a childhood of soft kicks
boots with pillows on
silent treatment and tongue-lashings
a bludgeoning of too much
and not enough
competitive tenderising
black and blue moods
the cathode-ray complicit
truth lies in comedy
friends are funny
he hit you on the head with a brick
back to playing with him tomorrow
Haw maw,
Remember the day in ‘66
when ye caught me
wi Labour bumf
an’ ye went mental.
At me, eight years auld.
Ye’d aye been Conservative
and Unionist, cos
“Toffs know how tae haundle money”
Although giein ye were brought up
By the McGairs, fae Laughgall
Ah suspect the Unionism
wis a bigger hook.
Already at that age Ah’d figured oot
Ah’d rether pit ma faith
in a government ah could get rid ae,
than in toffs ah couldnae
And ma inconsequential Da
quietly ticked the SNP box
saying, if ye supported Clyde in Glesca
ye should try an be consistent.
I long for God,
For myself,
That part of me which is Him.
I see him daily
Nodding to me
As we pass in the street.
We know each other
Intimately and well.
Our Souls kiss in the passing.
He is Everything,
As I am Particular.
He floats to my surface,
Embraces my senses,
Shows me Beyond,
Loves me timelessly.
-—
Oh for skin
taught, loose
held,seen
nuzzled and smelled
imagined, remembered
unfeeling layers of it
the thin boundaries
encasing the slippery innards
of desire
and no bones about it…
afterwards, you,
bedsitting
Weeping from your jelly eye
all the details you could muster
Seep into your filmy cluster
GooGoo eye.
I could have licked those tears
as I do now.
Sleep is the ever-expanding balloon
we stretch the night with,
full to bursting with dreams.
An awakening pop,
and we furiously grasp
at the thinning air
evaporating into consciousness
For that air
is the language of unsayable things
awaiting the clutch of an accepting soul.
Movements laced with my breath.
You claim to be naked.
I watch the veils I made shimmer and kiss:
hot, breezily pulsing.
There is more than one dance happening here-
It’s all skins.
The bright light inhaled. With eyes shut,
the voluptuousness deepens.
On another day I will write
about the ineffable numinous.
Perhaps the truth doesn’t rhyme,
It doesn’t speak the one language.
It doesn’t speak.
You can’t even talk about it
but you can be it.
It has no moving parts
But it is everywhere, in everything
And because and despite it all
It’s a beautiful now.
There is a bain and ewer
in this poem.
Normally they would nestle
in the third line
after the waking, the bringing,
then the pouring
and if this here was in real time
that’s just where they would be,
but
as this is a reimagining,
have been displaced
and came to mind immediately,
all pretensions of normalcy
are gone.
They sit at the head of the page
edging out everything else from the room,
where only the water makes a belated appearance
almost too late
for the image to function.
Old rolling stock creaks, rumbles
through a century of rust,
the industrial belt buckled
under the weight of disuse.
Sidings trundle by, clanking
tiredly.
Hobbling clunks, wheels churn,
brushes on sleepy snares.
My family were the railways.
A marvel crumbling from neglect.
They were retired unneeded after the war.
Welcome home.
The work’s gone.
Little
metal
bells.
Tiny
silver
ringings
Washing thinly waves of air.
Undulant echoes
Which soon will be
Not there.
They then dance
Into memory
If you wish,
And that is how her sentences
Live:
An expert brush
on
Rice paper.
