A playful collection
of poems – such as
Bad karaoke
The wedding night of my second trip
to Scotland two-by-two of us propping
up the bar of the Kilmarnock Travel-
odge in something less comfortable
which happens to be karaoke night
in these heels All day shy as a tree-
forg in my patterned dress and now
the whole room glitters Even my true
love says I shouldnae feel I have tae
as I launch my high notes at the tone-
deaf anaglytpa If the make-up runs
it’s just I haven’t splet since Thursday
and I’ve lived on crisps fro three days Only
dinna make me drive home on a hangover’s
slipped gears the sun on my forehead past
Dumfries still asking why indeed Delilah
Rain -
It started unremarkably,
like many regimes. We sat like children
making quiet things indoors. The rivers
burst their staves and soaked the folds mid-
country; they were schlepping people out of pedalos,
and punting through cathedrals saving cats. One lad
clearing out his granddad’s drain was still caught
when the waters lapped the record set in 1692.
Imagine. News teams donned their sombrer cagoules.
The house had more floors than we knew. In twenty years
we’d never spent so much time in one room. I’d no idea
you had a morbid fear of orange pips, or found French novelists
oppressive. On the seventh day, completely hoarse,
we took to drawing on the walls and staging tableaux.
In delirium all actions feel like role play -
protein strands against the ooze, the animals we made -
and rain, a steady broadcast on all wavelengths,
taught us everything we known about the tango. Only
when we grew too thin for metaphors was rain just rain.
We thought about the drowned boy, how he watched
the lid of water seal him in, for all his bright modernity.
Was it a Monday morning when the garden was returned,
tender with slugs, astonished at itself? Our joined hands
wer the last toads in the ark. We walked; we needed news.
