The greys are gone.
They’re not hanging around.
“May you live in colourful times” they said.
The shades are coming with them.
Maybe, Partly , and -ish
are currently considering their positions.
Arbitration and compromise
have agreed to disagree.
And as they vacate the premises
the stomp of a party tune upstairs,
“Look what they’ve done to my Dogma”
Wood pigeon kingpin
perched, rubbernecking
sparrows
who hover, peck and flit
stabbing fatballs busily.
The big boy buggers off.
Wings purr greedily.
One wee bird
on a feeder limb
waits
Another comes
shoving fat into its’ mouth.
A child?
A mate?
I don’t know.
Cormorants wing-drying on the breakwater.
Fishermen’s oilskins.
Six puffins bob on the near shore.
Toy tugs.
A grey heron,
all acute geometry
pokes around marsh grass.
Gannets peep-peep,
tourists from the volcanic plug
The offshore distant Craig
Pied wagtails
zip my eyeline
As I scuttle through
Britain’s Birds for the umpteenth time.
Maw, dad n me
We were only three
up in the flats.
Forty nine stairs
Jist three flairs
bit it felt higher.
Ah would skelter up them
tae beat the lift.
Startin at grun
Press “3”
jump oot
then leg it.
Sometimes the games spiled.
Yer oan the second flair
an hear some wummin
stoap the shutting door
wi her fit.
There’ll be nae wee victory the day.
I’m ok.
I’m not ok.
The contradictions
inherent in the structure of language.
I think
THIS.
I can also think
NOT THIS,
so NOT THIS too.
They can both be true.
I was unwanted.
I was wanted too,
but
What was unwanted was A BABY,
what was wanted was ME.
The first was true before I was born,
Both were true after I was born.
I was a buttonhole.
I was the emptiness that held a marriage together.
And the way life should have been was a button too big for the hole.
1958
Be his Da.
Dae that fur me.
Jist be his Da.
Ye used tae luv me.
Luv me noo.
N be his da.
Help me oot.
Ah know Ah wiz daft.
Jist gie him a Da.
You get me.
He gets us.
C’moan. Da.
1968
Ah’m yer Ma.
Ye wur premature.
Jist seven months.
But a fuhll weight
N a forceps delivery.
Figure that oot.
Ah’m yer Ma.
He’s yer Da.
Naw there’s nae kissin.
She hinks “The minute he’s up.
The minute he’s oot
I’m offski. Joab done.”
This other guy,
He gies me stuff-
Records n medals.
Ah saw an auld picture,
Him n ma Ma at work.
Ah thoat “Ah’m gaun mental!”
Right in the pit
Ae ma stomach.
“He’s me, Ah’m him.”
1998
30 year oan .
Da’s deid n Ma’d left.
Re-merrit n happy.
Ower a vodka
At 3 in the moarning
Ah spit it oot.
“Wiz HE ma Da?”
Nae indignation.
Jist “Whit makes ye ask that?”
Monoliths of flesh and bone:
Impermeable, unknowns.
They’d talk in shorthand
But only of work,
The business of the day.
Carving hard mythologies
For the foundations of childhood,
Where threadbare truths were dangled, arms length,
Familiar lies embraced.
The telly was our maypole.
Most sentences get us from A to B.
Consciousness swirls around them like the air outside of a jet plane
The sentence is a fixed thing which we float around with our meanings and histories.
The molecules of meaning bounce off of each other, connections are made.
The personal and impersonal rub shoulders
The best marriages of reader and writer have the former formulating truths which the latter has previously only intuitively understood.
Some reader/writer relationships are more akin to intense love affairs, the reader possessive of their understanding and either keen to parade their insights or contradict those of others.
These contradictions live in the molecules of meaning.
Rather than enter the discourse on those writers who educate, elucidate and enlarge me I prefer to bring my understandings from my readings to my poetry,
thickening the molasses of miasma
in the hope the baton of understanding
is picked up elsewhere..
Glasgow was a sea-side town
which sailed inland
in search of squalor,
turned it’s back on the setting sun
and somehow found America.
It’s cowboys swung through saloon doors,
with shipyards wages
poured in tills,
supped their mutual fills of sorrow,
danced in the dark come closing time.
The Wild-West, Govan’s desperados
soaked in work-sweat,
crushed in pubs
nicotined lungs, liquored livers
rain-whipped bunnets soaked by lamplight.
When the jobs ran dry, with the self-respect
and a deep-cut gulch scarred the townsfolk memory
the jokes came fast as the bitterness rose
And stabbed at the gut saying “how hard are we?”
The gangland teens, the football kickings
Whit school do ye go tae?
Here, stitch that!
Taught by the tawse and the home-schooled slipper
Or a well-aimed buckle from a BB belt.
Everything’s bigger everything’s better
brassy blondes,
borassic lint.
There’s no internal monologue here
It’s as loud as a shout on a midnight street.
Glasgow was a seaside town
which sailed inland
in search of squalor,
got sooted, booted and settled down
and sold its soul to the silver dollar.
A slice of toast,
wet toast, floats
downstream bobbing
into banks.
A soggy boat
suitable for sticking
into
old men’s gums.
