A Spectre is Haunting Glasgow

In the grainy half-rain of a grey September evening a small and pitiful figure cowers in a close mouth on a quiet Glasgow street. The orange glow of a nearby streetlamp seems to accentuate the faded affluence of the area as it competes with the setting sun to cast its highlights across grandiose Victorian architecture and its shadows over ancint uneven glass panes that enclose darkened rooms. There are very few people around but those who pass the creature appear to give it a wide berth as it shuffles its way across the west end and along Woodlands Road towards the Charing Cross end of town.

On Bath Street a woman makes her way hurriedly towards the Griffin bar. Sam O'Neill enters the bright noisy interior and glances along the booths to her left. She spots her friend Charlie who waves her over with a flash of red bangle and introduces her to the man seated opposite.

The creature appears to merge with the grainy browns, yellows and russets of the sandstone tenements; it seems camouflaged against the cold grey of concrete; it blurs and fades amidst the chrome and glass, the marble and complex Le Corbusiersque ironwork of office blocks as it continues its journey past North Street and onto Sauchiehall Street.

To be continued...

Without

Curtains that billow
against rain-lashed windowpanes;
April days
that refuse to pin back the clouds,
screw down the sun,
keeping their counsel on the prospect of better things to come.

Interiors mimic the misery out there.
As the grey chill unfolds around a broken down boiler,
runs its fingers along an obsolete heating system,
we smile through chatterng teeth,
wrap ourselves tighter in knits and scarves,
overeat and keep the gas rings on when we're no longer cooking.

Was it only last week that beds were warm
and kisses carried the promise of enduring heat?
I shiver,
shimmy into another layer,
stop myself in the act of switching on an appliance
that may already have burned out beyond repair.

Past the terminus

He'd come home late at night,
bleary-eyed and crumpled,
saying he'd ridden past the terminus.

My mother would snort
he didn't know where to get off with his lying,
but I believed him because

I watched them most schoolday afternoons,
working men, nodding-off behind newspapers
as they swayed with the motion of the bus.

As we approached journey's end
everyone, apart from them,
would get up and get off.

Behind glass they slept on,
lost to the hydraulic hiss of the closing door.
The journey beginning for them once more.

I get it from him,
this tendency to make unnecessary journeys,
of staying too long - to the point of pointlessness,

the art of missing the alighting point,
riding beyond the terminus.

Beautiful Creep?(To Leonard Cohen)

Clay-footed god of things earthly,
your addictions to visceral romanticism
and cracking up,
soothe the loser in me.

At four in the morning,
the universe having failed to succumb to my command
after each bar room farce,
or one-too-many faux-pas
my hand slides the volume up a notch,
trailing itself still, through that river deep,
where a tearstained note called you "beautiful creep".

Captain Mandrax,
Field Commander Cohen,
on mornings I find myself inhabitant unknown,
searching for remedies in ripped-out pages,
plotting the points between now and then
every coordinate poses the question,
where is The Future or Marianne?

Yet, your growing old gracefully
brings me hope I can clean up my act,
as I swab wine stains from dusty album sleeves,
sweet messiah of bedsit-ridden artefacts.
I kiss my husband, tend my kids, and cross off the days
while you reap the fruits of commercial success,
date younger women, and sexualise grey.

Miss Understanding

He scripts postcards over coffee in the pavement cafe,
drums fingers over tabletop,
exaggerates the pause for thought,
fancies himself a Sartre of
the latter-day
(minus axiomatic observations on life and the human
condition,
or any understanding of the principles of
materialism).

He too, he confides to his woman friend,
is unhappy with the state of the planet
-would change his life, if he could only get a handle
on it,
discard black clothes and prevailing trend
if someone who could see beyond his looks,
might rescue him from the company of his books,
(his only real bed mates recently.)

And she, thick-lashed and long-faced,
no Simone De Beavoir herself,
finding unfulfilled longings once more propel
her headlong into the bottomless lakeof human understanding,
manages just the slightest twitch as he reels her in
and up,
and even a smile towards the sparkling shallows of her
cup.

All the Things I can't Remember

Headful of random variables.
Conversations started and ended
by no-one in particular.
Accusations without basis.
Nothing is quite what it seems
in this jumbled lost and found
neural network interruptus.

Which of us was it loved another?
Who stayed out all those nights?
Spent others inviting friends to partake
in a piece of another man's wife?
The smell of hotel toiletries
still leaves me lightheaded.

The therapist sighs and wheedles
while I await configuration
of automatic scripting
to fill in the hours of tabula raisa
beneath the cabled avalanche,
perhaps never to arrive.

The Thaw

Grey afternoon downpour
dissloves purity's veneer
revealing blackened organs,
broken bones of twigs,
a hat, a scarf, a dirty brown puddle,
where once a lonely snowman stood.

Trees that blazed frosted beauty
boldly broadcast their disease.
Pavements that crunched cheerily
slither with excrement
rain vainly tries to wash clean.
The thaw is not pretty.

So too us, with our sloughing off of dragonskin.
Hurtful words that brought hot tears flowing at last
leave infected wounds,
livid scar tissue,
failing organs and twisted limbs
agape to the observer.