My father like Leviathan

In different dreams,
my father visits me in the house I live in now;
wearing his dead-man’s shoes, he comes like Leviathan,
bigger than my memory of him, to meet me in imagined rooms.

when it is dark

In the sidelines standing

In the sidelines standing, I am the ragged-arsed man,
who watches the world go by.

Oh Ange

Oh Ange, tu m’attend
en arriére des pages fermées
de ta magazine.

civilization

planet’s bones

blood dawn

Jacob’s ladder

denomination

I am pigmented by

I, who am weightless

Dreamt of water

Illusory

Jupiter and all his moons

Watersheds of the Afternoon

When time runs
in the watersheds of the afternoon
like water drops down a window pane,
light is changed, sinking slowly,
sliding downhill to evening.

Rinnin in watter

I see masel fae in aneth,
in a swite or in a dwam,
rinnin in watter.

Abeen, the clowds hap themsels
an whisper; in dags they weave roon
coupit trees that spik only the claik o wid.

Long Live…

Wi respec,
I’ll jist wear my breeks hauf-mastit
an shaw ma spinnle shanks for dule,
noo Leezie’s awa.

Identity Parade

Street by street, the city’s shivered breath whispers
of blood-letting.

Fading and falling

Out at the edge of shadow,

the universe’s shaped charge
unwinds.

Thirteenth Year

In my thirteenth year
I did not sing
on the school bus.

Dwinin

Sherp, deid gless glents oot o orra grun.
Midden-weeds that heeze aginst the rubble
grow in the shape o aabody’s pain.
Here, wi broken doors that nae human haun
can open, naebody wull tak the trouble
tae walk gled-hairtit on these steens again.

Garden Birds

A great spotted woodpecker hangs on the bark
of a birch tree and hammers till its dark;
siskins on rowan twigs quiver with desire,
coal tits fall on fat balls hung on garden wire.

a first storm

wind beneath the door
its linoleum rattle
like a dying bird
on the lobby stairs

All the work was numbered

As the work was numbered;

so was it set down.

…factotum omnium artium magister nullius…

Lies

Yesterday, liars spoke,
and we believed what we believed.

The Ballad of Dave and Mae – Part Two

Now Dave wears his shirt undone
Manhood sprouts from deep inside.
He holds Mae, his beloved one,
The woman who will one day be his bride.

The Ballad of Dave and Mae

And now Eden
Is a worn town east of the hills.

darkness in the telling

whose munition

whose rain from the death of a sky
drowned the last ditches of home

The Tomorrow House

In the tomorrow house,
a roof of light,
doors and hallways
empty rooms…

Who knew?

Westerly

Easterly

Southerly

Northerly

Directions

Blown

behind a morning

behind a morning
sun risen to refraction
heaven obscured by light

Second Decade

Mare Marginis

Was that not it? In our formative years,
Hardly begun when the old men settled
Into wistful jingo (having never had it so good),
Time wove its spell on them, drew its veil,
Washed us all in their cold water tomorrows.

Woodsman

I made my path following rutted traces
worn by feet neither mine nor yours
through blown and bending grasses.

Hospital windows

Hospital windows
reflect an iridescent sky
as colour turns to darkness.

pale shoots now growing

Tree

A tree I remembered, once tall,
with a limb severed by frost
and felled by a sudden wind,

saw change in the woodlands,
creep among the shadows,
and rise in the dawn like the sky.

The tree and its wound stands yet
with its broken branch beside it,
like a post, upright in the heather.

© BH, 2022

---

A vignette. A fragment. A couple of days in hospital with a cheap pen and borrowed paper. I was channeling something naturalistic - as you do six floors up in a side-ward, on meds and waiting…

In my April and come-what-May

In my April and come-what-May or some June
when the horizon remains as broken as the sky
and we, if we are spared, look down like drones
on the lies that spy-planes made of our living days
then I will continue to ask why, in this time of times,
was it human to turn on ourselves like this, to turn
on the soil and the trees, to throw dust and debris
on the earth as if nothing mattered but our pride?

© BH, 2022

---

A fragment from another poem (unpublished) - The Long Road to November. As if armistice would be the first step to healing this crock of a world and it's wars over stuff and hubris. Yet again we are showing how capable we are at accepting division and hardship, destruction and death, in the name of human-centred ideals. But we bicker and deny the cataclysm we've set in motion across the planet. There the hardship is too great, the division not to be sought and death, no more than the unfortunate collateral of protecting the way things are now.

For all those (leaders, mostly) who have an eye on history and their place on the pinnacles of it, I have a reminder. If we are too proud to undo the things we have done to damage the world we live in, then we have no history worth the name. We deserve to burn ourselves out and fade out in the face of environmental ruin. No-one is going to look at your legacy and do anything but despair. 

Rain falls blind

Rain falls blind on ground already wet;
weeping drops scatter, sightless,
among the soil-grains.

chiaroscuro

thrown

histories of the living
on a pyre where
everything burns

vallum

juncture

Omicron 2022

Hogmanay cam an went
wi the usual bells an fustles
TV music gied laldy tae the win,
an a puckle bodies louped
an skirled wi computer faces
lookin on ower the wire.

It wis naethin forbye.