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Not Today
Today isn’t a day for poetry; the words sit heavy, the air sits still, and all I can manage is the quiet fact of being here.
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The Second Before
There’s a second,just one,when the lights go downand the theatre tenses.The chatter folds,the velvet breathes,and I sit in the darknot as a person,but as a pause. Alone,not lonely;just suspended,like a held notebefore the overture dares to begin. In that second,I am every audiencethat ever waitedto be moved. Then the music starts,and the worldremembers how to…
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Poetry is Taught Wrong
They teach us metrics like a checklist,syllables counted like coins, rhythm weighed and filed away.We learn to admire the beast from a glass box: dissected, annotated, politely dead.They hand us diagrams of feeling and expect tidy answers. We are asked to tame metaphors into essays, to translate thunder into bullet points.We paste sticky notes over…
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Watching Hands
They speak without sound: the small grammar of fingers,nouns folded into palms, verbs scored along knuckles.A thumb hesitates like a question; a wrist flick is punctuation.Hands remember how to mend; they know the route to a bandage. I watch the map of someone’s day traced in flour and ink and keys,the quiet economy of a…
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Don’t Trust Poets
Don’t trust poets.They’ll swear they’re only describinga perfectly ordinary scene-a field, a street, a quiet afternoon-and you’ll believe themright up until the momentthe ground starts whispering. They’ll tell you the sky is bluewhile nudging you in the ribsas if to say,but is it? really? They’ll insist the strange thing you sawwasn’t strange at all,and the…
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The Parade of Polished Shoes
They polished the shoes and bent down to praise,they hung clever posters and learned all the plays.A drum got louder, a march found a beat,and neighbours began nodding in tidy, clean rows in the street. They offered neat answers with ribbons and bows,promised order, clean lists, and fewer of those.But maps made of rules leave…
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Decommissioning Caithness
Dounreay dismantled, piece by piece,reactors hushed, the glow at peace.Steel and concrete, stripped with care,a future planned in thinning air. And in the town, the same routine:doors shut quiet, streets go lean.Not radiation, but resignation,a slow embrace of ruination. They decommission shops like rods,pubs like turbines, hopes like gods.Every closure signed and stamped,as if decline…
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February, Lightheaded
February wakes up earlyand forgets its shoes.It tiptoes across the calendarin mismatched socks of drizzle and sun. The days are small animals,skittering out from under the bed,blinking at the sudden light. Clouds practice new shapes:a teapot, a startled goose,something that might be a dragonif you squint with conviction. Rain falls in polite applause,as if congratulating…
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Salt, Stone, Signal
We wear the weather like a cardigan here;salt on the collar, wind in the seams, Caithness sky stretched like an exam paper you can’t quite fold right.The bus leaves before the light finishes waking; I tuck my keys into the same pocket that remembers first-day nerves.My classroom is a cottage of cushions and careful rules,…
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Weather In My Ribs 