Rain Clouds over Edinburgh

 

There is a moment,

just before the beginning,

where the light slides up the walls

to avoid oncoming traffic

and is draped boldly over buildings

until it is one bright, burning canvas

with house fronts sketched loosely on

ready to be washed away

by the incoming ending.

There is a moment,

as the very air breathes slowly in

and the darkness of the sky above

accentuates the bright aliveness below –

and the whole unfurls lily-like

begging for the sky’s caresses.

There is a moment,

just before the world collapses inwards,

on all the corbels, the towers,

the rooftops, the doorways,

the pub fronts, the bus stops,

the cobbles, the church spires,

the gnarled and twisted trees

that lean on the fences of Tron Kirk:

when all the world undresses

and waits for the wash of the rain.

 

 

 

 

Night Walking for Wild Beasts

 

It is the kind of tree-infested black that lives

in the sluggish, silted seabed of your mind.

The footsteps I leave on the dark sink back in

like a palimpsest on the inside of my eyelid.

Ahead, the waterlogged path dives away

shining in the reflections of the moon,

a silver thread waiting for a Theseus to follow.

Not me. I tread on, hoof slipping as if reluctant

to obey orders. Even the lack of noise is black.

The sides of nothing pushing, matting on my fur,

a dense emptiness somehow shrinking to smother you.

Open claustrophobia. I can sense it behind me.

Then, suddenly, a hole in the world,

night retreating to reveal the stars in a puddle.

I gaze at the distance reflected up at me

and feel the weight of the horns on my head.

 

 

 

Back to Pen and Paper

 

Letters, my love, I have longed for your dulcet tones

like a lemming dreams of Dover Cliffs.

How I tingle for your alphabetical arms

around my waist, rising, tightening round my neck;

your soft, sesquipedalian murmurings

have transmogrified me into a placid masochist

injecting injunctions and sniffing sentences.

Your allure and aphorisms

aid my attacks of alliteration addiction.

Ours is not the love of the tabloid journalist,

hacking and bending you to fit his large-print pleasure,

no, nor that of the politician, twisting you cruelly,

or the religious preacher, the primary school teacher,

the early-language learner, the Mills & Boon churner:

they let your fire expire on some bookish back-burner.

They do not feel your glorious anthropomorphic abuse,

your unstoppable, drowning murmurings, that I sense

Like ink in my skin as I sink, poisoned veins of verse.

I smile, willing myself under.

Now, perhaps, I can breathe.