Reflection

There is courage so profound 

it ceases to be courage 

and tutors us in life as dialogue

between competing necessities.

There is cowardice so complete

it becomes a kind of death, life

exchanged for shallow compatibilities

found in temporary expedient

and disingenuous rationalization.

When you look in the mirror

which do you see? Both? Neither?

We are not entirely dead, 

nor fully alive, occupied, as we are, 

with the mystery of ourselves

which punishes every good intention. 

The object

It was blue. The committee agreed. 

There were so many names for the colour

and we agreed on "blue" by consensus,

which is to say, there were no tantrums, 

no strops, no-one storming out the room,  

only huffs and grudging acceptance. 

The shape was easier. We had precedent, 

Greek words for side and corner

and rules for how to combine them, 

yet this too was somehow inadequate. 

The world's greatest minds, together,

assembled in an exclusive luxury resort, 

all expenses paid, for as long as it took, 

with nothing else to do but think

about what to call this thing, and yet

there was still something eluding us, 

something we could not put our finger on. 

As to provenance, no-one knew. Had it come 

from the ancient interior of the Earth?

Did it have an extra-terrestrial origin,

or, indeed, was it from the future? 

That night I slept unsoundly. At last

I woke startled from a vivid dream

in which my dead wife came to me.

It had been so long the grief was now

a low monotone, an attitude, a filter, 

a grey snow settling on everything, 

and I had forgotten how much I loved her.

The memory felt like a sudden fall.

The sensation woke me. What happened

before then? I formed a clear impression.

She held her hands against her chest

then reached toward me 

and offered me something. 

ὕβρις

Just let them get away with it. 

How could we forgive ourselves

if we don't let them get away with it?

The world burns

and they are going to get away with it.

Billionaires who lit the fire

retreat into their bunkers.

The poor suffer the consequences.

Everything we value is now worthless.

Fraud perpetrated on a planetary scale

has lined the pockets of the very criminals

we aspired to emulate during the good times

and still envy for their stockpiles and safety

even now their betrayal of us is manifest. 

I know it isn't fair, 

but the big lie we were told

is just the sum of all the little lies

we told ourselves. We chose to believe

the big lie when it suited us, 

turned a blind eye as the blameless

were ignored or mocked or worse, 

raped like Cassandra in the temple.

Our outrage now 

is cancelled out by our indifference then.

There is no way home. 

We deserve this curse

that is lifted only by our destruction

and the absolution of those

we have chosen to destroy us. 

Εὐαγγέλιον

The miracle of love:

to constantly witness your beauty

always as if it is for the first time,

to see you with new eyes every day,

constantly renewing my love,

every crisis only bringing fresh clarity

in an eternal awakening of the soul,

a great dawn that pulses 

in every beat of my heart.

What kind of thing is this I am, 

what ground, what mud, onto which

divinity descends, which it treads

to announce this living gospel?

We are imperfect vessels, 

broken, leaking, useless, 

other than the extent to which

we allow love to flow through us. 

We cannot contain it, 

were we to try to make it stand still. 

We must let it flow. 

Meditation

Sometimes just consider my rage a meditation:

my agitation, anger, impatience, 

all sentiments with apparent targets,

all movements needing an external cause, 

all responses to something, 

but maybe whatever was there has passed

long ago. Perhaps

there never was anything there to start with,

leaving you with only whatever theory

serves to explain a wrath

that requires explanation, 

as far as you are concerned. 

Maybe the rage is just another kind of silence, 

a kind that I can hear in a noisy world. 

Maybe it is the only unmechanical sound

I can hear among the door slams and car horns

and the endless elaborate embellishment 

of stupidity and selfishness 

we collectively celebrate and value. 

Maybe rage is the only peace available to me. 

Performance

Let us pretend to be human together.

Let us partition the infinite heart. 

Let us veil its radiance 

within the mask of our individual identities

and in this dimly lit room I will remember 

who I am - I am not you - 

and I will remember you,

and you will help me forget who I am

with whispered confessions 

of secret shared desires.

Let us pretend to be human together. 

Let our bodies be kites, our skin paper 

on which finger tip nibs write promises

so that our gentle hearts beat as one

within a single fragile lantern chest

like a bird trying to escape

the aviary attic of our dusty life, 

and we will take it between our palms

and release it into the night,

rising through the starlight rain,

restored to infinity forever and again. 

Let us pretend to be human together.

Let us catch time in its passing, 

interrupt that career criminal,

that devil let loose, and siphon

silver champagne flutes of sin

through thin pursed lips in celebration

while we hear him tell his tale,

offer his excuse, as ransom, perhaps, 

making him sing for his last supper.

Listen to stories of ancient lust, cruelty, 

and misfortune, in epics lucid and obscure, 

in border ballad and music hall medley. 

Let us pretend to be human together.

Let us kneel, happy to pray in temples

whose columns are the ribs of monsters

killed by something worse in a prehistory

we dare not imagine or refuse to recognize. 

Light the fuse that makes every pillar

a stick of dynamite, 

and retreat to lifeboat solitude, 

and I'll meet you there,

and we will pretend to be human together

at the end of all things. 

A child sees the stars for the first time.

Everything anyone says after that 

is just something adults say to children

to stop them looking at the stars.

Let us look at the stars together

and be human. Let us pretend. 

Annihilation

It's like a conservation law in physics, 

a symmetry, but applied to morality

with mathematical precision and inevitability.

"Never again" is the action, the aim, the objective.

The events that subsequently unfold

are the equal and opposite reaction, 

a set of scales, a zero sum. 

We place the blame. We load the guns,

and never becomes always, 

again and again and again. 

We turn time backwards 

with appeals to the immutable past.

We cultivate excuses in the atrocity garden.

We turn time backwards

and in accordance with the laws of physics

we create ethical antimatter. 

The rest is history. 

Find me

Find me in the trees. 

Find me in the stars. 

Find me in the newborn cry. 

Find me in the weary sigh

of the prophet we denied. 

I was destroyed in Schliemann's trench, 

discarded in the recension of Pisistratus.

My voice lies untranslated 

in a forgotten archive

buried in the unexcavated capital

of a civilisation unknown to scholarship.

I am like an ancient space probe

with corrupted firmware

turning a deaf ear earthwards

from interstellar space,

although my journey 

has no beginning and no end. 

I have not gone, 

I am just so far away

your voice cannot reach me. 

I see your lips move

light years out of sync

and hear what I want to hear

whispered in the diffuse gas

between the stars. 

Let it be love. 

Let it be love. 

Let it be love. 

Ilium on the Clyde

"Fuck your stupid horse". 

We left it for driftwood.

The occupants climbed out, 

sat down on the sand, 

drew up their knees 

and watched, confused, 

as we set fire to our own temples,

tossed infants from the ramparts,

torched our topless towers

and celebrated the ashes

as our greatest achievement.

"We don't need your fucking horse". 

Stone

Nursing a stone,
cradling it in your arms,
holding it to your breast,
as if it would suckle,
this skull sized cobble,
setting it down in a crib
and singing it a lullaby,
feeling the memory of it
inside you, in the place
where your son grew,
the son the sniper took.

The birds

There is no silence. Even beyond 

the mechanised rattle of the city,

nature is loud with chorus and chaos,

giving public notice of births and deaths

with alarm and lament, and hungry,

insistent with its urgent demands,

ungrateful at their satisfaction,

making creation one continuous howl,

and even once we die

and surrender to decay

we fill the grave with voices

of gods and ancestors

speaking for us, pleading our case

when confronted with our ultimate fate,

elevating our petty quibbles

to the status of eternal truth, 

and having learned this new way to think

we invent new kinds of artificial ear

to listen to the palpitating cosmos

and thrust them into the airless void

that can carry no conventional sound

to eavesdrop on the metallic chime

of distant cataclysm.

Even if you withdraw into your mind

you overhear arguments in chambers

adjacent to the one you occupy

or attend to that one voice

that visits you where you are

and provides these words you write. 

There is no silence,

so we must make of sound itself

a substance in which we swim,

air into which we can extend our wings,

and with these words, take flight. 

My cousin

The Moon my cousin 

came round to pay a visit.

He wears the faces of the dead. 

"They'll bury you soon," he said. 

"They'll bury you soon," 

said my cousin the Moon. 

He is tired with a fatigue no rest will cure. 

He brings word from a place where truth doesn't matter. 

Lies are made true by their verisimilitude, 

while truth masquerades behind riddles, 

mocking your pursuit of it through the crowd,

or retreats to some remote, inaccessible monastery

to dance suggestively behind the veil of contemplation,

paralysing men with the possibilities it offers

between truth and lies,

where excellence and celebrity 

excuses every sin, and poor opinion,  

asserted with the confidence of idiots, 

condemns the innocent, and mere appetite 

makes the world an abattoir,

a carnival of enthusiastic atrocities 

justified with great solemnity. 

The Moon my cousin 

came round to pay a visit.

He wears the faces of the dead. 

"They'll bury you soon," he said. 

"They'll bury you soon," 

said my cousin the Moon. 

What we were told is important 

turns out to be unimportant

once we are broken by age, 

and nothing matters,

but we continue anyway, 

beguiled by the charms of madness,

while the sun grinds the organ 

and the planets go hurdy-gurdy on their way, 

and every cause we defended survives without us 

while all other grand ambitions turn to dust, 

and along the road that runs through it all,

beneath the vortex of stars, 

within the stroboscope of days, 

my cousin leads his horse 

down to the beach every morning

to feed it on seaweed, 

and leads it home again, 

an imaginary horse 

- you or I would call it a stick - 

for which he feels a kind of love 

to which we can only aspire,

uncompromising about what matters, 

indifferent to everything else, 

because, of course, all that matters 

is love that subordinates us to something

making the interconnection of all things possible,

Love is the only thing that is an end in itself, 

the substance from which all else is formed, 

the fabric of the world,

beyond truth and lies, sub specie aeternitatis. 

Forgive me if my words are childish, 

but we are all children, really. 

The world does not ask for permission 

to be beautiful. It simply is. Therefore, 

I will no longer believe I need permission. 

I will bundle up all my hopes and fears 

and put them away at the back of the cupboard 

with the old photographs and expired certificates, 

pensions, shares, insurance, and forget about them. 

Someday I will rediscover them

and they will be nothing more than an amusing curiosity,

and I will wonder how it was ever possible that I felt this way, 

and the Moon my cousin will come round to pay me a visit.

He will wear the faces of the dead. "They'll bury you soon,"

he will say. "They'll bury you soon," will say my cousin the Moon.

The easy way

No-one does it the easy way, 

and, as it all goes horribly wrong,

horribly, predictably wrong,

wrong in ways that were predicted

many times, remember, you chose this, 

and given another chance, be honest, 

you would make the same choice again. 

You would choose the hard way,

because it looks easy, 

and the easy way looks hard. 

Psalm

Let us sing anthems of absence

for an indifferent deity, 

recite epics of emptiness,

lend our voices to the void,

raised in celebration of nothingness. 

My soul swings towards its perigee 

with that dark planet 

that holds me in its orbit,

and what if this time I should stumble

at that low point, and continue to fall

until my heart is a meteor

charring the sky of that distant world,

coming to rest in some remote place

beyond all limits of discovery?

I have no fear. It is no more lost now

than it was when I first found it

in my solitary survey of this hollow soul,

mapping its emptiness, distracting myself

with the cartography of the infinite, 

so let us sing anthems of absence

for an indifferent deity, 

compose epics of emptiness,

lend our voices to the void

and celebrate its nothingness.

The optimist

The gears of our fates are meshed in secret.

The mechanism is contained within a box

that cannot be opened. Our stories meet

around campfires in a forgotten hinterland

where narrators unknown to us repeat 

details familiar made strange by time 

and distance, and return to us changed. 

We are our own future, unrecognizable, 

come to replace us, with knowledge

that cannot be transmitted to us yet

because we would not understand it. 

The knots that join us cannot be undone

because they tether us to a darkness

we curate for each other, which alone

we would be unable to contain. So, 

be glad. Have faith. All will be well

precisely because we do not know how.

Moral injury

Look at what you did. 

This is what you are. 

Don't like what you see?

Do not look away!

Change the things you do. 

The piano lesson

"What you must understand

is that your piano is an altar.

The gods of the earth 

are appeased by music. 

They demand appeasement,"

the piano tutor said. 

"Your piano connects you to them,

your fingers roots pressed through key

and hammer and string and frame

down into their subterranean realm.

When you play, remember, 

you prevent the end of the world. 

Your music replaces earthquakes 

and volcanoes. The sacrifice of sound

offers surrogate catastrophe. 

Perform the piece accordingly, 

as an act of worship

of something dark and terrible."

Skeletons

So many of my skeletons are strangers. 

I remember barely half the behaviour

that, quite rightly, renders me unsuitable

for high office or responsibility or trust. 

Events are swept into a bonfire of amnesia.

My life is written on autumn leaves

that burn unread in the gardens of bliss

before the winter they foretold

scorches everything with apocalyptic cold

beneath icicles of light at the north pole,

borealis chimes in six dark months' of night. 

I talk to my skeletons and ask them why

the prestige and respect I'm due is denied,

then act as confessor as they explain

the things I once did and will do again. 

We part, and return to two different worlds, 

one where I am blissfully ignorant of what makes me, 

and the dark, for which the closet is their embassy. 

Anti-clique

We live in the age of clique and slop. 

I belong to the anti-clique,

our manifesto: fuck you. 

The right side of history is superficial slop. 

A persuasive machine could write it.

Here on the wrong side 

we won't pat you on the back. 

We will stab you in the back. 

Our dogma is bog water

in which you sink and drown.

Congratulations, if you survive. 

You are immortal and a hermit

condemned to eternal solitude

in a remote shieling innocent of all amenity

in the middle of endless moorland 

on Ultima Thule, finding inspiration

where the eagle has left the carcass of your life. 

You could remain silent. That is the only way

to communicate what needs to be said here. 

Don't worry. Be happy. Be sad. Talk. Recite. 

Re-frame your trauma as privilege. 

Re-frame your privilege as trauma. 

Portray your petty disappointments - 

that thwarted teenage lesbian crush, 

the endemic stupidity of your peers

from which only you seem to be exempt, 

your incandescent outrage at injustices

to which you are uniquely sensible - 

as capital crimes against yourself. 

Your loyal clique of friends relate

from eight o'clock to half past eight. 

The priests of morality masturbate

from eight o'clock to half past eight. 

Announce the indictment in perfect slam 

[pause]

voice at the open mike. You are a gargoyle,

preserved as if in amber

as the syrup sympathy sets hard

around the grotesque you perform

to turn your poem into a sour candy

anyone can suck

when they want to look like they care. 

We live in the age of clique and slop. 

I belong to the anti-clique, 

our manifesto: fuck you. 

The sage

The man is still talking. 

I occasionally tune into the broadcast.

The dial of my mind turns through signal and static 

in this sports bar of scoreboards and playlists

over which his urgent ululations carry. 

My involuntary eavesdrop indicates

someone else is mistaken

and the man is explaining

why his understanding of the situation 

is in fact the right one.

His genius is implicit in the contrast.

I cast a glance. He maintains morbid obesity

with a selection of fried comestibles

whose ingestion is his only interruption,

but not for long: 

each mouthful is not chewed, let alone swallowed

before the urge to correct whichever fool

thought the bite sized breathing space

granted him an opportunity to speak. 

It is clear the world would be a better place

if only we paid better attention to this sage. 

If only we knew. If only we realised. 

Troop

Some ridiculous self-important apes 

bickering over some made up problems 

while patrolling their disputed territories 

on the slopes of a long-dormant volcano

arrive at a agreement that satisfies all of them, 

or nearly all of them, 

at least, all of those who really matter, 

and they start grooming each other

oblivious to the impending judgement

of the slumbering mountain.

Loanword

The trick is to move sideways.

Avoid head on confrontation. 

Conflicts have outcomes, 

winners and losers, 

but these can be avoided,

and the encounter transformed

into something more like a dance, 

if we circle each other, 

and only take steps forward and back, 

if offering ourselves 

and accepting each other

in the formation of something new,

a common language

enriched rather than impoverished

by our differences. 

The trick is to move sideways

like that palaeolithic partan that survives

in our modern day Gaelic and Scots

not because of its hard shell,

but because it moves sideways. 

(N.B. partan is Scots for crab, a loanword from Gaelic, in which it is itself most likely a loanword from a pre-Indo-European substrate)

The axiom

It is only a paradox if you stand still. 

We assume we walk on solid ground

but start to sink into the bog if we stop to dwell

on the irrefutable correctness of our assertion:

solid ground as far as the eye can see!

We are governed by an axiom 

that cannot be uttered: state it out loud,

render it into speech, record it in symbols, 

and it immediately becomes obvious

that it is invalid. The proof is trivial, 

yet somehow it is true if it remains unspoken, 

and all the falsehoods we confidently proclaim

and utterly depend on to support our belief

that we understand this world and each other

rely entirely on this unacknowledged axiom

that cannot be true yet must be true. 

Therefore, keep moving. We are travellers.

There is no settled position we can maintain

that is not a destination that can only be reached

in another world where the axiom does not exist. 

Swimmer

For Robin

Nuclear powered data centres

generating deep fake porn at incel behest

drink rivers dry amidst great drought.

This will solve the climate crisis, we are told,

somehow. Private contractors bulldoze your house

and if you complain you are called a terrorist. 

Astronauts orbiting the Moon observe an Earth

where we have made asteroids redundant. 

A long-sought comet finds it has time on its hands,

and swaps its appointment in Yucatan

for a Caribbean cruise, and devils are tourists

emptied into this fresh hell we make for them, 

our politics toys for their children, 

the beach front palace a creche for petulant brats. 

Our journalists document the tantrums. 

Maybe it's time to go for a swim. 

Maybe it's time to connect, or reconnect,

with the casual sincerity that saturates

the unimpressed world, the world whose beauty 

does not wait upon the eye of its beholder, 

the world that reminds us who we are. 

We bring some part of that world back with us

and leave some part of ourselves there with it, 

and time itself is just a coin we mint

so that we may transact with the infinite

in which we were immersed. Maybe it's time

for a world that is this beautiful without apology. 

Loss of signal

 

"Love your neighbour as yourself" 
the astronaut* told the Earth
as his vehicle slid behind the Moon
and communications were interrupted. 
"A whole civilisation will die tonight"
his president** said, back on Earth, 
apparently unconcerned with scripture. 

*Victor Glover, Artemis II

**Donald Trump

Unfathomable

In February 2026, along with the poet Keeks Mc, I helped facilitate the composition of a community poem for the delegates at the AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026 in Glasgow, on behalf of The Wee Retreat. The text below includes some introductory remarks and the poem as it was read out at the closing plenary session of the meeting.

Introductory remarks

"Rachel Carson said 'If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry'.

"I'm Peter, and this is Keeks. We are two Glasgow based poets and at the Wee Poetry Retreat booth in the exhibition hall all week we have been gathering contributions - words, sentences, thoughts, reflections, and even complete poems - from you guys, to include in a poem you are about to hear and a pdf booklet that will be circulated to in a few weeks time. 

"Keeks and I have blown away by the response we got from you, and I just want to thank all of you for engaging with this initiative. You have been incredible! If you don't hear your contribution in the poem Keeks is about to read it is because we have been overwhelmed with the sheer volume and quality of ideas you have submitted and there is a limit to what we can include in a four-minute performance piece. Please rest assured we will make sure we include everything in the booklet.  

"The idea that there is some distinction between poetry and science is artificial, a consequence of the contraints and intellectual straight jackets imposed on us by modern industrial capitalism. At all other times in human history science and poetry have walked hand in hand as we humans respond to the complex, beautiful world we find ourselves in, extracting meaning from ambiguous and incomplete observations, communicating our motivations and interpretations, sharing our insights and emotions. 

"If we are to be responsible stewards of this planet and its oceans, we need to do more than perform calculations. We need to embrace that holistic response that includes thoughts that may not be suitable for a poster or a paper, but would fit perfectly into a poem. It is in that spirit that we have gathered your thoughts together as best we could, and Keeks will now read the outcome of this exercise."

Unfathomable

The passage of time makes aliens of us all,

in this ocean where ancient anaerobic ancestors

were eradicated by the Great Oxygenation,

this sea topped up by three million years of rain

during the Carnian Pluvial Event,

the oceans from which all our rains are distilled.

The depths of mystery

Secrets drifting through ages

Messages without the simplistic containment of bottles

though we do not want for waste

The seas are made of time

time squandered lately as never before

Changing oceans we don't yet understand

Deep water keeping secrets

in a sea of doubts

Confidence in our stewardship lacking

however curious minds keep asking

reaching out to skim the surface

of oceans of opportunity.

Are we immersed yet?

Are we navigating our way to breakthroughs

or blindly, hopelessly lost in the abyss?

Pressure mounting, hour by hour

to interpret echoes of past and future

to break the surface into an age of harmony

and we can explore these depths.

Sitting inside a bubble of titanium

Dropping to the deepest point of the ocean

We are just an insignificant scrap in the immensity

The ocean, source of life,

can also take it from us in a split second.

We are allowed to contemplate the most intimate,

remote, legendary and extreme spot of the planet:

Mariana Trench, and discover new forms of life there

and beauty that exceeds the limits of our imagination

Diversity. Samadhi

In the magical polar blue light

today's generation of phytoplankton

seagrass and kelp

sway in a rhythm of aeons

before mixing in the sub-surface of the ocean floor

Layers tell their tales

currents carve the seabed's form

guiding how we care

over geological timescales

The infinite prism of the sea,

liquid, shifting, full of colours,

shapes and silts, rhythm, full of time itself,

connecting distant shores,

from the steel of the poles

to equatorial copper,

mixing surface and sea bed,

currents sharing their contents

linking strata across ancient epochs.

We live in a beautiful world,

and from the depths of space,

the oceans of Europa and Ganymede

swimming through the stars

in their celestial orbits

to this humble sea-clad rock,

the ocean was always within you.

My water is your water,

circulated in an inner orbit

since time began,

the first drink quenching the last thirst,

not owned, never belonging

to any one, uniting us all,

for there is a water molecule in you

that was once in the Buddha too.

We are living in a dream we choose to have.

We are each a different perspective

on that common dream,

a ray penetrating the depths

of that ocean of time,

and together we can choose a better future,

but our joy is mixed with sorrow.

Our tears run full.

In the silent bioluminescent disco of the deep,

falling in the marine snow

we find anthropogenic toxins and miscroplastics

leaving a plastocence horizon within the biogenic sediment,

evidence of the trespass of an invasive alien organism

and we discover the strangest species of all is us.

Punch

The orphaned infant ape

that finds a surrogate to cling onto

in a discarded stuffed toy: that

is what God is like to us.

No less real for being absent,

taking for us whatever form

our desperate need dictates

and random chance provides.

So what if the ritual is futile?

What matters is the belief.

(Punch was a baby macaque at Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan who was abandoned by his mother and used a stuffed toy for comfort)

Martyr

When I was alive
I hated you.

Let's face it:

you hated me too, 

but now I'm dead, 

I'm a figurehead. 

Don't pretend to care.

You'll never learn. 

I was just a weirdo

as far as you were concerned,

but now that I'm dead

you pretend you care instead.

Façade retention

I feel like I have died so many times already

and this thing you see before you right now

is the little I can remember from those lives,

the imperfect restoration of an edifice

that has suffered fire and flood, earthquake, 

insurrection, barbarian siege and sack, 

and, worst of all, the imagination of others, 

the ambition of a series of architects

who restore me according to the style and fashion

that satisfies the whim of my latest proprietor.

My cheeks blush with neon in the night. 

My forehead bears the imprint of a billboard.

Less cruel, perhaps, 

is the sincerity of the graffiti artist, 

but take down the scaffold of my smile. 

Abandon this place to ruin. 

Let it revert to rubble. 

Let it go. 

Lyman Alpha

When the photon is absorbed

an electron changes energy level, 

which is to say, beforehand,

an electron occupies one level,

and afterwards,

an electron occupies another.

Are they the same electron?

Does the electron even exist?

We look through the telescope,

observe distant stars,

record their spectra,

infer their composition,

only to draw the inevitable conclusion:

we are mud and rocks

waking from a dream of existence

into the truth of annihilation. 

But all light is resurrection,

energy absorbed, then re-emitted, 

and all matter too,

that passes through the forbidden chasm

that lies between the energy levels. 

The tears we shed yesterday

flow to the ocean, rise in the clouds

and fall in tomorrow's rain

and each dying breath is exhaled

into the common lung of the sky

to be recycled in some benediction

offered by a priest to a parishioner

struggling to understand their grief,

therefore we must ask, what died

so that this world could exist? 

Ego

Existence is something we assert:

I exist. The cogito will always fail

when thoughts infiltrate our minds

at the direction of others,

our minds hosts to parasites,

or echo without origin ad infinitum

within the sealed cavity of our skulls.

Identities are all fake, and unravel

if the smallest, otherwise unnoticed thread

is given the slightest tug, and we regress 

to infantile, pre-verbal demands,

no longer equipped to negotiate their satisfaction

with any degree of nuance or sophistication,

all names now administrative,

recorded on certificates lodged in archives

ablaze with the passage of time,

consumed utterly until nothing remains, 

identity as damnation. Nevertheless, 

we exist, not as a conclusion

rendered up in some volume of philosophy

to be cherry picked and misconstrued 

if not forgotten entirely, 

but as an assertion, a demand, 

entirely unreasonable, never fully satisfied,

that feels the pang of an unendurable hunger

while it shirks the burden of essence,

slips the madhouse straps

to govern the asylum as a neglected empire

in which the illusion of order

may spontaneously arise from time to time

but which is ruled by impulse and appetite.

This absent existence that dwells on detail

according to caprice and whim

all while its kingdom crumbles

is nevertheless bound by a law, 

a single law that it will obey

to prevent stupidity and selfishness

turning it into instruments of evil:

insignificance, in whose arms we may rest, 

whose embrace will crush us if we resist. 

There is no moral calculus

that will not eventually betray us. 

There is no deal we can do

that secures a greater good. 

We are only saved by our insignificance, 

and I raise my ego 

only so I may stand before it

and I reject all your philosophies

that would rob me of this autochthony.

Ultimatum

If I'm either with you or against you

then I'm against you, always, obviously.

If we have to agree about everything

I refuse to agree with you about anything. 

Your purity makes me want to be dirty. 

I listen, as you calmly explain,

as you explain in that way

that makes you seem the very paragon

of calmness, why it's me that's wrong, 

why I simply don't understand, 

what I simply fail to appreciate, 

and at last, at last, I am finally persuaded,

the penny drops, and the realisation dawns, 

that even if your gang, your reasonable gang

of entirely reasonable gangsters

was the only gang left on Earth,

my last chance to join up with someone,

anyone, I'd rather perish alone in the desert,

to starve, than sign on to your fine words, 

your fine thug words, your tongue tribe,

the compelling, irrefutable logic of your words

that only a deranged lunatic would reject.

I reject them. Condemn me. I don't care. 

See you in the next life 

when it's your turn to be wrong. 

Geronimo regret

Don't go down with a Geronimo regret.

Don't give up. They haven't beat you yet.

Don't go down with a Geronimo regret.

Keep on fighting 'til you're the last man left. 

Even when there's no hope that you can win this fight,

keep on fighting because your cause is right. 

Keep on fighting until there's no-one left.

Don't go down with a Geronimo regret. 

(Geronimo's lest words were "I should never have surrendered. I should have kept fighting until I was the last man.")

Cargoes

Excavations of Nineveh and Ur of the Chaldees,

hoards of ancient clay tablets,

cuneiform tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, 

records of astronomies and inventories,

of kings and calendars and copper.

Libraries of Alexandria and Baghdad,

magnificent by the Nile and Euphrates

home to scrolls transmitting philosophy 

from Greece, mathematics from India,

and Arab star charts and geographies. 

Disclosure of materials responsive 

under the Epstein Files Transparency Act,

women and children as commodities,

consumables, props to ego, toys to break

and cast aside before the next delivery. 

(What would John Masefield make of our world today?)

The song of Judas

Do not hope. Endure despite it. 

Be hopeless. Of all the truths

competing for your endorsement

choose the worst, the most dire,   

then season your pessimism 

with the bitterest irony. 

Imagine all the Cassandras, 

a choir of desparate Cassandras, 

singing their silent, hoarse, 

ignored, forgotten masterpiece. 

Find the hypocrisy that lurks

within the best intention. 

In the mild osmosis of this world

where we desalinate our words

beneath almost imperceptible pressure,

the slightest nod and glance  

of the self-identified good, 

leaning against us, into us, 

arms around our shoulders

in the fake familiarity

of the snake oil salesman, 

calling itself morality, 

calling itself the right side of history, 

calling you all sort of things

when you make the wrong choice,

drink the brine. Do not hope. 

Do not confirm. Defy. Deny. 

Annihilation is a sacrament. 

Denounce your saviour once, 

twice, three times. Crow. 

Be the rooster, the rebuke

of all would be apostles. Condemn 

the fundamental selfishness 

of salvation. Do not hope, 

for hope keeps you from a god

that has abandoned you. 

How can you ever have faith 

if you are not nothing. 

False start

"I wouldn't start from here":

the famous advice given 

to the man asking for directions, 

but no matter how far

we retrace our steps, 

we can never find the place

where we can stop, turn around, 

and put our best foot forward, 

take the second left, first right, 

and so on until our destination

rises before us to vindicate

the impulse that started our journey. 

Rather, it is a mirage, 

a hopscotch of fake oases 

that leads us in circles

if we are lucky, a familiar mistake

better than simply not knowing

if we are on the right track. 

Either way, our only options

are just different ways of being lost. 

In that event we swap uncertainty

for certainty, simply assert we are right, 

and fabricate future histories

as proof we were right all along, 

and defend this assertion

as an article of faith, all doubt heresy, 

and as a year is a day to a drunk man

we wait on the solstice dawn

to summon inebriate gods

so everything might start again. 

Merry Christmas

You can make a Christmas dinner 

using different flavours of crisp: 

prawn cocktail, roast chicken, 

parsnips and other root vegetables,

there's even pigs in blankets flavour. 

Alien, The Thing and Children of Men 

are all Christmas movies. Think about it.

All Radiohead songs are arrangements 

of River Man by Nick Drake: perfect 

for when you're spending Christmas alone. 

My gift to you 

is to set Boltzmann's Constant 

and the speed of light to unity 

so you can measure temperature 

in kilograms. Merry Christmas. 

Harris Tweed

O Lewis, 

land where the degrees of cousinage, 

lineages carded and spun like yarn,

connect us implausibly on the loom of chaos. 

The highest and most low are relatives,

the criminal in the dock, judge at his bench, 

humblest and most mighty, 

all sprung from a common loin 

if you go back far enough, 

over which intervening generations 

draw their discrete veil 

and family tradition offers 

its elaborate and unlikely extenuation. 

We all collide on the broken loom of history

abandoned in the roofless ruin of the old shed

now you can't make a living 

from the cloth there anymore.

The past is a revealed religion, 

once preached by monoglot grannies

innocent of the southern speech, 

fluent only in the language of Eden

as they recite lineage and incident, 

scandal and tragedy that adhere to the land

in every place name known or unknown 

to the ordinance survey,

but the sauce of time lies in its secrets, 

hallucinations of empire, 

confidences and obscure connections,

to Rory Dall Morison or Donald Trump

or Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruadh,

rumours of Spanish gold 

or Charlie's treasure 

or Jacob's pillow, the Bethel stone, 

hidden now in a different desert

by no less strict a covenant, 

even though this whole world of land and sea

is a tabernacle in which divinity dwells. 

Although the loom is broken the cloth endures

and we are conscripted into a weave

that puts the embroidery of Bayeux to shame. 

As a child I ran along the drystone gables

of your dilapidated black houses

while aunts audited my parents' anecdotes indoors

over tea stewed until you could stand a spoon in it.

My uncle let me discharge his army surplus rifle, 

well perhaps not so much surplus

as mysteriously gone missing 

when the quartermaster checked the inventory 

the day after my uncle hit civvy street. 

I pulled the trigger of the Lee Enfield .303,

giddy with the glamour of weapons

while he remained serious 

with the knowledge of what they can do. 

Who will sing of the good we reach

on the other side of evil, 

of the heavy price we pay

to do a little good in this world? 

It is never there when you look for it, 

yet it is always right where you left it. 

Animals do feel pain. Maybe that's all they feel, 

and all our ideas of human intelligence

are just fancy anaesthetics we use to stay numb

to the real world we find out on the moor. 

Still, the rabbit tasted good later that night,

and the moor is where the dye is found, 

lichen scraped from rocks with old spoons

to be boiled with the wool. 

The spurious exceptionalism

by which we humans refute 

nature's indifference

is raised in a sermon 

and dissolved in a psalm. 

The lesson is victory 

is only achieved through surrender,

and so the loom of chaos 

continues to quilt the land

with the cloth of time. 

Time

Clear away the clutter. 

What is left? Nothing. 

Not even yourself. 

There is no transcendence.

There is no enlightenment.

All that remains

was there already,

underneath it all.  

You might be alive.

You might be dead.

It doesn't matter to you now 

in this empty place 

you find yourself in. 

There are two kinds of time, 

the time we experience

and the time we can talk about,

the present, and that abyss

into which we are catapulted

by the bestial reflex

which governs our movement, 

that ocean we inhale and exhale

as we spend a lifetime 

slowly drowning,

those remote tonalities

into which we modulate

as our hands crab claw their way 

across the keyboard.

Stop. Rest in a world

that blossoms with decay, 

whose roots delve and stems stretch

to meet and entwine outside time

and form a circle around you

somewhere time cannot reach, 

somewhere calm and still

where life and death are both imposters

who have abandoned their attempts

to lure you into their schemes,

and all our modes and melodies collapse

into a single monotone of ecstasy

indistinguishable from silence. 

Nostalgia

Do you remember what it was like?

The sea and sky? People? Animals?

Colours instead of shades of grey?

Food and drink prepared to evoke pleasure

not boiled to leach mere nutrition

from dead tree bark and old shoe leather?

We dressed well and ate better, banqueted,

raised glasses to ourselves and each other,

made speeches, looked to the future in hope, 

the past in appreciation, then sipped

the hemlock of a thousand choices

we didn't even realise we had made,

and smiled and smiled and smiled.

Our numbers have dwindled since then, 

since that corporate dinner function. 

The staff have cut the throats of many

whose tables they served that day

before yielding to some new contagion

or being murdered themselves. 

Exotic varieties of cruelty infiltrate our lexicon,

while words for familiar comforts are forgotten. 

Now it is only you and me left, 

you and me stranded here on this beach, 

starving and hunted, old and sick, 

exhausted at the end of a long pursuit,

and there will be no-one left

to remember the good times 

once we are gone.

Who knew that, even while we celebrated,

long ago, the bosses were doubling down 

and digging in, that decisions were made 

to hold the course and ride out the storm, 

and they knew. All the time they knew 

not everyone would make it.

It could all have been so different. 

There's no bosses any more, of course, 

just this commonwealth of consequences,

this republic of sad remebrance

about to fall to the empire of oblivion. 

Juggernaut

What is beautiful, 

what we call beautiful,

is fossilised cruelty. 

It is the bones, 

the rubble and debris, 

the ornate urn of ash, 

the picturesque ruin

of that fallen empire 

whose apologists tutor us, 

whose indolence and corruption

we emulate like children, 

like animals, mere mimics.

We juggle kneecaps 

in a backward circus

to entertain the impotent dead. 

We are clowns tumbling through 

the comedy carnage 

of unrecorded history. 

Masalit and Circassian

and others we do not know

or care to know

fill the seats and deafen us

with their silent applause. 

Engines of war, long decommissioned,

are repurposed and raised 

as monuments to their legacy

and are admired and called beautiful.

Every temple mocks the sacred grove 

on whose embers it was built, 

every prayer the latest distortion 

of some original long forgotten revelation 

buried under layers of liturgy,

a slippery stratigraphy of tongues,

slabs of sediment lying flat on top of each other, 

their language decomposing in the mouths

in which our words thrust their roots

and probe the soil of past utterance

to find and bring forth dark meanings into bloom

while mystics retreat into solitude

and seek refuge from the cruelty

that clutters this cataclysmic world

in visions of apocalypse and ecstasy. 

We gather and evaporate divinity

until all that remains is one god

before whom to declare 

a unique bankruptcy

at the funeral of truth,

and all art is stolen.  

All our legal codes

are written and rewritten 

to stop justice being enforced, 

to let us get away with the theft,

because there are no laws against it.

Each sigh and pang 

you yield before a canvass

in some prestige gallery, 

humidity and temperature

testifying to sponsor investment

in environmental controls, 

must be measured against screams 

and agonies of others whose absence

is the foundation of our aesthetics. 

Genocide isn't special. 

It is tedious. It is commonplace.

Ask the Masalit. Ask the Circassians. 

You drink it in your coffee. 

It saturates the ink

with which you declare it 

to be exceptional, to be a crime. 

It comes from the same factory

that manufactures every pretty little thought

that you think to feel good about yourself.

We live in a web, 

but it is not made of silk, 

it is made of sinew, 

and our most refined, exquisite bliss

is spun from the pain of millions

who quietly haul the crimson juggernaut

of our silent history.