FIRE SALE

/trinkets

Contents

The mirrorball like a wall of a million

Breaking TVs, flashing static;

From the Old College, stone-carved rams’

Skulls look down over the road to

Where, in Ciao Roma’s window in

A grey faded photograph

Chris Penn – not as big as he became,

Not as small as he was; now dead –

Covers his face in a smiling expression

Of mock discomfort, walking in

2009

Survivalist

Hold the busy main street

up to your ear

and in the warm transient static

of traffic, chatter & exhaust

You can hear the ocean.

2009

Deus ex Vita

I watched Kurt Cobain:

About a Son last night

And this morning, while

Walking to work for

A company garden party,

A young man passed me

Still drunkenly staggering

In his day’s beginnings

Behind blonde hair past

Shoulder length, past I

In my best shirt and

Jet black jeans with

Mark Arm singing in my ear

“The straight life, baby

Has taken its toll

Confined your mind and

Stolen your soul”

2009

Poetic Motion

1996- on my tv

Living room, channel 4

Liam Gallagher

Walks out onto the epic stage

Before the endless crowd, he

Peels off from the gang

Towards camera, his eyes

Made wide & blank by heavy shades,

Reaches his fingers – hesitant, cautious – up

Towards the lens, the viewers, the world

Curls them in a turn

Flicks a jabbing V

Grins, walks on.

The show

Begins…

2009

Stasis

Dust motes glitter suspended

In still summertime air

2009

Replenishment

On worldwide internet radio playing

From the oblivious radiant screen

The live jazz performance recording tapers off

Drums skitter into the ether

and I see myself

In the glass’s reflection over the darkness

Raise an eyebrow to what comes next

– the DJ’s playing silence live to air? –

And then the applause hisses in

From dropping pins to a full rush

Like forest rain

2010

Installation Art

Above graffiti strung walls On the concrete ceiling Of rusting underpass By the roundabout and definite ‘Lower income’ neighbourhood Thin but unwavering Purple letters spell ‘THE SKY’S THE LIMIT’

Social commentary.

2009

Worm Turns

Flush with dead-end lifeblood

The flesh worm, angry, turns

Upon the hungry earth

And in an act against

Mortality, the warm flesh

Attacks

2009

Ambassador

He drags the switch down

Stares into the blazing orange

Of the thermostat light, feeling

His actions, himself

Pulling a change

Over the world

The angry mob

Don’t even know

Where to look

He spends his days now

Boiling full kettles

And looking for things

To burn

2009

Rift

A small child, with an

Uncorrected cleft palette, stares

With wide brown eyes, up

From a stark, dark-red square

At angles with the white tiling

Of the corporate stairwell floor.

2009

Returns

It’s near silent here In the waning afternoon, apart From the occasional footsteps From the room next door; Japanese horror synopses – the isolation, despairing violence – On the screen as I work through These piles of returns: Round trip battered polythene and Dry sheets of now name only; The same message through a global prism, Italian forms, Korean symbols: ‘Return to sender’ ‘Unknown Town’

‘The addressee has gone away’

2009

The Future

I was saying, ramraiding Is so passé now - Gone the days of grainy CCTV Footage on the breakfast news Of white vans plowing an avalanche Through Dixons shop fronts, grabbing Cardboard boxes – but Yesterday they reported On Princes St., a vehicle smashed Through a shop's windows, in the night Making off with… Handbags

3 handbags. £1200 each.

‘Glamraiding’, anyone?

2009

Who is a Woman Now?

In the tiny, silent, two room Unmanned exhibition, the Paper of a free poster cuts Me between my fingers Before the screenprint named ‘Who is a woman now?’ Flicking the tip Of my tongue between My first two fingers, I taste sweetness

2009

Red Spot

A rose

Petal in the bank

Of dead and fallen

Leaves; A muscle wall

Raw, red

And open 2007

Scavenge

The buzzard on its post stands Watching the motorway, knowing Hope, and knows the danger. Every Doppler zip a glancing possible almost Of ruby-glistening, fresh pulverised Still-warm life, to be pulled Apart, claw & tearing beak In the crisped air above Thrumming tarmac, head cocked For, in a ripping slipstream, split-second Oblivion approaching.

2010

Aneurysm Window

This short-haired, aging

Short, suited man

Face scarlet as an organ

Squat and reckless –

A paunch with legs –

Squashed down into the

Contours of his huge car

Stuck at the lights

Electric razor scrubbing

Furiously over his face;

He stares into the junction

Engine constantly ticking

Over

2009

Cosmopolitan Are you married yet? Pregnant? Do you think you’re hot? Here, smell this Chemical fragrance - it’s nice. ‘My Sexual Dysfunction’; ‘Wolf whistles: Do they make you Angry or make your day?’; ‘How to make a Relationship last’; ‘How long He should last’; ‘The Vibrator Revolution: There’s no male equivalent’ Are you married yet? Pregnant? Do you think you’re hot? Here, smell this Chemical fragrance - it’s nice.

2007

Echoing Boom

In the boom and smeared

Swirls of night city

Wrapping our taxi speeding

Yell-torn streets

As the backdrop

To you

Eyes heavy, hair astray

Expressions enhanced in spread

Streaked make-up shades

Weary, swaying

Doggedly determined

Leader

Deeper through

These small hours

Looking to the back window

I’m watching you

My greatest guilt

2009

Tagged Cocks for democracy! Cocks for equality! Paste up your likeness on A phonebox in Niddrie And in Tipp-Ex Marker or scratches Your genitals will appear Showing it’s known that In the heart of your LA Apartment, at the front of A multimillion dollar campaign Underneath everything, you are still A human being like everyone else And if you were ever to come Around here They could prove it. 2008

In the Forest

The tree trunks cut

Thick and ragged

Endless parallel wakes

Up through the grey

Like inky vapour-trails poured

Over dirty water;

Branches bleeding across like

Cracks in the ice

2007

The Edge, the Wood

At the edge of the wood, from

On the motorway, the stone wall

Looks so slight beneath

The height of the great trees

But even and consistent

It cuts straight

Across the trunk of every one

2008

Iron

Raised into the wind In the gable of a tenement On the top floor, in the window

- the one sunken, yielding point in the brickwork – Above the chip shop Facing out across landscape An iron’s flat, angular Surface reflects a pure Hard light 2009

User Unknown

User unknown

Unknown user

Unrecognised

Recipient unknown.

Unavailable

Address unrouteable

Relaying not permitted

You do not have access.

Unable to relay

Name not recognised

No such user

Relaying denied.

Address rejected

Mailbox full

Mailbox not found

Address invalid.

Could not be reached.

550.

Disabled due to inactivity

User not found

User account is expired

I am on leave until

I am on leave until

I am away on leave until

Permanent error.

2007

Information Age

There’s a lot to be said

For a good sleep

When you need it

2007

Air Pocket

Watching

clouded grey-

blue skies

on tv

in a darkened

room

2009

Somewheres

These bitter bonsai oases of Discarded takeaway plastic Lidless, Indian, Chinese; left In pavement corners, on Back alley thoroughfare walls Holding mildewed caught rain -water; In the small hours The last biomatter converting Food of life; Forming Miniature contained landscapes Embankments, water features The city’s infinitesimal secreted Gardens, nature’s equivalent To those little ornamental Houses in jewellery shops Fashioned in plastic & elements Nature and dirt.

2010

10hr Sleep Dream

A girl, like we went to school with

My friend Gogz, a social situation

Like a bar, she had a friend

And on Dalkeith Road, at the bus stop

By the junction, a boy child drops his shorts

And across the road, another, in childish imitation

Does the same thing, dancing into

The path of a white car, his

Bare behind against the bonnet

Knocking him to all fours; His mother

Running out onto the road, beneath

Her off-white crop top, a caesarean scar

Like a thick & gnarled maroon ribbon

And the girl was also taking some essay of mine

Which came back with pencil marks in the margin; She thought

I portrayed both women and animals as

Demented creatures, but by walking close

I won her over

2009

little excellent love Anyone writing The People Gallery: Making, thinking Just one good night Great full high day Real proof back, made well done Better sex, true art Shot urban, even black Cobain music, like! Call poetry life really Reading still gets beautiful genius Talking modern film new Man-man documentary fun 1st great album since- 2nd curious last; Best days finally Fine today; every, ever, always… Truly things, something 2010

Edu. Nocturne In the college residence Reflected in the black lake The students all sit With their lights on, like strips Of bright squares hanging In the night air, staring Out into the world For the first time

2008

Crossing the Abyss

In this frantic sheen of searing Lights & bilious drink slick Sad painted girls smile sedate Themselves and sell it free While the boys give and give it every -where, trying to fill the world Around this guarded, empty confusion And the desperate clamour of love

2009

In the Machine

This computer tells me

My kisses to you

Should be ‘axe’

2007

Jen’s Story ‘D’you wanna buy a rabbit?’ They held it in one of those Big, plastic jars like you Got in old sweetshops. We were only 13; they only about 10 ‘Why’ve you got it in that?’ ‘Look’ – they shook it side to side ‘HOW MUCH?!’ we screamed. ‘A tenner.’ ‘We don’t have £10.’ ‘Oh well, we’re going to take it home & pour salt in its eyes’ ‘We’ve got 5..?’ The look on my mother’s face. Children are cruel Children are kind 2010

Invasion Victory The supposedly great

Middle Eastern leader

Anti-democratic dictator

Defiant enemy of the West;

Forced into a hole

In the ground, unshaven

Back in his hated hometown

And what was he eating?

Mars bars.

2007

Blood and White Earth

It all seems so far away now Resting on this farm shack bed Hidden away in the silence of the maize The hollow boom of explosions Shredding citizens; Khaki, black shirts The armoured vehicle ram-raid Dead uniformed boys; He had been Policeman, bodyguard, politician The wild card, the threat of Civil war! Race war! Tearing the country apart. But Every time the prison gates opened The crowd was a little smaller A life lived beneath the pinned standard of White

Black and Red

Now grey, claiming God in a prison cell Still yelling for a home On stolen ground, for the tribe Armed, camped in the last century Booming voice with nothing new to say Beating out brain damage Unleashing dogs at gas stations Floored by your risen black horse Bombastic image blowback for The persistent resistance To the present, to progress The immigrant Remnants, the exiled Invader, dictator victim And when you saw those black faces loom, was it What you’d always expected? Not Some great clash of civilisations But the panga coming down Over a child’s disputed wages? Beaten, battered, bludgeoned you Died, bleeding onto the same ground You were born on Where British invented The ‘Concentration camps’. A concerted effort to not let this matter. And what is white earth But ashes 2010

UUMurk Horizon (Stir., 08-09)

milk-air & fog panes

Impressionist evenings

Grey-green

Buckfast bottles + rain

Like walking

microscope science slides of

snowglobed contamination

…Diffraction

Water on the lens.

hill ranges like tears

across old photographs

sheet glass & flimsy metal

brittle-flat, thin-faded architecture

Narrow windows fastened in

w/ pipes & bars & railings

CCTV cameras, floodlights stand

in the empty sky like

Remnant kings of a compound

left to rot

Paint puckers and splits

The river’s burst its banks -

clouds filters

hues shades

fumes rusted

rivets + chipped

concrete

snowed peaks over wide, empty roads

even sky like theatre hung backdrop

Insect leg silhouettes on the horizon;

Red light perpendicular firm before

An empty field of sheep

Thick knotting sworls of

Swollen river semi-

submerge shopping trolley graveyard

Slow, low flying

manatee clouds;

Trains pass through, untouching -

passing piston billboards

Horizons’ jagged ignored

oscilloscope readouts

Fractured geometry / the abbreviated

Parallels of fields -

Thick smears of whitewash light.

Bare trees like brain structure like

Stripped wires raised to sky

The lowslung belch spit

of bus engines; boy racers

circle the centre like frustrated flies

Strata of red gravel

scrap grass

murk horizon

The underpass tells me

who died

who’s a slag

The Lion Rampant flails

slamming against his tether-post.

Intercrossing mud tread tracks

Purpled iridescent petrol impact splashes

over the ground

Lampless lantern hooks stand like

Lazy spines/collapsed dorsal fins

Along the city; moss + weeds

On the rise in the flood

Walls strewn waterstreaked

Striped with damage

Smoke pillars from the mineral wool

Insulation works (‘Thermal & Acoustic’)

Rise & hang vertical

Solid & constant

Lit alight at sunset

Forest under construction

Dead leaves +

Burning skies

Red brick mosaic static;

Locked empty space of

multi storey

car park

Craigs underpass

Walls’ superimpatterned

Flaking overlap

Walls down into the tunnel

Vast abstract Guernica mural

Grey Orange Black

Stone slabs & cracked

fissures

Soot-soaked cenotaph

stairwells; Cubic wall

Solid concrete ziggurats;

Birds stood atop.

Here birthdays fall in

Supermarket carparks.

Strips of concrete light squares hung

To various heights to the sky

Shouts in the night, hoarse bellows

Screamed down empty streets

A night out

Maybe

A fight

The fog

erases

everything

Democracy of the water table.

Rock bottom sink of

Can go no further.

All together equal.

I spit off the Wallace bridge

(Its molar tooth topstones;

Its ‘pedestrian refuge’)

Here, near the root,

Forth, back to you

In our buried world

2009

Cycles & Seasons

ROOM 1 – Desiccation

Room 2 – Nothing much.

room 3 – fading fast / Scratching back

sparks like cuts

ROOM 4 bloodfire EXPLOSION!!

Stabbed and Savage

Room 5: 1969Falling space…

Room 6: .MATHEMONOLITHIC MAUSOLEUM.

room 7 – formless enunciation

drowning; filling

everything; no words

..

[Room9]- Storm a-Come Down

Blow it all off/ Away

Torrential

Room 10. The Incredible Roar of the Wash

Monet’s Waterlillies brought us here.

Incredible.

Room 11 – Towering vast warmth

force and arc

Vicious Hard Blooms.

The bright blossoming of the residue

Concrete wordlessness of absence.

Room Twelve Arterial Spray & Infinite Looping

RED so Bright

They Hurt my eyes

2008

Characters

His scars run over His cheeks like whiskers He can talk loud ‘Coz his mate’s here Doughboy with smoked-out throat Swearing, barking like a dog, in forced air Forcing people off chairs, laughing Passengers solemnly staring at The floor, over their shoulders “I live here, you don’t! Ha ha” He shouts to the tourists And as wee man tries to cram His bottle in the ticket bin Doughboy goes for the scam, claiming He never got the daysaver he paid for The driver knocking him back and Becoming his life’s obstruction Spitting, turning and returning, he threatens His brother-in-law will leave the driver fucked Punching at plastic doors as the bus pulls off And the two of them, beneath All the panel boarded windows Walk into their streets, condemned For urban renewal

2007

Over from Hope Park

Behind its flimsy, black metal screen Beyond the empty litre bottles of Moonshine White Amid the hiss of the constantly passing traffic Round the corner from the children’s park Stands the Meadows’ gents public bathroom. A silent, sordid pocket in the summer’s green Like some Grimm witch’s film set grotto Dirt blown in on a space that could have been For anyone, left to rot beneath Its filthed light fittings; Washed in Municipal green patches like some Abandoned barracks bungalow, its Cramped spaces & dimly lit, slide-bolt doors Covered with screaming, demon-scrawl faces & Desperately smeared sexual solicitations; Raw impulses scratched, carved into the plaster Compulsive moral turpitudes, muttered in the dark Specifying length, sex, ‘aged 6-13’, “No OAPs” “Any price” and like Some ridiculous joke, the soap dispenser Shines in sparkling new stainless steel, oblivious In this dank pit of base iniquity, this Shadiest corner of the park. 2009

That’s because I am

He’s drunk, sure And curiously attired The sharp, charcoal-grey Three-piece loose Shaven head making his Lit face strangely Youthful; theatrical: Eyes wide like an inquisitive Child who really wants to Hear the answer. Occasionally breaking into a broken-toothed jester’s grin; He shouts to others by the bar, head rising, shaking through every drum roll Gives thumbs up to the band When they introduce a song called ‘Thank You All’ raises his pint glass, “That’s alright!” But it’s the quietest song Arms spread, palms out Waltzing with no one, then Elbows on the bar, crisp Shirtsleeves from waistcoat Edges of his hands pressed The length of his face like A prayer; a bittersweet Smile of recognition breaks, as if Someone just told him the sad truth And now it’s that soft, subtle,

separated Point in the night, when these things Can only be met with a nod, a smile And resigned acceptance

2010

It Life is short Life is hard Life is good

2007