I'll Fly Away

So my flat isn't perfect, but it does have an awesome view of the crags from the living room, and this time of the morning there are dozens of gulls flying around the buildings, screeching away. It's been a while since I've mentioned birds, and I'd hate to think I was becoming lax in my duties.

Crags

And now I am a jackdaw perched
on a rock above the city,
bunnyhopping towards the cliff face.

I hoke at the wet stone,
shake the fine rain from my feathers,

and already the memory of being human
is slipping away in runnels.
The alleys, the highrises, the castle

grow abstract with each
rapid heartbeat. The river meets

the sea and the wind
pushes me softly,
suddenly over the edge and I open

my different mouth and I open
my different arms.

Til tomorrow,
Dave.

Football with the hands

I love American football. I don't care what anyone says, it can be one of the most dramatic games going. Its format practically requires a game to have at least one pivotal moment - 3rd and long, no timeouts remaining, yadayada - while each play (I don't think it a coincidence that such a dramatic game should be made up of individual plays) is rehearsed and refined and deployed with remarkable attention to detail. It's an underrated game on this side of the Atlantic.

Superbowl on the 1st of February. Hold my calls.

Catch

The opening drive goes three-and-out,
the defence – led by the six-four
two-twenty linebacker
in his eighth year out of Syracuse –
mobilises at midfield
as the white-stitched ball is torpedoed
to the punter with the European name
the announcers have yet to fathom
and sent hurtling end over end deep
into the floodlights and falling
snow – inside the twenty, inside the ten –
as mathematics and replays determine
where the next possession begins,
where the quarterback sends
his rookie receiver into single coverage
on an in-and-out route the safety
was only half-watching,
where the spiral of the ball will be
interrupted by gloved hands
and carried, screaming,
into the floodlit
endzone.

See you tomorrow, sports fans,
Dave.

O Tannenbaum

It is lucky term has not started because it is 11am and all I have accomplished is weetabix.

Edit: My blog was two years old yesterday. Happy birthday, blog.

Solstice

We unraveled the fairy lights my sister
left when she moved out
and threaded them carefully
through the needles of our fold-out tree.

I jumped from switch to switch
until the room turned black and grey,
ushering the night through the big french window,

and the lights flashed and for a moment
your face glowed and your eyes were wide
til something blew and then silence.

I knelt by the socket with scotch tape and tried
to secure the shot wires with giftwrap.
Spreading my arms like a priest before
a burnt offering, I prayed against the dark.

Hasta mañana,
Dave.

New Year, New Poems

First, some plugs: I'm an editor for Read This Magazine, a little Edinburgh-based publication for young and emerging writers, and our editor-in-chief Claire Askew runs a cool-as-fuck poetry blog at One Night Stanzas, more than just a witty name.

So! I've been fairly active over the holidays, and as such, over the next week I will upload a brand new, never-before-seen poem EVERY FREAKING DAY. Wowsa!

Today, a poem that is pretty darned straight-forward.

Train to London

The cloudline tears and sunlight spills out in streams.
Stars hide behind the two-way mirror of earth’s atmosphere,
the full-grown ash looking dwarfish as the motion of the train,
the motion of the farmer’s quad bike, throws us in centrifuge,
the vast brown field growing vaster.

A rickety wood-pole-bridge slants
across the bare-bark-reflecting stream. Sheep-trails and fox-trails
that line the woodland are not veins for plasma flocks of cotton,
and I cannot explain what makes the yellow digger such a good shepherd
though I can hazard a guess.

I give you birchwood. I give you the white flowers of hawthorn.
I give you witchhazel and alder with sunlight strobing through their branches.
You give me the fuzz-yellow buzzcut fields, heather like coral,
gaps in stone walls, a scarecrow, faces of cliffs like ellipses, the sea,
the sea,

a bluebell, seagulls following a tractor like seagulls following
a trawler, the soil deep brown, the summerhouse overlooking the water
where hawks hover, haybales like pigs in a blanket,
like an art exhibit, like the wheels of the sun, like morse code, like braille,
like the sign language I never learned,

the elm bare like handstanding roots, pheasant farm
net-roofed, sheughs of water left in train-wake;
horses graze by the river that curves out of sight,
branches reach out through reds, greens, blues,
white

Thanks for reading,
Dave.

What kind of a year has it been

Some things ended in York, some things have started in Edinburgh. I'm thankful that there's more of the second thing than the first. Here's some new stuff, workshopped this week.

Homecoming

These black waves belong to fish
and those spirits whose rumours disturb
our sleep. I lie and imagine myself
among bogland, or watching the rocks
drift into our kenning; but the song
of Oisín flits around in the darkness –
taunting my ears with deep rhythms –
I curse my heart-weakness.
Never again did man see Eden,
and I may never see Achill again.

Memory begins to blur and distort.
The face that sent me to sea
turns to the fatal cast of Moses
still in Moab, Canaan left untouched.
And now I have a book, for my sins,
though I fear that my brothers may forgive
more than Him. I have burned true words,
enraged in my ignorance, and those flames
have enlightened every marvel I’ve seen;
yet I pray in His name I’ll see Achill again.

Tonight I dreamed. I heard
Him call me: Brendan, come home.
No more than a man may measure the ocean
may he see all My wonders in his life.
Come home to the monks of your fatherland.
We have crossed the last time this horizon;
black cliffs rise up and gulls whisper
in the distance. I see the glow of white
blossom, hear singing from the shoreline,
and I know I may never see Achill again.


You! Me! Dancing!

It barely matters
that our morningwatch
of major chords
sweeps away the ghosts
of thorn-woven ruins.
Our smallness remains.

Sun chases grey into black,
houses rise like bruises
from the sickly patchwork
of hesitant string-picks.

Dust rises and towers rise
as starlight forges factories
from the shadows, building
furious momentum
from a frenzy of dischords.

Our dancefloor of nuclear beats
remind me of no earthly
thing more than your eyes
under the flashing blue
and violet light.

Cat’s Eyes

A stray reclined in the garden, beneath
a rare open sky in a gloomy summer
which deepened the glamour of its starbath,
untanning itself in the distant glimmer.

It shot off into the hedgerow, torchlight
hot on its tail. The night’s only variety
was the blue-red blink of a red-eye flight
weaving through Orion en route to the city.

That was all; goodnight to woods.
Reeled indoors by the sluggish hum
of my plasma TV, I felt the certitude
of the right thing done. Up next was some

documentary: On our tiny planet
life was created; if this delicate
balance has just once been repeated, as yet
we don’t know. It seemed something like fate.

Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Sea Legs

Writing poetry is fun partly because of the way it gets round to what it's "really" about. I'm writing about an empty house but I'm talking about say isolation or exile or what have you. So it lends itself well to insular kinda folks. But it also indulges that insularity, which is not only generally intolerable but leads to shitty poems. Poetry is written primarily for other people.
This poem is part of an exchange with the Edinburgh College of Art, and is based (loosely) on the picture above, by Toby Cook.

Sea Legs

Maybe that’s all that there is.
Maybe he runs through the streets
along roads over bridges on railway
lines that fly over sleeping cathedral
towns lit up blue green like swamp
mushrooms tra-la like coral like Christmas tree
lights like the Forth Road Bridge a frame
over night-bound trawlers young man finding
his sea legs tra-la cutting shadows
in the sky far beneath the feet of a man
on the moon-blackened bridge
regarding all that there is.

Thanks,
Dave.

It's you! It's me! And there's dancing!

Check this out first:
You! Me! Dancing! by Los Campesinos

So I wrote a little thing about this music video.

‘You! Me! Dancing!’ by Los Campesinos!

I

It barely matters
that our morningwatch
of echoing major chords
will sweep away the ghosts
of thorn-mingled ruins –

our mutual smallness remains.
Sun glares over the mountains,
houses rise like bruises
from the sickly patchwork
of hesitant string-picks.

How can you understand
the sunrise forging warehouses
from the shadows, building
inevitable momentum
from a frenzy of dischords?

II

Draw back from our disco of nuclear beats –
blasting this sphere to a cosmic glitterball –
which reminds me of no earthly thing
more than your eyes under the flashing blue
and violet light.

Thanks for reading,
Dave.

Welcome to the WORLD of TOMORROW

Soooooo it's been a while since I paid attention to this here thang. Ima put some poems up that I've been working on, hope you enjoy em. Gosh, this whole page needs a little housekeeping. The junk in the right margin... seriously.

This one is a re-worked old one, the title refers to where the poem might be situated. Dreams are weird.

Anywhere but Vienna

The night is alive with drones.
The hum of the streetlight,
the infant cry of a far-off ambulance,
stillness enough to hear blood flow.

If I opened the curtains I might see
the moon pass between clouds
like the last train out of Vienna,
and the courtyard dyed blue-grey.

If I opened the window I might hear
dogs yelp as they doze,
or the murmur of an exchange
in a language I don’t recognise.

But if I sleep I might dream
an off-white room full of saints
praying for distillation from the physical
into one solitary, confident note;

a theatre of bunk-beds,
curtains and moth flight,
and a pebble of dream-stuff
I can hold until morning.

Next one I'm pretty sure has been around here before, but I wanted it a bit more sparse. Less is more.

Anaesthetic

The valve turns and releases graceful
sleep. Daffodils circle the tree
among patches of foxgloves.

Satellites beam through
space, miles above the surface,
shinking the landscape.

The daffodil in my hand
braces to the wind
that once blew over foxgloves.

Names are fun! So is romantic longing. This is a renga, which is a Japanese poem consisting of pairs of stanzas; the first has three lines of 5-7-5 syllables, the second has two 7-syllable lines. The basic idea is to make a poem that can be easily read then just as easily forgotten.

Better Words

Hear the folk song of names,
blood-lines, incantations.
Sound them like a spell.

I hold your name behind my teeth.
I hold your name beneath my tongue.

I call up spirits
far gone in time and geography,
that one afternoon –

shearwater, meadow brown,
cormorant, yellowtail,

stitchwort, iris,
meadowsweet, herb robert,
lily, vetch, foxglove –

for better or worse, time let
them live, like a kiss goodbye.

Ruddy with wind-catching,
we walked through the streets
with grassy knees.

A towel, old shorts, summer sun,
touching my face with loose blades.

Topless in water,
feel the searing embrace
of airlessness,

watching the sun set on the glens,
glowing like you wouldn’t believe;

god, or a thing
for which there is no better
word than god;

the breeze tangling your hair,
fingers tangled in your hair.

Palmful of horse chestnut,
floor glazed in green shells,
smell of muddy shoes,

witch-hazel, valerian,
ragged robin, lady’s bedstraw,

bay window,
the ever-dwindling
list of flowers.

I knew you less than a year.
We never saw winter.

I write about birds a lot. They're weird and fantastic.

Magpie

From a standing position
in the wet-leafed car park,
magpie waits, wings furled, head
tilted left, right, square
to the ground.

On legs of hooped birch
and dirty lizardskin,
its haunches tighten
and release, launching
those few pounds of bird-
flesh, bone and feathers
inches from the concrete
where wind twirls magpie
in somersaulting spirals.

Feet, yards and faster,
magpie wings spread
farther in the blank
winter night –

Yards, furlongs and further
magpie spans the breadth
of the sky, tearing away
its animal sutures –
shards of feather turn
in diffusing whirls
to the scattered light
of the black, glinting
winter sky, all
the stars tangled
in magpie’s wake.

Thanks for reading!
Dave.