Poetic Offshoots from the Scottish Jungle
Can I ask you to wait at the door awhile,
Said consciousness the old trickster,
I’m dining with fear and the unknown just now.
I’ve misplaced their jackets, they’re leaving.
I know they’ve lived here forever
They pretend to be guests.
Oh , you’re coming in anyway?
Make yourself comf…oh, you have.
You say this is YOUR house?
Why is it so familiar then?
My guests seem to have left somehow.
You’ll let me stay though?
Now fog
Where we are
Was
Enforcing pasts clarity
We need time
To see
I take relationships and burn them
for poems.
From dark to darkness
the sought light guides me.
Tonight I sacrifice myself:
Altars of unspoken truths
flame heavenwards.
The corn is not sunlike anymore,
Greying in the rain,
Joyous sad.
There is no need to chase love-
It blossoms in everything.
Just as a physical entity
is resolved by us into
an appearance we define it by
despite it being predominantly
empty space and subatomic particles
which are at best energies,
So too with a word:
on paper, said aloud
or with it’s image inside us.
New green comes
with the fullness of summer,
the accepting leaves thickened
by lush plump rain.
Life is ripe
with wet dogs
dashing grasslands,
as the rain clears
a prism in the mist
and an exhalation.
May
and a shedding of youth.
Every petal now
has decidedly fallen-
a shoal of pink,
imperceptibly shifted
by a slow nodding breeze.
A limp velvet quilt.
New green coming
in the fullness of summer.
Because I had no family
In any meaningful sense,
I had no silence I understood.
Not the silence of omertà
against outsiders and authority
but the silence of within,
the silence of personal shame.
A silence that leaked out
in the actions of co-conspirators,
parents, grans, grandas, aunts and uncles.
It seeped into their cosy knowledge,
until it distanced them to far flung streets
until they had nothing to say, finally.
When they started dying
I tried to talk. Got half answers,
still half-a-silence. Truth was poison.
I have the freedom of the unknown.
I remake them in the truth I choose to give them.
With love.
From capsules of classrooms
we ran, the wind and playtime
sparking the fibres of our nerves
and jackets. Spat out, fizzing blindly,
zigzagging, jumping, blazers
for sails, legfuls of youth.
Fifteen minutes of mayhem
before the clanging bell
died us
back down
When a tree falls
We don’t hear it crash.
If it’s in a forest
It will be held up
By those closest to it.
Propinquity, said Freud
Is the catalyst of treehood.
Shopping at Asda.
Black refuse sacks for the bins,
Carriers for food.
Escaping the News,
Shovelling buckets of grub
Into the trolley.
Family rubbish,
The routine consumption, not
Bodies in a ditch.
Paracetamol.
Big Ape Diary 