In 1891 the rains never came.
Carts jammed the dust-tracks
from Voronezh,
the sky lit electric blue arcs
over rye husks, and
the wind lapped at loaves
of famine bread.

She: she I see; woman standing in a sunset.
As she stands, I am enamoured.
As enamoured as she is glamoured.
Lines of divides of spiderwebs; her hair
framing her picture in a stop-still
fraction of time.
Warm electric fires of blue are her sunset mascara.
Lips so blue
Eyes so blue
Egg stained, passions written and marked.
Where will she go?
Where will you go from here?
Captured.
She: she I see
Mirrored by my attentions,
Lost and jailed by my affections;
Alone.
Hair midnighted, hair darkened:
Fading into blue.

Why is not
the stone of Scotland:

a pillar of Mull basalt
a weathered board of gneiss
the pink of Nevis granite
or crumbled muds of Fife
red vivid Angus heartstone
or whitened Atholl quartz?

Orange Merseland richloam
a lump of Lanark coal,
precious Lowther goldstone
black polished, Reekie’s soul,
or silver-speckled slab hewn
from Cairngorm or Aberdeen?

A Caithness plate of split slate
grey as the eyes of seamen
a rough thrust of Skye gabbro
where torn skin made a free man
the fossil-beach of Jura -
or weathered Orkney sandstone?

Of all these I will sing.

But in the castle’s stone room
can we really hear
the keening stone of Scotland?
This trapped stone pathetic
does it really fool us
and do we even care?

For boys of destiny
still play under Argyll skies -
freedom is a noble thing.
I found myself some bedrock
and - like any braw young chancer -
have proclaimed myself a king.

Jessie is two, she’s scared of me –
my hands to her are ursine paws,
my beard is tangled foliage
wrapped around a stony jaw
and when I smile at her my teeth
seem sharp, my eyes are dark, I try
to offer her my paw. She cries.

This reminds me of a programme
I saw, about circus-people.
One had a bulbous foot-long nose,
one had strange bubbles on his skin,
but the one who the children were
really scared of had claws for hands.
He said to the kids, “I don’t bite”

but still they wouldn’t go near.
Jessie is two, I’m five-foot-ten,
looming over her, a bumbling hulk.
I see her eyes wide open with fear
as I wait for the door to chime
and the ringleader to take me away.

Let us tear the harvest moon in half,
raise our hands and grasp its sharp
edge between thumb and forefinger
whilst it still hangs
fat, and orange as copper,
above the sea.

Let us break it like an old penny
and keep each a half,
stopping this night in mid tick,
where the warm shingle beneath our blanket
shares the memory of the day with us,
and let us be fooled and promise
that one day,
when the blackberries are heavy
we will come here again.

Before; then the stone age, then the bronze age, then the iron age, then the ancients, then the greeks, then the romans, then the dark ages, then the middle ages, then the renaissance, then discovery, then machinery, then now.

An insect man sits with his many eyes looking through rituals of decomposition. Through slits of carven writing, through thumb-nubbed tool handles and the faded devices of dynasties.
The insect Man is a factory, a pick-axe handle, a razor of flint, a plank, an ankh, a camera shutter, a tail-fin. Insect man don�t know no love don�t know no hurt; knows blood and guts and fucks though, squeezed into words and sediment, and long rows of figures under headings in a thousand hands.
Insect Man doesn�t know taste. His room is a cave of threads, his bed is of reeds, the uppers of his shoes are london, soled athens, a tongue of rome, it�s straps are flayed donatello and stippled with arcadia.
Then Insect Man is made of emulsion, his carapace is celluloid glazed with moving pictures and a dark cave wall. His mouth is empty, his teeth are stretched out on a rope many nights long.
Insect Man never woke up to it, he has stared for all your lives with his milky insect eyes that don�t know, that don�t know and he is tired, and he was tired, and he tires of tiring when he is born again. Was tired in the first Fire, the first Gun Shot, the first Sling Shot to The Moon and Back, to the first Dull Edge, the first Sharp One too.
An insect man sits with his many eyes, and he cannot see, he hasn�t got the right, he ain�t got the hang, no manual, no remit, no certificate, no proof of ownership. They�re not his eyes.

Our pigeon visits us daily in our hushed Paradise
He has a tail like a vampires teeth,
A morbid sash of wispy feathers;
Fanned out as he flickers away,
Momentarily distracted from our childsplay.

On returning he whispers something into my ear.
A message from,
A lost love,
Perhaps,
Or a dead relative come to say farewell.
What’s the difference?

Once, as summer showers began to threaten,
He even nibbled your finger.
A token of thanks for the amusement of it all.
He had forgotten,
You see, that
We were of a different kind.

Of his tail my headdress is made.
A blinding shroud, a decorated deafness.
I love him but I did not know.
I asked you to catch him
For me, my love, fluttering in the cage that was your clasped hands.
Your nails on my neck and your breath fanning his frantic feathers across my ear,
Like threads of hair, cobwebs drifting.

On being released
Flustered, he ruffled his quills once or maybe twice
And continued to peck at the shiny thing
That he could not name
But that looked like a cat’s
Yellow
Eye.

We go for each other, the final task
Union always preceding disintegration

Hands slide over hips; and thighs
As I draw you closer, deeper into me
Thick between my toes and heavy against my breasts
I fall wholeheartedly into the feast
Caked in a lifetimes worth of sleek slippery mud, the fusion of our elements,
Twin, bear thy nature, monster from the deep
Penetrating each crevice, bathed in my reciprocation

Soaked and heaving with the effort of disentanglement
I lift my limbs and my crustation of a body from upon yours
Slipping and sliding now, running to the lands of liquid
The tides had anticipated us
Knowing from what deeds we came
it mixed and frothed its depths into a curtain of clouds
A veil awaiting to envelop us and wash one of us away.

I returned to my brothers and sisters
Glistening and snorting they came for me
I clawed and rubbed myself free from your body of dust
Thickly matted hair released itself and reaching out and spreading
Became the silky silver fur of a seal rolling in the spray
I disappeared into my world once more, all tail and flirting whiskers
Eyes of ebony with a melancholy cry I bid her goodbye

She stepped from the waters, shining and pristine
Glad to be rid of me and I of her

All I left was a faint smell of the muddy marshes and salt tides.