Ex-Teacher

Summer hols, back from Italy with the school and Majorca with the family. My goodness but from August 15th the ShugMeister is a retired teacher, woop woop. I hope to spend a lot more time writing, in particular prose. I hope to rewrite my very one dimensional comic novel 'Love Death and a bit of Opera' into something that might be published eventually. And I am going on a wee tour of North America and Australia in April and May 2014.

On the poetry front, I am still scribbling and have a wee collection from Mariscat coming out next year. What else? I'm crap at doing these sweeping summaries, and will try to keep the blog more up to date.

Here's my very last Higher Class

 

Last View of My chaotic classroom wall

 

 

And my retiral poem:

 

 

Excavation


Emptying cupboards from

the pre-Homeric Classroom era,

through strata thick as Schliemann’s Troy.

I am looking for bedrock and

the world before printing

when we worked with our bare minds

or a single piece of paper rolled

soaking wet from a banda machine.

When times were tough, we drank the fluid

and went outside to fight hairy colleagues from other lands.

Who can forget 1978 when that probationer

stole the Headmaster’s wife

and we sailed across the Firth in a fleet of long keeled ships,

the sun glinting on our oars?

Our beards have grown, our blood coarsened,

paper has closed over our bones like sand.

But there is a hot deep wind today at the skip.

It takes the sheets and spins them over rooftops,

all the dense tyrannies of words

gone to air at the end,  like birds.