My breath is white.
It’s wintertime:
more than weather
it’s the ghost of hunger,
small sounds in the night,
a strangling of light.

I walk through haar,
through the town’s cobbled crust,
past smeared shadow,
mirrors in green glass. As I go,
halos of lamp turn to will o’ wisp,
neon to bone fire.

Moon cracks cloud
and the clock face freezes.
I burrow in a guise
no wraith will recognise,
professional, of Dumfries,
out for an hour.

In my Apple-land
they quietly wait,
souls lost, souls gained,
finger tips on window panes.
I raise a glass to Hecate,
drink, ab ovo usque mala.




Ab Ovo Usque Mala- from the egg to the apple, from birth to death, the circular path.

Back Yam.

So I received my ten thousandth visitor while I was getting rattled about Loch Scridain like a frozen pea in a bucket. Thanks to all who dally here.

I am back from the golden Treshnish Isles and the long bleak wetlands of Glen More. What a beautiful part of the world, even in a force 10 when the boat can't berth and you have to hang onto the bar on the ferry with both hands and one leg.

A great night in the Oban Inn with a largely captive but hugely appreciative audience. This has encouraged me to plan Phase 2 of the Tour next Spring. The good thing about 'guerrilla' readings is that you're bringing the stuff to an audience most of which wouldn't dream of going to a poetry reading in their lives. You bring good entertainment as well as showing that poetry is accessible and relevant to everyone's lives. That's my mission statement anyway.

Tobermory not as successful I think due to wrong venue but I know what went wrong there and will avoid pitfalls like that in the future. Back to work tomorrow which will be a shock after such varied shenanigans. Then in 2 weeks a reading with Tessa Ransford at the Bakehouse in Gatehouse where I hope to shift the last of the Hedge. Then Edinburgh with the bold Rachel Fox.

In the next wee while I will lurk more among the curtain hems of Scotland's history and try and produce some more squibs.

back and away

Majorca beautiful and sunny. Gale force winds in Penpont last night but a fine kick off to the Postcards Tour. Off this morning to Oban. Will take some pics and post them when we get back.

Two more of the History pomes written. Here's an obscure one:

Pope Boniface V111 Sums Up the Evidence

In 1301 in the conflict between King John Balliol and Edward 1 of England, both sides were at great pains to present evidence to the Papacy to support their positions: Edward I’s being that the Scots were historically subject to the English crown.; the Scots being that their nation was of greater antiquity than England. Edward 1 was represented by a battery of lawyers, Scotland by one Baldred Bissett whose colourful take on Scotland’s history won over the Pope.


“We have puzzled over these petitions
Not least because both pursuants
speak the same tongues
and possess many of the same dislikeable attributes…
The testimony of the English Crown
is scholarly, deep in genealogy and law
and drawn from venerable sources beyond repute.
Its argument- that the Scots were but a younger
branch of the tribe that migrated to Brittania
after the Roman conquest- has impressed
the lawyers and historians of the Holy See.
Baldred Bissett on the other hand claims,
with no evidence at all, that the Scots
are descended from a daughter of Pharaoh
who, after a heavy night with some Irish sailors
in Ayia Napa, found herself drifting at sea
and later washed up at Lochgilphead
with a strange stone (which later disappeared),
all this while the Romans- to use his own words-
‘were a piss-poor tribe of skanks in mud huts.’
Bissett also claims to have incontrovertible proof of this
but left it in a kebab shop last night in the Piazza Navona…”