revolution now

The Desert It is almost one month since I last wrote. With distance things have become clearer. Every surface feels alive under my bare feet; rough cotton, wet grass, flat rocks with crystals embedded. Mornings are chaotic with birdsong…

The Uses of Poetry Ammar, ten, is thankful for The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams whose two volumes (Carcanet, 2010) kept him warm all last night. They were precious indeed, so cold under the clear sky of the Kurdistan …

Not Since We Began While trying not to get my best boots any wetter and fording a small impromptu stream I watched a leaf, briefly, fully yellow and caught within a rain-river. I remember how you said it wouldn’t rain as I was…

Vote of No Confidence It’s not the manner of your going— be it in an accident no one saw happen, not even the woman driving the car that hit you; or you slipping of your own volition into a lovely hot bath, clutching a large…

Revolution in Progress The lead wings make us fly the tethers the tears in our eyes, shine, bring the bier, the good days are back, the good days  are here comes Stalin, there goes Ho Chi Minh, Ian Dury wouldn’t know the horrible…

Election Night There were lovers once who thought they were alone one night in the Glasgow School of Art. Reckoned that only they could take a palette knife to scrape off their Sfumato surfaces, find each other underneath as blank …

The Voice That Galls To the voice on the radio, Sheltered in your suit And silken in the tie That keeps our wrists in bondage: You say you know our heartfelt headache As we live hand to mouth But ask us not to make a meal of it.…

Questionnaire                                                                     You appear to be screaming. Are you screaming? Why are you screaming? Is that blood? Really, that seems an extreme response. On a scale of one to…

Port Each wind, a face, asking to be carried through the compass points. Magnetic you, ocean to all currents, torn open as a sail. On the exhale, the air finds the room to take stock of everything. If you were to lie down, their …

Vertical Engines fly in layers compulsively stirring the snow inside the billow Clouds sponge up the sun. Before reaching land the long distance traveller evaporates without a trace Seagulls cry in the window. Towering…