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.