Small thoughts on writing/on reading

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..

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Glasgow was a Seaside Town

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.

Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters

A slice of toast,

wet toast, floats

downstream bobbing

into banks.

 

A soggy boat

 

suitable for sticking

into

old men’s gums.

What’s Lost

Tell me about your life,

The untold days

That will incinerate when you go,

Your favourite toy,

How you felt lying awake in the dark.

Tell me about your normal family,

The uncles who never were.

Tell me the unsaid stuff

That will have you live in me-

One little thing that no one else knows,

Because when you die

Only caricature remains.

This is what I asked you.

 

You told me

You loved all existence

As much as you loved me.

Handiwork

I waited decades

for my father’s hands

to take shape in mine.

 

Calcified skin,

yellow tobacco-edged and burn-tinged,

elaborating his age;

 

but I never got the rooted veins,

nor the cold marble threading waxily

up wiry arms,

nor the anchored mum of a tattoo.

 

I got duck-billed fingers,

arms of flabby contentment bathed in mother’s milk.

Sun-frightened skin

fresh as a strawberried nipple.

 

Yet his hands live on

in my head

chiselling away at stubborn but superfluous words.

Solitary Object

Every solitary word has a weight.

 

Centuries of weight.

The heft of now.

 

Times there are

to plough through this

just to get the day done.

 

But the natural gravity, heaving down for each, remains.

It is always there to see, to feel

If you would but acknowledge this.

 

Haul it into the sanctity of

Your hard earned understanding,

Drag it to the fireside of your meaning.

The Parents

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 the fragile truths were dangled, arms length,

And familiar lies embraced.

The Nascent Romance of Dulux Paint Charts

Waltzing with a trolley

down the aisles of Homebase, I find

your eyes, your eyes- page 49,

Jade Cluster and Mossy Moor.

Your lipsticked lips are reproduced

as Sumptuous Plum or Summer Coulis.

Your skin, apparently Sorbet splashed

with Toasted Terracotta freckles.

I struggle to find your hair, though,

there being no classification of blacks

to compare with the infinite range of whites

there seems to be. Jesus, Cornflower

Blueberry, Violet, Jade, Nutmeg,

Apple, Almond, Barley,

because white is obviously a shade of nature.

These guys get paid for this.

Selling the nature of paint.

If only they could see

your firelit body flicker,

give colour to the burn inside,

the freeing of sweatbeads popping,

the Coral Flair would read

Bloodlust Flush or Pinked Desire.

What are the colours

for Wanton Abandon?

Beat(en) Poet

Unhappiness:

hear it fall

like a body in a sack

down

cellar

stairs.

 

Anxiety.

The ang and the buzz of the x

like a cattle prod zinging.

Have you ever played Operation?

That zzzz of failure.

 

Truth.

The only beat possible.

The hangman’s gift.

This beat is forever.

O Moon

O moon

Big moon

stuck, hovering

mushed silently by wintry night

tracing paper

cloud slits the fullness

sidles on,

pale yellowly,

a ghostly cigar spat

from the O of the moon,

the moon as mouth,

O.

O.