Crow what have i done
You shot off, like an arrow
My heart was in you
Are you anything more
Than a pile of wind-ruffled
Feathers

Seventy million

Seventy million
That’s what we cannot exceed
Not one person over
All gestations must be cancelled
All pregnancies terminated
All who are overseas cannot return

The Minister for Population Capacity specifies that
This winter
All heating systems within homes of elderly persons, including care homes
Must be shut down for good

We are still awaiting the first voluntary removal

I am looking at a picture of rainforest by Henrik Haakinson


I am looking at a picture of rainforest by Henrik Haakinson.
It is a non-descript thicket of secondary possibly riverine. I can see bamboo, I can see light, the forest floor is covered with dead leaves.

Not a creature can be seen.
What does this image do?

We are presented with a view of nature wherein that exclusive abstraction negates any human presence. Is this scene then one of perfection? Is it the result of an exclusion of human civilisation? And yet would this too be an artefact of that very civilisation and therefore a product and part of it? Is this that which can be or will be or is, where only we are not?
Or is this merely the inside of a hot house of some great botanic garden!

We cannot tell and yet we immediately play into the notion of otherness, of how if only we too could be there then somehow we too could feel an experience that feeling of serenity, of pure and totally nature.

The fact that it is not virgin primary rain-forest must be a factor that is considered and therefore it must be an intended to imply non-perfection.

The thick screen of secondary growth does allow for an impenetrable screen through which we cannot penetrate.

It is the familiar – the forest – and yet the totally unfamiliar – tropical plants we might recognise from a garden centre, no sign of any path or track or any way through. No trees we might fall into familiarity with.

It is clearly not a garden as the degree of manicuring we in the western world would desire to impose upon it, the order we must constantly impose, is absent. No roots or stumps betray a previous human presence.

No creature puts in an appearance and is not likely to – it is daylight, the photographer is present, and the image is a frozen moment. And yet we do stand and stare in a futile hope that we can spot one of the multitude of familiar animals that wildlife programmes paraded in front of our eyes. This intoxicatingly inescapable desire is to be the watcher….is this to circumvent becoming the watched? Place any human into a strange wild forest and they will experience a degree of nervous instinct. It is who and what we are.

russian doll

the train judders into life
cranking and creaking along the steel rails
out of glasgow queen street station.

i throw off an ant i see scurrying
in a furious hurry to be somewhere,
a tiny black tornado
on the gleaming white expanse of my shirt.

i trick him to walk
onto my canvas bag,
a poor second to his waste-land home
but better than the dead-end upholstery desert
of this frontier train.

on his second lap of the bag
he stops, is still, becomes
a spot of fluff on the fallen strap,
legs slipped into neutral,
antennae revving up.

i stare out up at four tall tower-blocks, acres of concrete
man stacked on man, an army of workers;
i unpack all i see:
that great mound of workers, my self
and the minute ant in front of me.

moose

eventide gushes in, dark
as blankets of squid ink. somewhere in the forest
there is a slow stirring, an unfolding
of telescopic legs, joint after joint,
raising huge hummocks in thick evening air on
long legs so thin
they seem as the backs of humpbacked whales sailing
through the night.

at daybreak these creatures sink
below the surface
concealing their breathing in
a cloak of spruce-needles;

out there they move,
hundreds thick,
their hot breath rising
a stirring of the unseen.

missing, presumed gone

you tell me the vagrant wanderer,
the one who shimmered on your marsh
while the sun gathered,
who drew great crowds and maintained
an almost believable air of indifference,
has left.

i wonder where the ibis is now
and did his sheen vanish
with the last of the marsh,
the green of the cracked algae
a crumbling rust on his tomorrows
on your tomorrows.

within his absence his bill still prods
the slow worms of your mind.

lover

a poem is a journey
you start with a word, a glimpse
a half-understood image; you follow it
all the way to the point where
it decides to spin round on you
refusing to be chased further
and butts you in the nose
with a new word.

you scrap a few lines, here and there
re-adjust fourteen times its hemline
and then its finished
clear, crisp as a new made bed
waiting for you to slip in between its words
like a lover.