Tuesday, July 23, 2013

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.