Initiation

Mark his skin tae show the warld in paint.

Blindfold him tae tak the warld awa.

Dress him in rags aw caked wi tar and glaur

syne slap his face; remind him he's no saint.

 

Send him oot tae sleep oan freezing fells,

grund hard wi frost, till senseless wi the cauld,

he'll see the Deil, haudin oot his haund

and, raving, ken that beauty leads tae hell

"whaur you and I tonight maun gae." Sae noo 

he'll see aneath the sangs tae perfit truth:

the darkling dance ahint corn, meat and mou.

Syne thocht unthocht, this sacrifice of youth

 

fae whit it is: a blude initiation

stacking as it does new peats 

fae new incineration.

 

Starlight Stroll

 

Starlight : stroll - go heat

the midnight : themed, nag hot

fat embers from : fit umbrous form

in hellfire's lit : no hale fiere's lot.

 

Watercolour of Hills

 

A watered palette: Eildons splayed

nether on canvas under stars.

North-South, Mid-Hill, a woman's body rayed

allegory-like, her curves as a guitar's. 

 

The colours now: cair red, brae black, burn blue.

A freakish foreground twist of frazzled green

completes the composition and ensures

the eye's drawn in, appreciates the scene.

Three maddened trees, three hills a final clue:

look past the paint's incarcerated glaur

and plumb a golden mean.

 

A West End Boyhood

 

A West End boyhood - paintings, sweets and songs,

sung school of a city known to me by then

in vague perceptions, sandstone flats and long

Botanic days in sight of drinking men

mythologised by drunken eulogies:

Maclean, MacDiarmid, Wallace, Thomas Muir,

the bloody rivets reft in Connolly.

All symbols of red Scotland's scunnered stour

to which I have no claim except a youth

amongst the wreckage of their poetry.

I sing: an English mooth.

  

Meaning Matters

 

Meaning matters - take a golden mask.

Look behind it - see it masks a corpse

and not a hero. Then forget this bit

and read your Homer, mindless of the task

Mycenae set to men who worked in gold:

hide the slavery, make the children sing.

Blind yourself to everything but this:

Dead Agamemnon in his golden folds.

 

Meaning matters - take sarcophagus.

Cut beneath the lid and eat its flesh

like it eats yours. Or take the syrphidae

and watch the meaning of that word arrest

four fluttering wings (inside the insect: pus).

But on the surface, flickering: hoverfly.

 

Saining

 

Pass the fir branch three times roun ma heid,

ma fiere, until I braithe, a makar sained

an haly as agnostic people are:

revivin sinnens, kythin oot a wame.

 

Shaw me rainbows, jo, aircs speldrin owre the sea,

lit pleuchin swaws lik blades wad pleuch a field

an scaitert indigo seeds spreid owre blae.

Gie me the tools tae work, tae mak or yield

 

tae whit I will: leaf slockent nettle tea,

the dryness i the face frae kennin lowe

as leal lowe nocht the anaesthetic dree

electric licht casts. Grasp the silver bough

wi me, ma freen, an we sall vaig faur ben

 

intil it's hairt - vieve haly - clean again.