Et Finalement

I know it's been more like eight days than a week, but hey! Hope it's been enjoyable. It may be a little while before there's any new material up here, but I'll try and make it sooner rather than later.

Edit: OMIGODOMIGOD I got published by Gloom Cupboard Jesus

Root

Many Sundays ago I was carrying
pot plants from all corners of the house
to the kitchen, covering the sink and each flat surface
till the room was green and the air was thick.

(In a smaller kitchen in the early nineties
my mother measured the fertiliser
in droplets that billowed beneath the surface
in a muddy miniature watering can.

I stood on a stool and tipped the contents
round the roots, recolouring the soil
as water leaked out in dirt-clogged rivulets –
‘That’s enough now, David’)

The ivy creeper from the sill on the landing
had been overlooked in our shiny new home.
As I dropped it beside the compost heap
I wondered how I’d ever figured out
when to stop.

Ciao for niao,
Dave.

As I post this I am watching Mark Wahlberg in the 2008 classic "Max Payne"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

Sky Burial

Hollow broken bones,
meat mixed with barley flour,
yak butter and tea;

vultures take the best of the spoils,
bones are left to ravens and hawks.

On this clear morning
our breath masses in fine clouds
as we remember

the one who offered himself
to the sky. Juniper fires

cleanse the air above
the charnel-ground, a tower
of silence stained

by sunrise. Later, man-sized
wings will carry altered flesh

across the mountains.
Nothing remains but dirty-
white feathers and memory.

Last poem tomorrow!
Dave.

Shh

I am very quietly posting this then getting back under the blanket in front of the tv. Which is turned down. Ruddy absinthe.

Going Home

Sun hit the room through tall windows, painting shadows
in the slender, breezy light of morning, clearer
than your camera for picking your nestled brownness,
throwing mustardseed freckles on your cheeks.

Hair rippled like running water down the alleyways and canals
of places we’d never been. The door stuttered shut
where the carpet lay thick, or the door lay low,
leaving a pile of clothes spilling green from your suitcase.

There were more stairs going down than going up;
I couldn’t recall the frosted windows overlooking back yards
or the bikes locked up on each floor. The Edwardian front door
with the red plastic lock buzzed and shunted onto the street.

The concrete sat ordinary underfoot, the breeze from the sea
wheedling its way under layers of clothes.

Happier tomorrow,
Dave.

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.