The disintegrating pigeons line the street
Expiring, flesh mile markers
Tracking the progress of a journey
From here to there
From life to death
A daily reminder of mortality

They lie lifeless, strewn
Innards exposed, rusted by the air
Wings torn asunder
Beautiful feathers wilting, now
No longer connected to soul
Just spare, useless matter

Sweep them away, sweep them away
Dear god, just sweep them away

Everyday I pass, monitoring
Charting the fall
Them
Me
My route fixed, my destination known
Their resting place unmoving, not chosen
I rot and decay, day after day
In sympathy and in solidarity

The disintegrating pigeons
Take their place beside mittens;
Two of, white
To fit the smallest baby
Delicate things, abandoned
They litter the pavement with unanswered questions
Things we might not want to know

Sweep them away, sweep them away
Dear god, just sweep them away

And now the single wing has worn away to fragile bones
Stood on by commuters, who don’t know
Or don’t care
Traipsing clumsily on the remnants of existence
While our cells wither with the passing hours

One day we will lay in the ground
Or on the pavement
We will be stark, hollow shells
Drained of memory and devoid of life
And the pigeons will -
Without second thought -
Step on our sacred remains

Sweep them away, sweep them away
Dear god, just sweep them away

Early this year I was asked to contribute some poems to a screenplay for an upcoming feature entitled Mother. This is a non complete list of poems written for the project. I had intended to write about the evolution that occurred throughout the collaboration but I feel the poems can pretty much tell the story themselves.

*

I clung to you; your meagre, scant frame
Jutting shoulders from which loose cloth hung, I clung
Our futures entwined amongst the ecstasies of youth
We drank in the heady passion that was us,
Until our minds reeled
Our fragile elixir spoiled
Still I clung to you; as your gaunt cheeks filled
Your stomach ballooned with retained regret
But still I clung

*

Civilizations would fall before we did
So inconceivable was it that we should ever part
Every beautiful phrase you uttered
Destined to race around my head, before gently
Resting in my heart

Clandestine kisses, stolen
With abandon, our lives overlapped
We lost the days as we lay together
In perfect unison
Our bodies we explored and mapped

Something of such purity
This world must deny and reject
The inevitability of the end
Rendered it pointless to object

*

Only with the cruel tint of hindsight can I truly comprehend
The stark, aching rarity of the love God sometimes sends
I was offered the chance to live in the hazy afterglow of passion
Without knowledge of life’s gradients and stringent rations
But I took our love for granted, allowed it to erode
Without a slither of understanding, of the blessing fate had bestowed
I smothered the embers of our tryst, starved it of air
Euthanized our future happiness without worry and without care

*

I beseech you to dream, this life is yours to own
Suffer not my lavish folly, to shoulder such weight alone
Though I selfishly leave you stranded, in the crudest of terms
I pray that life’s cruelty is not a lesson often learned
I dream that you’ll have all the things that I could never keep
May the fleeting glow of contentment be a crop you always reap
I hope you can mine this life, for the diamonds in the dirt
And immerse yourself in the memory, of my love and not my hurt

*

Our best days are behind us now
Jealous, gnawing things
I lacked the strength, the foresight
To oppose your inherit traits
I coldly accepted fate’s course, capitulated
Refused to take up arms
Now I rue my weakness
My naivety, to let love go
And my arrogance to think
That it could ever come again

*

I can no longer pretend, my dearest Marie
The future is no place for a casualty like me
Furnish your time with all the pleasures of this earth
And nourish your soul in this mortal berth
I dream that you’ll have all the things that I could never keep
May the fleeting glow of contentment be a crop you always reap
I hope you can mine this life, for the diamonds in the dirt
And immerse yourself in the memory, of my love and not my hurt

*

The past remains a foreign country
Distant and remote
Fate conspired and I raised no objection
Not one, no intervention
I accepted the cruel barbs of your nature
And failed to object
Stung
With myriad thorns of regret

I died, I was resurrected
I came back
To walk the holy streets of Possilpark
I left my father’s right hand
My own personal seat
To spread the word from a bedsit on Saracen Street

But I’ve had nothing but hassle
Since I returned to this mortal realm
In the age of the iphone
My miracles seem to underwhelm
I walked on water
Right across the Clyde
I multiplied the battered fish and the Mother’s Pride

But still…
Nothing

Just gormless neds and brainless quips
Like nails to my hands straight from their lips
Abusing my “stupid beard”
My “manky sandals”
They don’t care that I hug the hookers
I love the vandals
“Whit’s wae the get-up, you some kinda muslim?”
Mate, I’m the son of God
Do you know who’s balls your bursting?

I’m trying my best here, I really am
I read aloud from the 21st psalm
To a 14 year old pushing a pram
And all she said was:
“Whit the fuck’s a shepherd?”

So I appear here today
So you may state your case
For the continuing existence of the human race
After the wanton destruction and neglect of this place
And all you can ask for is forgiveness

Well, I forgive every sin
Except your Kappa trackie
And that time you called the shopkeeper a packie
And that boy you left with the gaping chibmark
Pissing blood by the side of the swingpark

No more
I’m going back to my roots
Old testament shit:
Plagues, smiting, fiery pits
Unless of course you can just admit -

That you all still need me

It had been a week of unknown ceilings, and yours was the last.

I woke up disorientated, dehydrated and dishevelled. I slowly familiarised myself with my surroundings. The sun streaked the walls with amber rectangles through your blinds. I had been here before – but never in this light. My hungover head raged in neglect as I became aware of the shit sitting obtrusively in my bowels.

That’s when I noticed you lying beside me in bed – angelic and unaware. Framed in soft focus.

Your toes peeked delicately from under the sheets. As I sat up the slipping duvet exposed welcoming curves before unseen. A frantic grope of my person confirmed it. We lay here naked and exposed.

I sat in silence, reticent to move lest I should disturb the mound of contentment sleeping soundly beside me. I struggled and failed to recount the details of the previous night. I tracked down leads in my mind only to have them evaporate just as they were about to yield the intricacies of yesterday’s debauchery. The room stank of cheap wine, and with this I was at least reminded of the night’s origins – the money saving carry-out consumed before even breaching the threshold of your flat – the first solid account of my actions.

I looked down at you with a wondrous fear, the excitement of undiscovered secrets offset by my faltering memory. I took this silent opportunity to appreciate the velvet curves of your body, unaware to what extent they had been appreciated the night before. Your symmetrical dips and soft bends mapped a country unexplored, or worse still, conquered but untamed. A frontier of beauty that I could never colonize – wild and unknowable.

Panic set in and permeated my being - if I could forget a night of passion spent with such a beautiful creature then what else was my brain omitting? All sorts of criminal liability crossed my mind as I started to sift through the contents of a night lost. Then suddenly…

You stirred softly and regarded me with the same hazy confusion as I had your entire room. You turned over, either in incomprehension or disgust - or perhaps to wake from this surreal dream.

When you rolled back over our eyes met again, this time in shared concern of the situation. “Good morning” I whispered, and ventured a kiss, a sign of affection and of trust, a symbol that my regret over my lack of memory didn’t extend to our forgotten tryst. The kiss was accepted reluctantly, with a lazy turn of the head so that I might meet your cheek with minimal contact. I became immediately and acutely aware that you either had a far more specific memory of our rendezvous or the thought of such an encounter was not one on which you wished to dwell.

The shit had hardened in my stomach, weighing me down and bloating my belly. I tried to pull in my gut. I regarded myself in the mirror, a crumpled mess that in no way resembled the groomed individual who had set off the night previous.

“Some night last night eh?”. You agreed. “Did we…?”. Again you nodded in the affirmative. At which point my nostrils were piqued by another strong scent. This one seemingly artificial in nature, industrial but saccharine - streaked with strawberries.

I noticed the lube on the bedside table and it’s sickly odour afforded my brain it’s first proper flashback of the previous night’s events.

Disappointment.

Sex with someone for the first time usually falls squarely into the disappointing bracket but you can at least hope that it was enjoyed enough that another occasion may be sought to remedy the disappointment. In this case it was already certain that the chance had expired.

And I cursed the booze. The booze that made me charming and witty. The booze that allowed me to be confident and brash. The booze that allowed me to be loose with my tongue and my wallet. But most of all the booze that gave me the opportunity but not the means to exploit it.

You offered breakfast as a gesture of peace and, most likely, of pity. I declined as the knots of regret had conspired with the shit currently blocking up my stomach to leave me in pain.

Something was still missing, not only from my memory but from the mise-en-scene of the room itself. In my experience of such instances the room is often strewn with clothes, underwear and other paraphernalia. Where was the condom wrapper? “We did use a condom at least?” I meekly enquired. This time I was met by a muted shake of the head.

The revelation triggered a flashback of clothes clumsily pulled and grabbed to the side, allowing just enough space for fingers and hands to explore down tops and down tights. However, so manic was our lust that we refused to wait until we were under the safety of your roof. The cyclists that interrupted us pretended ignorance but we laughed at what they might have witnessed. Pasty Scottish bodies illuminated by the lights bouncing off the Clyde’s dulled waters. Pallid canvases for a multitude of neon reflections.

You starkly announced that you were going to the chemist to get the morning after pill. My offer to accompany you was met by a weak rebuke from which I took my cue and insisted on joining you. We dressed in silence – you in casual fashion while I scavenged and wore last night’s crumpled rags.

As we traipsed along the street your resolve started to weaken, you began to chat with impunity, to open up about the shame of claiming this particular pill and the the embarrassment it had brought you on previous occasions. You finally relaxed enough to gather my hand in yours, affording me the opportunity to communicate my feelings through the medium of touch. I tried to explain my regret, in vain, by a series of morse code squeezes of your hand. “Let’s not talk about it” you said, “ever again”.

We wandered into the chemist with the suspicious expressions of a couple of shoplifters. You held back, approaching the till in a stealthy manner, waiting until the woman beside us had picked up her prescription and left. “Can I speak to you privately?” you half whispered to the woman behind the counter with more than a hint of emotion in your tone. Her amiable old face already knew what this was about before she was told. Saturday morning in a west end chemist, they should have them lying out like M&Ms.

You were whisked off into a little room. An interrogation room. I imagined the scene: the small, kindly woman transformed into a Stasi inquisitor, stripping away the layers of your ignominious night out - “How did you get so drunk?”, “Why didn’t you use protection?”, “Why did you have sex with him?”.

I padded around the shop aimlessly for what felt like an age. I kept a continuous vigil from the corner of my eyes, watching for a sign of life from the little room. I daren’t sit on the moulded plastic seat, if mistaken for a customer I may have to explain my intentions and waiting for a girl to pick up the morning after pill was not the easiest sell. Instead I worked systematically from aisle to aisle picking up different packages and examining the contents as if an overly earnest shopper. As I was impassively reading a box of vitamins you reappeared thanking the assistant. I joined you on the plastic seats and our hands again combined.

The cause of all this secrecy was handed over in a little, nondescript paper bag. And that was that.

On the walk back you ate milk bottles purchased from the chemist, to cheer you up you said. I felt a great guilt manifest itself in the back of my head – a jealous, gnawing feeling. I watched you throw the sweets into your mouth, every inch the picture of innocence. I knew otherwise but I was cursed to forget it. Never could it be replayed in my mind’s eye beside the other great sexual victories of my life. Perhaps that was to be my punishment for failing to fully appreciate the innocence that lay beneath your studied exterior.

When we reached the end of your street we parted ways with a kiss. By no means enriched with any passion or lust, it at least embodied some inherit feelings of love and trust. The kind of kiss that could be shared with a friend I thought. Best to keep it that way.

On my way home I held my stomach in agony, desperate to be back in the comfort of my own home where I may excrete the waste, and regret, from the night before.

Flatpack dignity, build it yourself
Homogenised style, facsimile wealth
Aspirational living for the faux middle classes
With the Murakami novels and the horn-rimmed glasses

The crude light dissolves amongst the frenzied throng
An amorphous mass trudging slowly along
Traversing a showroom that seeps with desire
Hoarding timber to construct their own funeral pyre

Couples with hands entwined and smiles embossed
Bind their futures together with mahogany albatross
While tired spouses with crumpled faces
Debate which lamp will best fill their empty spaces

Jealousy colonizes the mind and erodes the soul
Infatuation manifests itself in a set of ceramic bowls;
A pillow with arms; a stainless steel fork;
A horrendous ten foot canvas of New York

Matching monoliths of cool angular wood
Granting meaning to rooms that sat so long misunderstood
A domestic symmetry to deflect our pain
From the personal perfection we could never hope to attain

For something to be lost it must first be owned
The concept of our future was not bought but loaned
We lost nothing tangible, just one possible path
The sweet smell of talc, the low hum of a bath
A hazy lilac dream framed in soft focus
A single shoot sprouting amongst a descending plague of locust
That single shoot we resolved to impede
To mercifully stifle whilst only a seed

We exist now in the spaces inbetween
Tormented by possibilities felt but unseen
Not tempestuous passion nor orderly strife
The fragile, unspoken grace notes of life
I traced hieroglyphics on your back as you softly slept
And held you in my arms as you gently wept
Eyes of red, drowned in sorrow
Pregnant with the unfulfilled promise of tomorrow

We lay together, and we count the cost
And imagine the things we could have lost