A Reply (on seeing “Burn’s” on an A-board and seeking shelter in the unco West End)

O Lord, let this dram slake fitever saint wad save us
Fae the spectre of apostrophe
His sark aw bluidy frae grallochin maist butcher leid
An the grocer’s tae;
Gird oor hooseholds roon wi iron bars, gin his punctual fey kin
Ower Rotary’s bonnie lands stravaig
An thon illiterate horde gleans midnicht’s attraction.
Bar the threshold, Mick!
Oor nips seal ony (sic) paction.

Advertisements

You’ll never get this time back

People wonder how their friends become hooked on time travel. I suppose sometimes you just fall into it.

“Imagine you’re a mouse tunneling between two walls. You can only go forward. That’s it, now hold that feeling.”

Wisdom was not ours, perspective never ours
To cross-section the how and why

We would meet four times a week or more if we weren’t working. I’m not sure if it was a week, or what the number really represented. I was an explorer of concept.

“We’ll need 40CCs of embalming fluid, a first and fifth declension, and a solution injected into the thorax.” That from Graham, the former duke of Saxe-Coburg on another afternoon.

I’ve never given up on the idea we were doing the work of important men. Our methods were unorthodox but the results were staggering.

Irish Crossing

Loupin doon the lobby
Gran’s wa is papert wae
Vast unfussy fractals;

Whaur I chap the dinette door
Wink at the blind black fish
Sea lines her larder wi.

Six poems upon re-entry

The planet

Wisps roll in resignation
across our wide bed
and smoke on sick days
where it always rains

Let Me Sleep

The Time Team lot are out
on single-seater Cessna runs
for two full weeks;
bacon rolls on the village green
the order of the day.

‘spoons

Where an uncertain girl awaits her Tinder date in a place laced with CCTV
And married men go 2-for-1 with workplace flames
In former banking halls across the country;

There’s a misheard influence in talking heads and TV news, muted so the crowd
Can get the full Doppler effect of a rusty-spaver jakey’s bar-side piss
Before he stumbles off, hops-blind —

Saints preserve us from more like us.