Poetic Offshoots from the Scottish Jungle
Are the molecules wet
(The water that binds us swimmers
As we turn mid-liquid,
Carving ourselves futures,
Pressurising others paths)?
At the death of the swim
Droplets slough off
As we haul, bend our elbows
Allowing gulps of survival.
Fluidity of hope, dousing
Arid realities.
A merciless Sun
Simultaneously nourishes
And incinerates.
Life can be a video call
In which
I absent myself,
Shout witticisms off-screen,
Let the participants know
I’m there, alive,
But refuse to be the main protagonist
And hope each growl, each reedy peep
Will be enough
To let everyone feel
I love them;
But in a poem
I can shoot my cowardices down
With the gun pointing backwards on my shoulder
Whilst I look in the mirror.
Snow suggests itself-
a whisper coming down-
time stops for the journey.
There is patience
in the prayers of the gods.
This moment of falling
in soft song.
A pianola scroll of
white/greyer/blurred dots.
The land of cradles
for a billion pendula.
and there she is…
Pale fire pink,
but where chill has nipped and bit,
cheeks red as a well-skelped arse.
Vibrato.
Not the heart.
Not the fluttering lungs.
Not the ambulances in our arteries.
Not the blue sludge in veins.
Neither the Farads running to ground
Nor the factories of piss.
Not the inexorable rot of death
Or it’s playground slide to feigned entropy,
But that stuck pin of the lepidopterist’s Now.
The hum and flux of being.
Stasis moves in mysterious ways.
Stillness, a chimera.
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.
She was all the rage.
I knew when we met
she was my hidden rage.
She told me.
I had to wait for a year to watch it unfold.
I didn’t know how to argue, being an only child
of noninterventionist parents. So
when she exploded I’d walk
out of the door and almost immediately
start calculating how long of an absence
would make it “look good”.
My silence
Infuriated her, so I learned to use it,
triumphantly.
But over time I learned
the dance of anger,
learned how to
dig to the gut
with stilletoed words,
fillet the righteousness out of her,
pick the scabs off
of buried pasts
and have those sores run
and slough us into the morrow.
It’s a lazy day.
I’ve been making a meaning.
Not actively, not hewing or constructing one.
But in the reverie of moments, sifting,
seeking discoveries in the relative simplicities
of commonplace words and things.
I float in and through liminal space.
Wander, wonder.
A deep sea diver familiarising himself
with watery discoveries.
I float.
I circle and return, and peer again.
I watch how sentences sit on the seabed
of the everyday. Then how they shimmer
and shift in the liquid glow of attempts at understanding.
I sense how things are and despair of communicating this.
The lazy days, the days when nothing comes are hard work.
As I drown
the escaping bubbles
belch a new language.
The pond sizzled
as cold rain slats drizzled
down from the heavens.
It metamorphosed
from mirror to cheese grater,
and as the wind whistled
today into tomorrow
winter sliced our soft bones.
We were fair drookit
as wetness clung
and dampness seeped into
our accepting souls,
the Higgs-Bison seeds
of small Scottish rain though
imperceptibly sunk our spirits.
Our wetness melded,
not knowing where we stopped
and the weather began.
We moved the clock
After five years.
So we now look at
A little red oil painting
For the time,
Then swivel our necks
And shoot our eyes
Up to where it sits now.
It sometimes reminds me
Of the shock,
Being unfamiliar with girls anatomy,
That vaginas weren’t sat
Like perpendicular slots
But craftily tucked somewhere below.
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In pea-soup sixties city fog,
when solidity got lost and sunk
back into murky walls of mist
and the soot-grey, black-smoked halls
of nineteenth century brick lurked id-like
behind a milky snot-green sea,
us kids could make new lives
and conjure light,
for now we were all sky and pointless,
and I could be countrified,
as a weather-vane
creaked from nowhere.
That random eek would
scratch a comfort deep,
an old-time longing
between my shoulder-blades,
and soothe
the addled want
of bright mornings elsewhere;
the swamping
of cement and city
by fog, fomenting
freedom of imagination.
