"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)