Guy Fawke's Night. (a chorus of crazed baby chicks)

What radicals you are blowing up in suburban streets.
Startling the solemn households from their quiet Sunday
breathing, lighting up thousands of tiny troops of Civil War.

Anarchy! Streets run amok!

In flocks you burst and scream, a chorus of crazed baby
chicks being strangled, a thousand wild light bulbs sent up
into the air fusing,
exploding
bouquets of flowers, flying out
like burning feathers.

You fizz and whistle like sparks of fat.
Breaking the rude silence of safe
towns, reminding us of a war
just
round
the corner, or
to shut the curtains, lock the door, and always
blow out candles.

(An old favourite I've posted before.)

Parable Of The Fence.

'this went on for quite some time' from KickingParis on Vimeo.

McGuire reading in St Andrews, at Risk-A-Verse, with Inky Fingers and Stanza, Byre Theatre.

Thanks to Rachel McCrum for taking the footage.

Quiet night sponsored by the letters O and L.

Olaf aloof in his loft, loafing on his lounger luxuriating in lofty litigations with his lifeforce while looking through the skylight skyward, lamenting the final harbour of loss and snuffed love of all life. Then, laughing lightly, he licks his lips and gulps a glass of cloudy lemonade, toasting to longevity.

Peck Rechublic.

From a summer schooling.

I.

In Czech - fined 700korun on tram check, played dumb but ticket master not fooled, repaired a burst Jeep tire check, huge bananas check, off to teach tomorrow check. A cloud in a pair of trousers - check. The sun is made of honey and shooting stars are bees spilling with pollen - check. Packed verbosity and pretension - Check. Still gay - check.

II.

Teaching in Czech - check. Work with raging friendly Alcoholic pervert professors, eyes drunk on young possibilities - check. Teach in a style aloof yet caring, confused yet powerful - check. Drink too much, alarm bells drinking, God put me here to teach me a lesson. Not to drink like it's a practical skill. Watch middle aged men ruin themselves. Run around barking like a dog at the world and my own obviousness for being crazy. Life redeemed by hundreds of glorious young engaged and engaging with alien words, the breaking world, their secret selves and Mr Doe-Eyed Me.

III.

Back in Prague - more drunk days and mornings - my liver sings a dirge! Possible divorce proceedings. In love, out of love, who to love. Same constant state of inertia. Hours of A.A. footage to confirm my suspicions. Kafka's house is a tiny prison. Can't find Hasek's bar. Beautiful day of orange juice. Smack head off low ceiling. Too surround sound self-involved. Lazy cow grazing on Prague. Perversions need my absolute attention - Czech. New day - going sailing under a blue pallet of sky and bright people. Open all the windows let the air in and the fruit flies out - check.

My Father in the Sun.

Photo: August Sanders.

'Don't be such a fucking poof!
Be like me, Son,
Long in the tooth.

Why don't you go off
and bake a cake
with your Mum?'

He kneel's out of sight
continuing to cement the brick
wall he's building between us.

A Snail on Easter Road.

A patient God in the rain;
oblivious to the business shoes.

Like the gentle progress
of an ocealiner across the atlantic.

The smallest most slow of comets
glittering a trail across wet night pavement.

What I Say About Him: A Review.

What They Say About You – Eddie Gibbons: A Review.

Eddie Gibbons is a Liverpudlian living in Aberdeen. I've always liked the soft pudding like pud sound in pudlian and Gibbons is a Pudlian Poet and an accomplished one at that. He has the technical skill to weave his pen (or, press his key's) between form and formlessness with ease.

He has all the inventiveness a quality wordsmith should – juggling word play, toying with double meaning, jiving with associations, balling with rhetoric, scattered with allusions; the books buzzes with trickery, mischief and comedy.

Read the full (fool's) article by clicking here.

Mick Kelly's News.

Twelve, May 1930, North Carolina.

Miz Colours is nice teacher. A real soft voice. Real smiler. Not as nice as Momma. Momma sayz neva play with peoples’ who lie or cheat or steal. Sayz the world is a danger untoitself and that each person has a devil inside thum equal to their angel. people are only people at the best of times and at the worst.

Dada works hard as hell and it's as hot as hell at the mill, like a furnace, he sayz, like momma's cooker on full for the bread. He don't beat me - and done more boys sayz they dada's hits them when theyz too hot or unhappy.My Dada don't hurt at all. He gone made me a swing, out back too. He is fast and hard when we wrestle. My idol. He doesn't cry.

Momma bakes pancakes with vanilla ice-cream and feeds Bubba scraps o' meat. It's summer. It's bright like all day, and sticky in da night, window open to let cool in, and i here the chip crickets and owl's call, and it sleeps me well. I play twist in the garden and the sun shines through the tress like one hundred swords.

I go school and learn to understand and make things and plus ones and twos and paint brilliant colours and listen to music on piana, which buils up side of me like a foutain. I play ball wit Joey and Sondra and everybody else who play. Momma and Dad sayz life wasn't prepared for me, thought they sayz I gotta make my own mark in thiz here world. Thiz is it a guess. My news for today.


Micky Kelly

Sing a rainbow.

The sun catches the glass vase
at 12:40 in the afternoon -
painting on the wall
a circular burst of rainbow.

Contractual Obligations.

Man, busy after work, scoops two goldfish out of the pea green pond.
Drives home to put them in a large skull shaped bowl
with castle, stone bridge, marble rock inside.

Time streches its long arm - hours, days, weeks -
until one day, by means of a wayward elbow,
the bowl fall to the ground, detonating, fragments of skull everywhere.

The fish writhe out of water, struggle and gulp for last air.
They are scooped up and flushed down the toilet
thrust into the ocean of the suburban sewage system
to die without any form of contractual agreement.

This Collection Friendly Slam.

'The holy miraculous difference between firstrate & second implies nonthinkable enormousness by contrast with the tiny stumble from second to tenthrate.' - e.e. cummings.

Aye Eddy, whatever you say son!

The inaugural ThisCollection FRIENDLY POETRY SLAM has been and gone. It was a great success, with consistent quality and entertainment, from a controlled crowd of temporary human beings and poets. It took place in the dark cavernous downstairs bar at The Banshee Labyrinth. It was hosted by the miraculous, relentless labourer of poetry Claire Askew.

1st place went to Young Dawkings: A quality controlled performance of orange juice compact passion. By that I mean, Dawkin's performance contained with the same 'juice' (energy/nuritional value in poetic terms) as a ripe orange. He was sincere, empassioned and caused the hair on my neck to stand on end.

2nd place went to Stephen Welsh: This was his first poetry slam and, I think, his first public reading. He was polished, confident, thoughtful, and gave us a poetic-lecture of the complexity and mystery of the universe.

3rd place went to Chris Lindores: A beardy man of quick wit and self-deprecating humour, and enough dirty realism to undermine the pretense of the far-too-serious of the night.

All three got money and booze and self-satisfaction, and what more deserved than that, on this shorttimespent-planet-earth! Well done to them.

Question: what's the difference between SLAM and a poetry reading? Anwser: SLAM (in this case) is COMPETITIVE, but poetry reading is not. SLAM involves score sheets, ten point scales of content form and delivery. It involves arithmetic/calculators. Time keeping. Stop watches. Shouting, reading, self-doubt, an excess of passion and microphone reverberation. It involves financial incentive and booze promise.

All in all, it was a quality night, and the three winners now get to go to St Andrews and read at an experimental poetry night. So, good luck on that wee poetry galivant. I think there may be more this collection SLAM nights to come. I hope so. Let there be mic!


End note: I came a tight, but not tight enough, 4th which astounded and encouraged me, like a child on stabilisers cycling for the tenth time and not worrying that you'll fall over.

Rip Van Winkle: A Review

Tomorrow, we will live here. Ryan Van Winkle.

'RIP VAN WINKLE, known to all as a harmless, drinking, shiftless lout, who never would work, but roamed about, always ready with jest and song-idling, tippling all day long.'

Ryan Van Winkle arrived in Edinburgh in 1999, from USA, working in bars, cafés, and the Forest Café. He's came a long bloody way since that beginning. Jesus, I barely know him, but what I do know is he's a pro-active, tireless encourager organiser, and fair poet.

He recently won the Crashaw prize for poetry.

Read the complete review here.

Precision Engineering: A Review.

This is not about what you think. A poetry collection by, Jim Murdoch.

Murdoch is not a poet of excess. Murdoch does not mess about. Murdoch gets to the point, and then gets off the page. In some respects the poems are sterile, not in the sense of imagination, but of being thoroughly clean and free of destructive elements.

Read the complete article by McGuire here

I wonder.

Self does not exist, I say,
but we kept on talking to each other anyway.

All the while clouds shift and move -
giant white lawn mowers of the sky.
And God the great gardener of the sky
as the rain falls from his watering can.

Soul does not exist, I say,
but we kept on destroying them anyway.

All the while people are dominos
caught in random tragedies,
taken by bullets, by electricity
by everyday garden appliances.

Intellect, does not exist, I say,
but we kept on using logic and reason anyway.

All the while it rains in one part of the world
while it snows in another, a direct debt
is taken from someone’s bank account,
and someone chokes on a toffee.

Love, does not exist, I say,
but we kept on kissing anyway.

All the while trains shuttle past
graveyards, cars zoom through
puddles that spray passers by,
a blind woman walks in a flower garden.

Poetry, is shit, I say,
but I kept on writing anyway.

*Found a file full of old poems. Here is one. Wrote it in about 2004.

The Jobseeker.

Tam: Awright son, long time no see, yuptay these dayz?

Alec: A laot a fuck all, on joabseekerz, been own it fir last five munf. Fuck all hapnin Tam. Hall worlds a riot man. Nay jobs ur nuntin. Even Helen no got nuntin. Shez volintearin it the charity shaop. Fuck all fir it. But, guid fir her c.v. They sayz. Better tay day somefin thin nufin, they sayz. Iz it fuck. Better tay day fuck all an git yir benefit. Fuck them. Government full o curption. O multie millionairz, floatin aboot on boats and aw that, in the fuckin hitlon, pish man, i'm no workin.

Tam: Fucksake, wish i'd nevir asked. A'v goat a joab the now, threw an agentcy, a day deliveries fir Tesco. Mind you son, I don't work fir Tesco – only goat the joab fay the agentcy. It's that bad. Git yirself tay an agentcy. Plenty o kitchen work goin'.

Alec: Me? A pot scrubber. Fuck that. Peelin potatos fir 5 pound a oor. Fuck washin ma ain dishez let alany a resturant full o shirt and tie fuckers. I'm aff tay the bookies, try on a coupla the horses. Mare luck on the gamble, I hink.

Tam: Fuck gamblin' that's a bottomless pit.

Alex: Lives a six feet pit. Fuck it. Am aff. Take it easy, Tam. Driving they wagonz for tesco. Tell the wife I sayz hello.

Tam: Aye, o right, you and yours too, Leck. Catch yee doon the local some time, I'll shout yee a pint.

Alex: Noted, Tam. Noted. Take it easy ma man.

Hole Poem.

Binding.

Rather lounge on a couch nourished
by the sharp turn and talk of a single page
than strain through the luminous glare
of an electrified screen like a conspirator.

Knead the dough of the story,
the warm loaf in the hands rising
rather than stretch plastic cable
to that-just-right angle to balance a machine
awkwardly at midnight.

Most of all, imagine, a Mother or Father
reading beside you by lamplight,
or you reading to your loved ones,
as they fall asleep dreaming of a game world,
a sky sugared with new meanings,
clusters of constellations, of sentences.

Self Esteem.

Colin McGuire, you're glorious, you're smouldering,
you're Adonis on the beach, honey glazed, apple bottomed,
speedo adorned, boy of the century.

You are The Great Wall of China, The Shining Path,
The Nation of Islam, you are the help line
for abused and abandoned children of Nations.

You are E = MC2 times the speed of light,
you are the galaxy of Andromeda,
you are a clear night sky framing a chandelier of stars.

Your eyes, bright lights upon a cliff,
guide ships to shore. Your mouth, wide open,
is for orphaned birds to nest and soar.

You guide planes to land
in your park sized back garden,
with your massive luminous hands.

You're the Edinburgh Playhouse on fire.
You are a scatter of atoms raining under lamp light.
You are twelve months of the calender.

You're all the rivers converging to meet the ocean,
the streams, the puddles, the rain drop, the moisture.
McGuire you are the entire process of rainfall.

You commune with the Angels and Cherubs
who doze to the sound of your harp
in an apple orchard in Eden.

Colin McGuire, you are the hand of God,
trembling slightly,
as it accepts the award for lifetime achievements.

*Work to be done.

At the other table.

I have two eyes.

He has three.

We glance at each other,

awkwardly.

She orders coffee.
I order tea.

We drink together,

silently.

Taxi Italia.

'Don't go to the station. Just get a taxi.' She explains. So I go to the taxi rank. 'How far to Reggio Emilia?' I ask the first driver. '100KM = 100Euros.' I nod, and put my bag into the boot. We set off in the air conditioned taxi from Bologna heading for Reggio Emilia. I take a moment to orient myself, look out the window, at the unfamiliar city passing by. Take the time to acknowledge I'm in Italy barely an hour since landing. Then, blank as a donkey, I stop to consider the meaning of that hurried mobile conversation.

100KM? 100EUROS O, God! Mamamia! Mio Dio! She meant go from Bologna Station to Reggio, then get a taxi from Reggio Station to her house! Idiot. Mamamia! 'Scuzi! Scuzi signore. Io, cretino. Returno per Bologna Stationze, Grazie Tanto mi amico.' No doubt confused, the driver turns back towards the station, I twiddle my fingers nipping my mind with insults: 'Scottish rare bit' 'Short bread attention span' 'Black pudding' 'Irn Bru brained girder'.

15 Euros it cost to take me nowhere and back, under a Sun that does not care and never could, and has nothing to do with public transportation. I get out of the taxi, the driver kindly brings me the bag, and leaves, I stretch in the Sun's oven, and pray for a bottle of water. 'Grazie tanto' I say to the driver. 'Niente' he says, and winks. Camomile skinned, smooth bald head, mid 30's. Bologna is a gay friendly city. Who cares? I do, now that I'm no longer ironing my mind to the impressions others may have of me.

So, off I go, needing Lassie, littlest Hobo, Flipper, to rescue me from Italy, to intuit where the correct train is, to guide me to Reggio, to help revise advanced English grammar. I get the train, sit down, talk with the man beside me. We do not understand each other particularly well. Meaning, we understand each other perfectly well. He speaks Italian, some broken English about Reggio Emilia being the stop after Modena. I speak English, some broken Italian, thanking him for the clarification.

I settle in for the ride past dry corn yellow fields, past industrial factories, and old men on ladders in Olive groves, nona's fanning themselves in deck chairs, and the firm buttocks of a guy ,
each cheek like a sand dune in a desert, down by a river. Someone is very angry with the train. It arrived late, he 's so angry he rolls tobacco, tobacco, tobacco, which is forbidden in the train, and a mother, in a hushed voice of quiet concern, asks him to put it out for the sake of the children for this Mother believes that children are cursed when they breathe in cigarette smoke for the first time.

I dream through the window. Imagine rail lines precise as a sentences, the rhythm of the wheels running through the countryside like syllabic stresses. To think in five days I must give direction to a horde of twenty screaming children. I play the role of teacher, they reluctant language learners. Life is an error, I think and rest my head on the head rest, laugh quietly to myself in a manner which is understood immediately in every language. I tilt my head back and close my eyes, waiting for the lessons ahead to teach me what I am missing.




-Rapid notation of something that will be worked on, should this be made into a short story. It's a horrible mess, I should wait and post it, what's the rush, Jim once asked? There isn't one, sometimes I think the internet is my downfall. I post it online, rather than sculpt on the page. Will I learn better practices? YES.

I'm in Italy again, two months this time, in the North, a place called Reggio Emilia, it is very small Artisan city. I can cylce around the old city in a loop within about 15minutes. It's lovely, civilised. I live in a beautiful house, with a mother and her daughter. I'm working out. I eat well. I'm teaching at a summer camp, which doesn't have an academic focus, so much as activity and basic language aim. All in all, things are going well.