lanzarote i.

exhausted by the tyranny of choice,

unable to sleep

four alarmed hours,

panic

then mile-high boredom.

bad pizza is still kinda good,

parched stroll less soo

cacti burrito,

a visage

of the village

in the mirage…

reinforcements parachuting in

petulant torrents of surf,

energía de la patata grande

pumice piss,

curtain of cliffs

and scattered sand

past the chain-gang (squared)

by fag ash straits

of jagged lava,

literal poetry in motion

i’m not much of a photo person. i’m not sure why, as i have total aphantasia which means i cannot see anything in my mind. i can’t just look once at the view and recall it forevermore.

maybe i should. but this disability has meant my internal world has always been dark and wordy. so when i’m on holiday, i like to record the holiday in poetry. this short series describes my cycling holiday with friends in lanzarote last year.

why i support scottish independence but only if i get to be in charge

i long to modernise scotland
to the revue of my imagination
to restrict actors to a single role
depiction in our nation
and making them legally change their name
to the one they portray in fiction
punishable by death
and claiming global jurisdiction
then i will reduce the toothbrushing time
from two minutes to 90 seconds
and thus sanction my cohort
to luxuriate over breakfast
then i will retire to
the camper-van i’ll embezzle
proud of my augmentation of
our cultural endeavour

this won’t make me especially popular but i don’t support scottish independence. i think we live in an age of empires. that sovereignty is meaningless in an era where the usa might invade greenland. i don’t think independence will make the average voter more powerful. we should accept our powerlessness and work towards global government within whatever existing supranational structures available to us.

but if independence does happen, i would like to be president and these are my main policy priorities.

haw yuppie

i shout haw yuppie at a prefect

on a flip phone

citizenship is over,

we are now brand ambassadors

sold off forever,

forever strong and stable

wrap up warm for the gilet years

lasagna al forne and an afternoon of beers

it’s like 10 thousand spoons

when all you need is the bus fare to partick

ah well, we’ll get there in the end

how come nobody says yuppie any more? is it because social mobility was like a once off event that only benefitted a small number of baby boomers?

remember when only poseurs had mobile phones? remember when it used to be very difficult to find a recent enough photo of yourself to use as a profile pic? i was just flicking through my photos there, and they are thin on ground until about 2010. very little record of my many fashion missteps over the years.

all the king’s memes

i despair we are so selfish

in such a self defeating way

meritocracy is not

a real-world thing

it’s a pump and dump town

and there’s new mayor in clown

so double down

to top trump

they say

all the king’s horses

and all the king’s memes

couldn’t repair humpty‘s

defective genes

he pulls fascist faces

and pardons racists

we can only prey

for a ceasefire that sticks

a new leader had been ennobled and he was promising to end wars while at the same time pardoning violent people who were in prison for storming the capitol. a mockery is being made of the rule of law. corruption is open, bragged about. it’s depressing. so turn the news off and write some poetry.

this was a spinal tap

they are taking the piss

a hospital day in boring pain

on my way to the spinal tap

they paywalled tour de france

doffed and donned by a duo

of up-duffed doctors

two days in the hospital

and i’m walking like a train wreck survivor

it was only my neck that hurt yesterday

a new diagnosis,

coital migraines…

i’m done with western medicine, man.

and that was how i met fah.

weirdly, i find myself writing this on 15 december 2025, the day ron reiner, who directed the spinal tap movie, was murdered. and for some reason trump has weighed in. what a miserable world we live in. but it is at least better for containing the great works of ron reiner.

entertainment. it’s there with food and shelter as one of the core essentials of life. even without food and shelter, one will seek entertainment.

this poem however is about some mysterious migraines i’d been having. i actually went to the doctor about my sore neck. i mentioned the headaches and before i knew it i was in hospital undergoing a gruelling litany of tests. on leaving the hospital, i noted that despite my two days in hospital, the neck pain i’d presented at the doctor’s with was if anything, significantly worse.

i complained to my barber, and she recommended a massage therapist called fah. i’m not going to claim she works miracles, but i did go on a cycling holiday to the canary islands like a week later.

archival sleeves

i take a bridge to the opaque sky,

cranes peak above the mist

sanity is no identity

likely to inspire me.

the storm comes,

a lockdown redux

trapped and claustrophobic.

pulling up archival sleeves

although i’m not

the most thoughtful typist

stoic, waiting,

on the fundamental

life changing news

a decade to the day,

again it goes my way

ah friend anxiety,

my quitting finger itches

tomorrow’s loaf will be a belter,

yesterday’s a chinese whisper

my girlfriend got trapped at my flat on the day of a big storm. she left to go home in the morning, but it was so windy she came back. i was just having a normal work day, she was climbing the walls. she baked cookies with chickpea flour. they were pretty nice.

i went through a big archival urge about a year ago. started sorting documents. sketching out timeframes. i think i was preparing to write a memoir. i was worried i was planning on doing myself in. well, its a year later, and i’m glad to say i’m working on a memoir. although, it is not a true story. in the traditional sense.

echolalia

echolalian

echo-location

finds me where?

a lack e acumen;

black pepper and cumin

or is it turmeric?

i use all three for safety and

dod on and dod well,

two is too many bills

moving like a statue,

a foot-soldier,

mystified and amused

das kapital

to cap it all

ex marx the blues

a lot of my poetry comes from echolalia. daft little phrases just get stuck in my head and i want to say them just for the pleasure of the words moving through my mouth.

moving like a statue was a funny thing i heard in a podcast. the speaker meant that they were moved to an emotional response, like they might have on seeing a great work of statuary. but i heard it literally, and my brain said no, statues do not tend to move.

waiting

i wait on a call

and fret on making a call,

feeling powerless, unable

and this is what i mean

when i say i’m strong and stable

wrap up warm for the gilet years

lasagna al forne and an afternoon of beers

it’s like 10 thousand spoons

when all you need is the bus fare to partick

ah well, we’ll get there in the end

i had a job interview. i was waiting for the news. i’d had a couple of disappointments. didn’t want to get my hopes up. but had a good feeling that i dared not develop.

this is the first chorus of part three – which we are calling giletdonism. 2024 had been rocky and i was planning for a somewhat cosier year to follow on.

roll, again

we roll again

through cold thick cream

a runner for four seasons

i believe in

the beauty and

the romance of numbers

fact patterns:

four ones, nine nine nine,

four eights

i can’t help but add

together spectral sums

earlier in the year i wrote of coincidental couples day – we only live in relation to each other. for any two people, whose lives overlap, there will be a day when one is twice the age of the other. i like to celebrate the anniversary of that day with my partner – it was 11.1.1999. four ones and three nines. it was meant to be.

time, again

we feel like time is all we have

when we are under its spell.

but we could abolish it

now,

not tomorrow,

neither yesterday,

in the universal now.

clocks and calendars

are metaphors for our

warped perception of a dimension

that we can not comprehend.

the earth is forever moving in space, such that the events of last week took place literally millions of miles away. are time and space one and the same? does time mean anything at all, on the universal scale? time is relative, even within a single planet there are an infinite permutations of 12 noon. in britain we run with greenwich time as a compromise to keep the trains punctual. but the sun isn’t directly overhead in greenwich while it’s immediately above lerwick.