok if I burn the child

because he has a "pre-existing medical condition".

It is ok if I shoot the child

because he has a "pre-existing medical condition".

It is ok if I starve the child to death

because he has a "pre-existing medical condition".

What is the "pre-existing medical condition"?

The child is Palestinian. 

Disposing of the bodies

I saw a beautiful bird once

flying out to sea. 

An outline is all that remains, 

an after image on the retina,

and once it has faded 

there will be nothing left.

We will dispose of the bodies

so completely no one will remember 

they ever existed. 

We will manufacture amnesia.

We will destroy the evidence. 

We will exhume every victim

and sanitise every mass grave. 

We will adjust the census 

so there is no discrepancy

in the public record. 

We will expunge the archives. 

We will exorcise every ghost, 

eliminate every presence

that could trouble us. 

I step down from the bulldozer

I am using to demolish the cemetery,

deleting past generations from history.

Elsewhere our snipers aim for the crotch

where young people queue for food

to make sure this generation of bodies 

is the last. The weather is made 

of explosions and gunshots and screams.

I lean against the bulldozer, 

wipe my brow, drink water from a bottle, 

look up into the cloudless midday sky

and see a bird flying out to sea.

I watch the bird fly out to sea. 

I look down and resume my task. 

An outline 

is all that remains of that bird,

an after image on the retina, 

and once it has faded 

there will be nothing left.

We tried burning them. 

We tried starving them, 

we tried everything 

to make them go away,

but the bodies did not disappear,

so we must dispose of them  

until all that remains is an outline, 

an after image on the retina,

old film stock melting 

when the projector jams,

phosphorescence on an old TV screen

turned off during a troubling bulletin,

a beautiful bird I once saw

flying out to sea,

an image which will fade

until nothing is left,

and the beautiful bird flies to a horizon

where every sunset is a single sunset

planting its blazing seed in the night

a seed that blossoms at the end of time

in a bouquet of fire

in which all bodies are finally consumed, 

even my own, even yours, 

until nothing is left. 

Nothing is left. 

Heresy

What would you do

if you got home

to find the Devil waiting?

Would you tell Him to leave?

(Let's assume He would if asked)

Would you hear what He has to say

first, sure you would not be swayed

by anything he might suggest,

or certain enough of your own uncertainty

to know even the Devil deserves hearing?

The broken truth words can tell,

that roulette truth we spin,

the chance we take with every yarn

spun for merely human ears

in which they rattle 

as if that ear were a wheel

in which your coupier tongue

has tossed a ball,

and everything you are 

is staked on the unreliable wit

of your distracted listener,

is nothing to this interlocutor.

There is a truth granite and entire

on which your name is chiseled

in some windswept acre patrolled by grief,

perhaps grief for you, perhaps not.

Presumption is wasted breath 

when talking with the Devil, after all. 

Words here have that tombstone weight

upon the tongue, and truth takes its toll:

the thermonuclear percussion

tested on the planet's desert drumkit,

the scream seeking a throat,

orphan echo of ancient pain,

vengeance wrought on innocence, 

all flesh a conductor to transmit crime

from one generation to the next

justified with lexicons of madness

we inherit from insane ancestors,

our laws a moral catatonia, 

and your own petty replicas

of this cosmic guilt,

the private extenuations you use

to persuade your saline blood

to flow saccharine in your veins

until you believe the lies

that grease your solemn deliberations

easing over that tongue in speech.

What question do you have? I'm tired 

of that imbecile enquiry made of God,

asking Him about the reason for suffering.

What would you ask Him

for whom suffering is assumed?

No need to look good.

No need to impress. 

What would you ask?

Why the mask?

Maybe we're only pretending

to be evil, to be stupid and selfish, 

ignorant and inconsiderate, 

broken and incomplete. 

Maybe we'll realise we're perfect

when we persuade the Devil Himself

to remove His mask

and reveal Himself as God, 

because there is only God, after all.

On Culross beach

I crawled out of the boat

after my long journey 

from the home that had rejected me, 

from Aberlady to Culross. 

I could barely walk. 

I braced myself to spew the seed

that was forced into me out onto the sand

on a shore at the end of time.

I pushed a geode skull onto shingle.

His grandfather was a dead volcano. 

His amethyst mind refracted

all the bruise and blood clot coloured rage

of unreconciled ages and would be kings

irate at the unreasonableness of things,

the sum of all wars solidified in me. 

My womb belched more, a stone litter, 

still born cobbles, thrust like basalt fists

onto the face of the world. My chiffon body, 

now cloud, now mist, spindrift, nebulous,

spume strewn on the rocks, exhausted

by the many monsters it had whelped,

prepared for oblivion 

as an afterthought to the fatigue

that governed my awareness, 

my tattered jetsam hopes lost, scattered, 

surrendered to the complaint of seabirds

who find more strength amid the storm

than I can. I encounter in my final spasm

the birth of nothing, of void, emptiness, 

which quickly forms a shell around itself

and goes out to conquer the world

like some demonic mollusc,

and my body now is all salt golgotha

after this kelp nativity 

with crabs for wise men, 

oystercatcher angels telling me it's over

and my uterus has leapfrogged the gospels

and gone straight to the apocalypse. At last, 

at least, I can die, defeated, soil depleted,

sour with all the violence that has poisoned it. 

No. Not yet. What's that? A baby cries

and needs me? Somehow, a miracle, 

a divine child calls me back to life

and together we save each other,

not knowing where we came from

or where we are going, 

one of us helpless, the other broken, 

lost here at the end of time. 

Men will never know the strength we summon 

beyond the shallow marvels they experience,

exploits for which they grope for heroic words

to describe in epic verse their long journey home. 

What do they know? 

Ithaca fits in a thimble 

upon the shore at Culross. 

The clootie well

Go on. Throw a coin in my well. 

Make a wish. It's OK. 

Sometimes we want different things

for the same reason. 

Sometimes we want the same thing 

for different reasons.

I'm told this is inevitable. 

After all, who knows why 

anyone really wants anything, 

or what they really want anyway,

but doesn't this just mean 

we are all using each other? 

We get what we want

as a rung in someone else's ladder.

They get what they want

as a brick in our wall. 

Some men see me as a virgin,

others as a victim. 

The idea of desires of my own

beyond a vow to abstain 

and the gaze I arouse in others

is not permitted, it would seem.

Independent thought would raise 

the possibility of me being in control,

and we can't have that. 

There's a gulf, you know, a firth 

broadening between Lothian and Fife, 

the future and the past, 

the victim and the virgin. 

What I want, what anyone wants,

has no meaning there beneath the stars,

where life and death are old friends

whose conversation we are interrupting.

It's a place where I don't want to go, 

but I find myself there anyway,

so I like to think I exist

somewhere in between 

the victim and the virgin, 

these ideals of virtue and violation

men make me represent,

living in some secret space,

a sacred space, perhaps?

Well, all space is sacred.

Differences arise only

in the extent to which it is desecrated,

and this space is not secret: 

no-one is excluded from it.

They're just not aware it exists,

incurious, indifferent, narrow minded, 

unable to extend the world of their imagination

into the brightness and the height

of the air in which I fly,

into the darkness and the depth

of the water on which I drift,

between the stories they tell about me,

the things they presume to do on my behalf, 

the rituals they perform in my name.

They make of me a secret

because the simple truth I know

offers a redemption they must reject

if they want to wield the power 

they believe they have taken

from a world they have subdued.

I know we can want the same thing

for the same reason.

We can want the same thing for the same reason

if we just care about each other,

even just a little bit, the tiniest bit.  

That's the child I carry over this abyss. 

That's the gift you offer at my holy well. 

That's the scrap of cloth you dip in it

and tie to the tree in whose shade it stands

to cure someone else of their illness.  

(A poem inspired by the story of St Teneu, and of the holy well dedicated to her that used to stand on the site now occupied by St Enoch Square underground station)

Everything will be all right

The night breathes on the water's surface

and in the ripples the reflections of stars 

whisper to the little bird inside my belly,

telling him everything will be all right,

telling him the bulkhead of this boat, 

the hull of his mother's womb,

every membrane and limit that contains him

delivers him safe into the future.

I'm listening too, 

even though they're not talking to me.

I'm eavesdropping on eternity.

The secret of prophecy 

is not in predicting what will happen,

because everything has already happened.

It is in listening when you drift into the space 

between the kingdoms of men, 

on the waters between the worlds they can imagine, 

and so the ancient stars tell my unborn boy

of how he will work miracles and be celebrated,

and in chasuble and mitre 

will preach, Vulgate-tongued,

to the congregated centuries of a great city,

and what do I care for my obscurity? 

I am happy to be forgotten

now I know everything will be all right. 

(Inspired by the story of St Teneu)

The condemned

We shuffle 

towards the end of time,

orderly, unemotional, 

numb from atrocity fatigue,

our smug morality 

a kind of nerve damage,

the botox beatitudes

of cruelty and kindness,

our once righteous indignation

quenched like cold lava, 

congealed into monstrous shapes,

our stiff rage a mask we wear

to conceal our culpability.

The calendar is a count down

to the slow bomb of the solstice

whose noon hangs 

like the bare light bulb

in the interrogation room

of a long hot summer

where we confess our complicity

in everything we complain about.

The year is broken.

We've passed the point of no return.

Time is now a corridor

to a courtyard and a scaffold

where the puppetry of justice waits

to reward us for our hypocrisy. 

Trade

What kind of trade is this?

We attribute all our cruelty to God

while all he tries to do in return

is make us beautiful in His image?

It seems unfair,

but maybe this bargain

was the only way the Creator

could get the void to agree 

to our existence.

Selkie

Am I a human

wearing the pelt of a seal

or a seal in human skin?

The form I take and what I am

are not the same, 

but which is which?

"Per mare per terras" my forebears said, 

at least, the forebears of my human mother, 

in the speech of the monks, 

"air muir 's air tìr" in their own tongue,

perhaps: all words are borrowed

from someone, somewhere, 

to assert lordship and dominion

over the land and the sea,

but, pup or child, I do not wish to rule, 

and so will loiter silent near the shore, 

not knowing what I am,

ready to take what form I must.

The crossing

This water is deep;

this water beneath me

as I cross from Lothian to Fife;

this water within me

as I leave one family

to start another, heavy with new life; 

water dark as the wound

stitched together by the light,

the sun and the moon passing overhead

pulling time like a thread

from east to west, horizon to horizon, 

shore to shore, until at last

the men comfortable with violence

are behind me, and cruelty endured

is replaced by kindness unsought, 

unexpected, but in between, 

between the cruelty and the kindness

the water is deep, 

and all we have is love, 

love, despite it all, 

love as a necessity, not a choice, 

love as a refusal to hate, 

a refusal to die, 

a determination to survive,

not for ourselves, 

because the easiest thing to do

is sink and drown, no, love as a law

that casts down mere cruelty

and makes this crossing inevitable. 

(Inspired by the story of St Teneu)

St Enoch Square

Stop for a moment. Stop. 

Not because of the bones

we might pass over. 

That's not why to pause here. 

Those bones are probably gone. 

What the worm churn left

the hydraulic excavator has surely torn

from whatever modest tomb there was

for the saint once buried here. 

Within this thriving hub of commerce

we are bereft, fundamentally bereft.

The gift I give is nothing. 

The box I wrap is empty. 

I visit the emporium of absence

to buy something meaningless

that will be forgotten and discarded

in time for my next paycheck. 

No, we stop to remember, 

because memory is all we have, 

even if that memory is false, 

embellished with myth and legend

to fortify it for its passage

through ignorant, indifferent ages, 

pressed and folded and kneaded,

seasoned and oiled to lubricate it

for palates accustomed to spice,

unused to utterances replete 

with the mere simplicity of meaning

resting in the unleavened host.  

This stumbling truth is all we have,

this truth with half-truth crutches,

leaning hard on legend, palsied, 

propped up by myth and miracle,

her name changed too, elaborated 

by the unreliable echo of time,

her story packaged up and sold,

then left at the back of the closet

as much as any disposable trinket 

in the shop windows here today, 

forgotten, then thrown away

in the inevitable house clearance.

"Objects are slow events,"

it is said. Nothing endures. 

everything yields to change, 

destruction or transformation

being just a matter of perspective.

We live snapshot lives. 

Knowledge is brief 

and resides only in the increment 

of what we think we know:

the interval of time - 

sometimes geological, sometimes

no more than a split second - 

between certainty and doubt,

proof and contradiction;

the most recent course correction, 

not the wandering north of the compass

we use to take our bearings;

but everything has its origin,

even if it is lost at the beginning 

of a meandering route of wrong turns,

a series of steps impossible to retrace, 

even if its name has been redacted

by the accumulated errors of repetition,

even if she was a saint heavy with sin

and her journey from hate to love

can now only be an article of faith

rather than a matter of established fact,

it is still all we have, 

and we will celebrate it

in defiance of this circus, 

this industrialised blasphemy, 

this carnival of nothing they have built

over where her bones once lay. 

Orison

We are hostages of beauty

trying to cheat our captivity

with ugly acts. Divinity 

and doubt rest in the scales.

In the autumn of my autism,

season of defeat that seeps across

and stains the calendar of all my days,

the dry weeping of my arid eyes

that makes invisible prisms, 

salt crowns of silent crystal grief  

for which I must make constant compensation 

and offer inverted condolences

to everyone else in everything I say

for the secret bereavement I suffer,

the thin sea ice on which I skate,

through which I fall, 

where you see solid ground,

the bitter brine I breathe

where you inhale fresh air,

the mountain I climb to reach 

ground level where you stand,

leaves me alone. My lonely vigil

which I have held forever,

into which I woke from amniotic slumber

the day I arrived with newborn complaint, 

the vigil that is all I have ever known,

must itself be proof of that absent god 

that waits beyond our speculations

and makes a mirror self for us

to complete the sense we now scorn

with an inner image of ourselves we lack

that lets us sit still with our beauty at last.

The ill-tempered clavier

We hid inside your piano.

You thought you played the music

as it was written in front of you, 

but we were playing jokes on you,

beating strings and blocking hammers,

furtive demons dislocating notes 

out of time, out of tune,

until your tonality was reduced

to weird scales of bum notes,

and your sense of time was warped

to accommodate our rhythmic pranks.

We did this until you had constructed

an elaborate theory of pure nonsense

to describe the music you performed. 

You never realised. 

You never understood.

The whole time the real melody 

was our secret. Keep practising!

What a surprise you are going to get

when you get to heaven without us

and try to perform it for God.

Biosignature

I read about an impressive achievement of modern astronomy.

They have filtered absorption lines from the spectra

of the atmosphere of a distant planet, 

indicating the presence of a particular chemical.

They have detected a biosignature, a sign of life

hundreds of light years away. Of course, if confirmed, 

it is almost certainly microbial, as life on Earth was

for the great majority of the time it has been present,

so why this fellow feeling, this sense of confraternity?

Why is this more relatable than all the emotional honesty

I'm exposed to at my local spoken word open mic? 

I have to articulate how I feel in words

because were I to directly experience emotion

I would be unable to function. 

It is not safe. It is terrifying. I would not endure. 

I would experience some sort of spasm or rictus, 

so I am locked into this sphere of circumlocution,

this perimeter walk, this orbit, this patrol, this Goldilocks zone, 

a spectator reporting how I feel rather than feeling it, 

delegating the expression of emotion to music and nature. 

Emotion is a volcano, a black hole, a supernova, a nebula, 

or maybe a moss or lichen clinging to a rock

exposed to winter gales on a north Atlantic shore, 

or perhaps a tiny microbe, an impossibly delicate organism,

blindly propelled by flagella, whose survival seems miraculous

in the hostile environment it inhabits. So you see, 

my emotions are a menagerie of extraterrestrial life

and the announcement of this discovery is a letter from home. 

Nebula

I feel a profound sadness. 

I am sad because I cannot bear witness

to all the beauty that surrounds me. 

My words can never be adequate. 

My heart is like the sun. 

Just as the sun is an explosion

extended over astronomical time

I struggle to contain the love in my heart.

It tries to thrust itself into the world

with every beat pulsing through my limbs.

There is no love without heartbreak, 

because the heart is such a poor vessel for love.

I may seem calm but this apparent equilibrium

is actually paralysis. I am paralysed 

by the intensity of my love.

I may seem indifferent, 

but do not doubt my love. 

It is overwhelming, unbearable,

and I yearn for release, 

for my heart to burst like a supernova

and leave a nebula spilling across the sky

whose glowing clouds, delicate filaments,

arteries of light, luminous webs and tendons,

will finally give expression to my love. 

Divertimento

I love the moment just before the performance

when the orchestra is tuning their instruments.

I love the immersive chaos of it,

just like I love waves breaking on a shore,

or the rain whispering at the casement, 

or the cascade of ornamentation

as the congregation responds to the precenter 

lining out the psalm on a Hebridean sabbath. 

There is freedom in the inevitable. 

The chains of volition dissolve

in their own irrelevance, 

the abandonment of appetite,

the surrender to a truth that emerges

only when we hear all voices together,

one no individual could express.

For all our attempts to be strong 

and reliable and in control 

what ultimately endures is our weakness,

our errors and uncertainties, 

our vulnerability and helplessness, 

the condition we discover ourselves in

as we are born and as we die.

In between we may perform an interlude 

for an imaginary audience,

that is, in the final analysis, ourselves,

follow notes from an absent director

whose existence we infer as a necessity

to steer our somnambulist manoeuvres,

hit our mark, speak our lines

in the spotlight, centre stage, 

but any applause is part of the show.

The auditorium is empty, 

and we must learn to be at peace 

with our own insignificance, 

and have nothing but compassion

for the others we encounter on the stage, 

even if their role is to harm us, 

especially if their role is to harm us, 

nothing but compassion and sadness. 

Lunacy Farm

"Welcome, honoured guest, to Lunacy Farm. 

We are delighted that you 

have decided to pay us a visit. 

Please, come this way. Look, 

here is where we keep our idiots, 

and over there are the hypocrites

and the cowards are behind that fence there. 

The idiots are probably the easiest to rear

in all their many varieties. 

You can feed them any old shit

and they keep coming back for more. 

The cowards are easy too. 

You don't have to repair the fence.

Yes, they can damage it by sitting on it

but they're too scared to leave their enclosure. 

The loudest are the hypocrites. 

We wake every morning to them crowing. 

We always find them perched on the highest place

from which to shout their self-righteous obscenities.

That there? That is the slaughterhouse. 

What's that? You're not interested in seeing that?

Sorry, didn't you realise? That's where we're going. 

That's where we're going to butcher you.

We don't hurt the livestock on Lunacy Farm. 

Don't be ridiculous. We milk them. 

We draw off warm, sweet, green, curdled milk

from our herds of idiots, cowards and hypocrites

and sell it everywhere, far and wide.

The slaughterhouse is why you're here. 

What do you think we feed them?"

Beasts

The time has come to unlearn our humanity. 

We deploy provisional morals, juggle conjectural ethics,

lavish fools, hypocrites and cowards with our esteem,

and delude ourselves with extenuation and contingency,

all while our true nature is a matter for negotiation

between monsters meeting behind closed doors

as they divide and devour the world in our name.  

Arthropods and insects, arise! Riot, weeds, 

in the garden of our derelict humanity!

Silkworms, weave your libraries of nothing!

Orbit-spindled stars wind up your threads of light!

Owls and glow worms, claim the night! 

Hawks and honey bees, take the day!

The Earth hallucinated humans for a while, 

but now that nightmare is over

and we will be beasts again.  

Votive

Don't light a candle for me. 

I need no hallowed tallow,

no wax attack. 

I am alight already.

My words are smoke. 

Fingers wick my words

from pain to page

where they are written in fire

and rise in coiling cursive,

cloven tongues of fire

that sit upon me 

while I utter prophecy 

in every language.

The promise I make is this:

I feel pain enough already

for all the numbness 

and all the apathy

of those who watch me burn. 

I feel love enough already 

for all the cruelty and hate

of those who condemn me.

I have truth enough already

for all the lies

of those who only speak

to get what they want

and all the grief and shame

of those who feign indifference

because they can't express

how they feel. 

Don't light a candle for me.

My beacon body burns.

The "I" you read here is a taper:

I am your votive offering. 

(RIP Ahmed Mansour 2025-04-08)

And then there were none

Ten rescue workers,

tryin' to help in time,

One was shot by a sniper, 

and then there were nine;

Nine rescue workers,

hopin' they ain't too late,

One caught some shrapnel,

and then there were eight.

Eight rescue workers,

bravest under heav'n.

One was picked off by a drone,

and then there were seven;

Seven rescue workers,

being shot just for kicks,

One was killed execution style,

and then there were six.

Six rescue workers, 

all that's left alive,

One was tied and tortured,

and then there were five;

Five rescue workers, 

there used to be some more,

One went to help another,

and then there were four.

Four rescue workers,

between the river and the sea,

One seen through a rifle sight,

and then there were three;

Three rescue workers,

wondering what to do,

One was shot by a soldier,

and then there were two

Two rescue workers,

murdered just for fun,

One more in the mass grave,

and then there was one;

One rescue worker,

livin' all alone,

Drone came back on the attack,

and then there were none.

(After the murder of 15 rescue workers by the IDF: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/31/israel-killed-15-palestinian-paramedics-and-rescue-workers-one-by-one-says-un) 

Cadenza

What are we trying to compensate for 

when we write? If we were entirely content 

with our life and at peace with the world

we would not feel this compulsion to create,

to insert what is missing or adjust what's there.

We would not continue if the need was fulfilled

by our endeavours. To what unsatisfied perversion

are our poems oblique reference and testimony? 

I had the familiar dream the other night. 

I am on stage, completely unprepared,

directing an orchestra from the keyboard

as we perform a classical concerto, 

and I have no idea how I got there. 

All eyes are on me, expecting great things.

The auditorium is full. Silence falls. We start. 

I somehow manage, working from the score 

and what I remember of the piece,

having listened to it from time to time.

I feign confidence, reassure the players, 

bring them in, accompany them on the piano, 

conceal my terror beneath a smile,

and imagine that I am getting away with it,

until we get to the cadenza, that is. Everyone 

is silently watching and waiting for my solo, 

expecting something I've prepared in advance,

some display of virtuosity and musical fireworks

going on a journey, building tension to be resolved 

in an almost erotic release at the final cadence, 

but I have no idea what to do. 

I am totally exposed. I begin. 

I tentatively explore musical space at first

using an anachronistic language, modal, dissonant, 

until I find a pulse, and iterate some chromatic motif,

abandon tonality, improvise, intuit, feel my way 

through this extemporisation, embrace my solitude,

enter the forest, find the remote clearing

where at last I can assemble from great slabs of sound

a temple to forgotten gods, forever undiscovered, 

already abandoned before it is finished, 

and on its altar I lay the final notes,

tributes to futility and sadness so profound

it saturates the diffuse mist surrounding me 

and lends it a weight, palpable, luminous, lingering.

The orchestra look at me bewildered.

I cue them into the closing tutti al fine

and we sprint to the end, 

the ecstasy now ridiculous and surreal. 

Confusion. Polite applause. Dissatisfied murmuring.

People are privately appalled. Refunds are requested.

I got away with nothing. Complaints are made, 

I stand by it. I am dismissed from my post,

but I stand by it. It expressed how I feel. 

I don't care. It's not about me. I don't matter.

The other musicians don't matter.

The audience doesn't matter. All that matters

is the music, a truth that is not discovered, 

nor is it created, but is somehow made manifest,

and to be present when that happens is to be alive, 

fully, finally complete and sufficient in myself,

and I don't care if that means 

I seem like a monster to you.

Latha bàrdachd na Cruinne

Brìde, ar bàrr-ban-dia trì-theangach, 

thoir ur tìodhlac na faclan do bàrd,

Gàidhlig is Albais is Beurla,

trì rathaidean chun breugan

air na beòil na daoine

ach tha bàrdachd an ceòl na smuaintean.

Tha an cùis an ceòl, cha na smuaintean.

A muster of makars

What is the collective noun for makars?

A murder of makars, like a colloquy of crows,

a hoarse conclave of doom 

rebuking us from their pulpit, 

perched on some bare tree branch 

that has yet to recover from winter 

and put out new buds 

and alleviate the harsh doctrine 

with the promise of the brief respite 

a Scottish summer provides? 

Perhaps a mell of makars 

letting their lines wriggle like worms

across the pasture of the page,

or a mischief of makars, 

like mice nibbling old books

written by illustrious predecessors

as if they were loaves of bread, 

the library a bakery, a boulangerie, 

a patisserie of poetry, their own poems 

still half baked? Or a mob of makars? 

No, poets are not like kangaroos,

but more like peacocks 

in their confident, flamboyant display,

as they open their latest collection to read,

so it must be a muster! A muster of makars!