atlas tugged

earth is comprised of water, mud and metal

so is the human body. 

and as we pump pollutants into the air

we literally incorporate them, 

a singular ticket to where?

i’m in my prime and, 

unlike miss jean brodie, 

atlas tugged

people expand in space to take it all

when i just want to be so small

hitlerism is coming back 

and i’m as depressed as i am scared 

and i’m suddenly not sure, 

is everyone humouring me or not?

i’d just read primo levy’s masterpiece ‘the periodic table’ and was touched greatly by it. the vile inevitability of war, hatred and suffering, coexisting, always, with the fantastic beauty of the cultural world. as the bombs dropped, the poets worked on in the dark.

the culture war will exist forever. because there will always be the poetic and the curious on one side, and the bullies on the other side, who think that poetry is an affront to them, because they dare not try and understand it. and even now, when the bullies are fundamentally in control of america and the internet, they strike against poetry, and call us elitist, when all we are is a disparate mass trying to make sense of the hatred in the world, and imagine something nicer.

the war on wars

veteran of the wars on terrorism

drugs, poverty, intellectualism

now let’s declare war on concepts

and rush into combat 

clench fisted and limp wristed 

the joy of the process is doing it again

g sharp minor has all the black sharps

do you remember the shoe people?

i realise 

i myself am a slow cunt

who thinks it so important 

that the words look nice on the page 

with nice punctuation:

in all the nice places!

you know, we have grown up in a traumatic time. since i was born it’s just been empires collapsing, financial crises, wars and pandemics. the nuclear arsenal rests above the fireplace like chekov’s gun.

i remember once standing at the roundabout on dumbarton road, by the thornwood. with n or m. and talking about the shoe cunts. rather than the shoe people. a pretty weird kids tv program. and we moved from shoe cunts to slow cunts. people for whom time travels at a different rate. meaning they seem slow to observers. in retrospect. clearly we were talking about ourselves.

the minor scale

how could i be complacent 

now that i know

the minor key is 

just a line below…

is there a word 

for the sense of being 

so fundamentally insignificant 

on the scale of the cosmos

but so important 

to those who love you?

if not, can i suggest 

we are all imbued 

with great minifiance; 

as every speck of stardust

lights its own constellation

and is lighted

and it has been an honour to share 

our hour on the rock together 

i was dealing with my mid life crisis at this point by focussing on music lessons. i picked up most of what i know about music by just mucking about. and in my 20s, my music theory knowledge was dross, but i had a good enough ear to write some songs that were good enough to get on the radio every now and then, and to get the opportunity to play lots of gigs around the city.

after i finally gave up on the dream of being a renowned rapper and producer, i pretty much forgot it all and concentrated on learning about debits and credits, and on writing prose.

anyway, i’m still pretty crap at music but it is very satisfying to be able to perform a few songs on my melodica and i know my scales now.

christas traditions

a message from a fond reunion, 

hidden in a bottle

overdrafting on my sidling savings

a big bright banging badhead 

brings a boozeless bath

often when alone i think, 

“this is exactly what an insane person would do”

and that means i am sane

i feel the agony of love 

and recall that the future never happens

consequential couples day was covered in stanza 5 of the love epochal, published may 2025. i will quote as it explains it quite nicely:

every coincidental couple share or will share a day

(assuming all live lives that lap over and aside)

when one is either twice or half as old as their partner.

we only live in relation to each other:

brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children we are all 

anyway, the day that my love and i share is 11/1/1999. 1111 999. it’s a message from the universe. i don’t believe in soulmates. but some people do make a lot of sense for each other.

and the future does never happen: it appears that we are eternally doomed to live now, in the present.

hate don’t beg

do we believe in the power of love 

to conquer all?

hate doesn’t beg patience 

and demand generosity 

maybe i’d have preferred life in an asylum

in my bedtime mind pops 

my first foreign trip without my parents

there i am, eleven, 

living in a world i don’t want to live in 

still here, alexithymic through fear

decoding signations from the incarcerated adjuster

interpreted via reddit memes

between being diagnosed with a terminal illness, then undiagnosed, then diagnosed with autism, i spent a lot of time with therapists from age 38 onwards. i was first diagnosed with depression as a teenager. i remember waiting ages for a referral to therapy. finally getting there, jittering, a nervous sweaty wreck of self-harming, substance abusing, poetic teenager. i just sort of wanted to unload on someone about this one time, when i was eleven, that i was bullied relentlessly while on a trip to austria without my parents. the trauma of which i had just buried as deep as i could, before trying, flailing, desperately, to make myself an entirely new social circle at high school. and i’d since left high school and found myself in a similar predicament (although this only occurred to me 20 years later.)

that’s not really the sort of thing we do here, the therapist told me. i felt utterly humiliated.

inconclusive, in conclusion

anyway, that was yesterday, 

with that we close the chapter

for now the winter sun flits 

over scarecrows, toclips and frosty nips

and it all begins to feel conclusive 

but then the things as usual 

start to get ambiguous

and once again of the good souls 

we must ask forgiveness 

my on and off girlfriend and i were finally turning the dial fully to off. we were taking active steps to move on. it seemed like that was what we were going to do. i decided i would focus more on my housework and compiling my personal archive. play more melodica. but as usual. the temptation to check in arose. on both sides. and we weren’t sure of our relationship again.

rage

@poet’s corner 25 nov 25

sometimes in poetry, the words really tell you everything and it doesn’t get any deeper.

prick threw an egg through

flashback to the day 

apple watch ultra two was launched

launched like the egg 

some rocket threw through my open window 

thanks for that. prick. i

’m going to clean that up one day

or paint over it.

—-

i had a mid life crisis a few years ago. caused largely by interactions with the medical industrial complex. lockdown was tapering off, and so was i.

i inexplicably lost a bunch of weight for no particular reason. i’ve been fit and active for most of my life, but i am prone to beer and sweets and my figure always reflected that. but suddenly i just couldn’t maintain my weight. i

t was a bit scary at first but by the time i wrote this i figured, lean in, just eat sweeties whenever i want.

the tempo of doms

to the sweetie shop why stop there’s no consequence 

i run and i come as close as i’ve came since whence,

rage rover through the stroll pastoral 

cape town to mugdock bog, 

wide spectrum gossip, conspiratorial 

prone to panic about other’s perceptions

a tendency revealed through a habit of projection 

concept album? i am living a concept life

into the tempo of doms i go, abandon strife

the internal rhyme rolls the rhythm, through indecision to precision

yes i am getting organised, on a mission

to rise up contra to mindless repetition

yet once again i combine olive oil chilli and paprika in the kitchen

—–

when you find out you are  autistic, there is a tendency to temporarily get more autistic. i have actually only had a few meltdowns. i am a quiet person. i am prone to shutdowns. i don’t like to draw attention to myself.

the few meltdowns i have had have tended to get me in serious trouble. like, hospitalised, or mortified.

on this occasion, i merely smashed a phone that was already quite scratched up and to be honest i probably wanted an excuse to buy a new one.

anyway, i had a hot bath to get over it, and when i got out, the plug was stuck in the bath. i had to empty the bath one bucket at a time into the loo.

plug stuck

am overwhelming day, 

a meltdown throws my phone away

the bath is full of soapy water, 

the plug stuck in its circlet

it’s thursday the 12th, 

what the fuck will tomorrow bring?

i start the drill and it’s enough 

to scare the plug from its crown 

——

recently,. i was a victim of attempted violence. a guy tried to knock me down twice, one of the times actually on the cycle path on victoria road. i had the guys licence plate.  

I had to decide if should i report the crime, and myself propagate violence (via the criminal justice system) on my assailant? 

i know victims of the police, i know that the punishment is often worse than the crime. i thought it over for a couple of days and my yearning for revenge declined quite dramatically. no doubt the same man will one day kill me and i will rue this.

choruses three and nine

have you tried the toblerone, pleasant child?

i have a theory my anti car philosophy i

s not strictly environmental 

but because i was in two major car crashes 

before i was 10

different, but the same

brazen child, pray share y

our toblerone with me

i know you pinched it but i’m no a grass

i have a theory 

that the criminal law system 

propagates violence in place of justice

different but the same

lonely consequence

maybe we can choose 

our consequences

and gain energy as the 

days accumulate 

have i mentioned my inability to visualise the future?

scared, listless, 

unreadily forced to bear witness

a dusken golden moment lighted

a sudden recognition; 

that leaden feeling 

when they tell you are going to die

is loneliness, 

as much of it as you can have.

i was once diagnosed with a terminal illness. that was the start of my midlife crisis. i was then completely undiagnosed on my 39th birthday. a misread x-ray was all it was. so why don’t i feel any better?

i remember the days after diagnosis. feeling so heavy. feeling like i could forget to breathe. it was only later than i realised that this was the loneliness of the universal truth that we die alone: it is the end of the internal world, the one we can only try and share through metaphor and simile. 

endless time

how would you feel 

if everything happened forever 

if every moment of your life was still ongoing 

everything always in total contradiction 

i want the unexpected

off script, dumbfound me

astonish me quick 

with your attention to retail 

when they finish the history books we’ll see

we just have to just accept the past

it happened

i think about time a lot, the hopeless impossibility of the past, its unchanging nature, its doubtful nature. do facts remain or do they change over time? i worry that the despots of the past, henry 8, pope urban, alexander the great, ghengis khan become sanitised by history. i dread a work 1000 years hence on which the crimes of fascism are forgotten or decontextualised and hitler is remembered as some great socialist leader. perhaps in an eerie, whitewashed slave globe. 

it’s important to remember that the rich and powerful are only in it for themselves. the pharos put their slaves to death. the romans were a plunder economy. social democracy is not normal and if we want it we always have to fight for it.

love me like a holocaust

influenced by scottish ned culture

a natty factagonal 

revolutionary rear guard

my interest is piqued,

love me like a holocaust 

quirkful monogamy 

unpromised and distant 

transient specs

in the universal scheme

sonic balance 

tripping me

who was influenced by scottish bed culture? pretty sure i read it on wikipedia. maybe it was gerry cinnamon. love me like a holocaust is a maniac reference. it was a difficult time. my mid life crisis was unwinding and i had sought refuge in the angsty left wing rock n roll of my teenaged years.