January

Sky tilted its face to leeward
in the slant of the year ending,
a simple turning away from yesterday
displacing distance, having come this far.

Surfaces

Layered and level, 

landscape waits for sky…

            …to wash the angled trees with wind or light,
            …to wash the upturned leaves.

Pure Invention

Where we live
is pure invention,
the cage in which we pace,
where we dwell, creatures of habit.

24-7

never-ending news 

recycled facts
fabrication

twenty-four

seven

ardnamurchan

a crater rim 

on an ocean’s point
in a circle of land’s dead bones

you or I

you or I
speak of truth

but write only
of ourselves

Songs of Cold

Earth’s spine shivers, remembering snow;
inverted atmospheres press white
on the hollow ground.

I know what’s

it’s not glass but I see thru it
with my minds-eye

birds-eye beady on the screen
looking for what it is I mean
when I say ‘I know’

don’t need rhyme…

don’t need rhyme (not all the time)
and seldom if ever at the end of a line
I don’t use it much but I choose it
at random for words and phrases
to ease the flow, to make it go

year on year

year on year trumpets sound

thin notes echoing
fading notes on dead walls

My mother, in her agile mind…

My mother,
in her agile mind,
nurtured clairvoyance;
her tea- and cake-time séances
her mysticism in the parlours of an afternoon,
were the leaves in upturned cups
foreseeing tomorrow.

week

seven-day’s
wonder

flowing
where once
it ebbed

saturday

being
released
normal service
to be resumed
when the minutes
have gone un-clocked
and the hours without end
sneak past midnight
till dawn is
broken

sunday

a

kirk

spire

against 

blue sky points 

to a heaven of mystery 

more distant than weather 

or the weathercock spinning 

monday

clocks dominate

the grey dawn skyline 

the small hours fade 

tuesday

wake
as appointed

rise up and go
wherever they tell you
it is morning or afternoon

wednesday

mercurial

in its rising 

eloquent until

silence falls 

after all the days before

for all those that now

must follow

thursday

one day 

marking time

as tedious to go back

as go on to the bitter end

where everything 

begins

his work

a hand on a saw
one generation gone
a hand like mine
        on wood
        working the grain

Circling Water

Moving air
breathes tongues of cloud
through heaven’s open mouth;

    and licks the salt waves dry.

Na h’Eileanan Mòra

An ocean floor pushed against heaven,

     broke the surface with its basalt bones

where the wind was from the west,

     and the sunlight poured down…

friday

friday

came and went

the sun unseasonable
the sea reflective
human time
already
begun

Horology

Outside my old room,
humid with dreams, rain fell
warm in the arms of darkness,

drummed its thousand beats.

only roads and rails

and there were only 

roads and rails
a crossroads
beneath a horizon
a dangerous sky
where trees overshadowed
distance
and clouds
in a smoking heaven

Automatic Writing

The automatic poem wrote itself,
its pen, a jumbled board of keys,
a trivial swill of data and, here,
a work of art, soi-disant, appears.

Mine is the Art

Mine is the art of disorderly rhyme
every word broken, begged or borrowed,
every syllable spoken, a token of tomorrow.

activism

won’t take no more
prevarication
time to go for
provocation

Bronzed

I won a war, said one;
I started a war I couldn’t finish, said another,
and we, they said, were cast in bronze…

acrididae

for a moment
change rubbed along
with hunger

Midpoint of Nothing

Stars without conjunction
cross Heaven’s half-world;
only empty space beyond
our orbits and ellipses.

wisdom singing

morning

birds scream joy
at daybreak

shackled and drawn

this is how
fortunes were made
from the fruit of our bones
field and furrow subverted open sky
sweat out of sunlit drudgery

Triggered by Cloud

On fire in a high sky,

sunlight vaguely filtered,

sliding down, attenuated,

my eyes' pointed staring,

my reminder of a face;

My Old Man's War

It was little people
Crossing the channel;
Their Dunkirk spirit
Cut the flannel.

Covid-UK

Covid, livid,
Viruses tire us
The things that ail you
Respiratory failure…

Anthropolypse

Mother Earth,
Oh bother, dearth;
Foiled it, spoiled it,
Death and decay,
No birth today;

planet of humans

one stone too many
in the orbits of heaven

solitary confinement

long days in a walled garden
the sun leaves behind its shadows
and the wind begins to warm
unexpected and so soon

Gowk

Apryle cam an wi' it
thon heidsman, a gowk himself,
that, lang afore the month began,
had proved himsel mair o a gype
than ony gaen afore.

Wonder

Time
slides like a river
largely unannounced except for
the sound of air drawn down to stone
and set free as erosion scours
the river’s bed.

Black Haun an the Weaver

Coin spun the air aroon’t an fell on the blue tattoo.
Black Haun cleek’t his bluebird ower the silver’t nickel.
He bade Chaunce to spik afore the Law steps in
tae spik o gravity, averages, diminishin returns.

then there is mystery

then there is the mystery
of upward-falling rain
how eyes become prisms
bending tomorrow’s light

Mother

Chiming,
the bells ring for necessity,
crying from their hearts:
who’s there, who’s not,
who was, was never.

in times of isolation

in times of isolation hear
lone strings vibrate feel
air on your face remember
the shape of crowds moving

breeze

wind blows from the east
(no longer an ill wind) and the west
discretely coughs behind its hand

I don’t remember shit

I don’t remember, I don’t recall,
I got no memory of anything at all*…

Avenue

Was it sun in the pine trees,
or cypress branches feathered
under snow? or, in the frost,
hemlock needles remembering
lemon-scented spring-time?

Resistance

In the Americas,
never peaceful,
neighbours
in paralysed cities,
dance around each other
and arrive at blows,
words of distance
and dissent;

Smeddum

As if I was ground to dust and my heart still in it,
even with my bones powdered to meal,
my blood dried to a paste and my flesh
in torn strips, dried to pemmican;

I would still drag a smile from this pulled-pork face,
let the half-hearted wind blow my hopeless pieces into piles,
and still feel earthbound energy rise from my grains.

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