The Donkey

In the livingroom sitting on the couch.

My sisters present me with a baby donkey.

It trots toward me, grey and hairy. But someone wraps it in white swaddling, its head protruding.

The donkey seems to take me for its father.

Tries to bite my face and nibble my ears. I see its soft ugly teeth.

-It's a donkey what dyou think it is.

-Seems like a deer to me. Its ears aren't very long.

I caress its short furry ears.

Laughter in the room. Give the baby a carrot, says someone.

The glistening carrot suspended over the donkey's mouth. Its teeth grind and reach for it. The carrot wet with saliva.

As though a baby has been given Bottom's head. Wild struggling donkey eyes.

Like the eyes of a dying horse.

The donkey unwraps itself from its blankets and trots away from the couch. I give up parenting.

-I can't deal with herbivores, I prefer anthropoids.

(A hairy ape would be a more suitable baby).

Ladysmith and Visit to Robert

(The train is about to leave for Ladysmith. And the ladies in their long skirts are waiting. "Please take us to golden California" says the girl.)

(Visit to Robert)

Entering the livingroom. An Edinburgh terraced flat like my grandmother's groundfloor livingroom.

And I click on the TV.

Upstairs the parents are asleep. All is hushed. I do not turn on the lights.

The sexual coloured light of TV in the mournful room. I sit on the edge of the sofa bed. Laconically watching TV.

I realise with shock that under the duvet on the sofabed someone is lying. I see sticking out, wrinkled bedsocks and tousled hair.

The face is revealed. I see it is my friend Robert, very weary and confused. It is he I have come to see.

But his flatmates are awoken upstairs. And up the dark and secret stairs.

Upstairs under a bright bulb my mother had awoken sternly. And my sisters in a bad mood rustle plastic bags.

When Robert wakes after a Friday night out I plead with him: "But haven't you got a couch where I can sleep?" I'll bed down, with my coat, on any long, grimy couch.

I just want to sleep before dawn.

Motiveless Random Massacre (No.3)

Coming out of school near the frosty playground. The sky pink and the scarves waving.

Up a street like Edinburgh's Rose Street I see a man. Looking like Leon. Thin and haggard, dark glasses. Though face red and excited. Blustering, as if crying.

Staggers drunkenly and I notice in his hand what must be a toy gun. A heavy black weapon.

Is this a joke. Suddenly the gun goes off and someone falls. A lady drops shopping bags.

No-one screams. I am tempted to laugh the shootings are so bare and game-like. (Not at all like in the movies).

But I'm afraid of being shot so I run up the street toward barricades where other frightened citizens are sheltering.

Before I run I see him shoot a lad in the head who at once drops. The actual shootings are quite airy and pleasant visually. As if it were all a game.

I run with my long coat down the street. I can feel him behind me. My back an obvious target. Oh fuck I'm gonna get hit oh fuck I'm gonna get hit.

But I reach a wide alley where I know I'll be safe. No-one else has thought to run up here.

Two firemen stand nearby, quite unconcerned, putting out a small blaze.

They are watching the killer.

-Ha ha ha.

-Ho ho ho, bust a cap in his ass.

(I take it from this that the SWAT team has arrived and disabled the killer.)

Roxy Music

On the radio I heard a DJ say "I think the first two Roxy Music LPs are just the best records ever made".

In my room one night, curious about Roxy Music, I decide to seek out their first album. I think it was "For Your Pleasure"? Bored, I nip next door to the record shop. The bored girl and boy behind the counter sell me a CD.

It was £6.25, cheap, but I momentarilly feel guilty about spending money on myself with Christmas coming up. Then I remember I had set aside a tenner for myself.

The CD case is black. One of the songs is called "Dilemma". On opening the CD I see there are two discs inside. I have two CD's. 1st song, says tracklist, is "Young Americans" by David Bowie.

Dissapointment.

The Hostage (precis)

Back in high school, autumn: hometime feeling. Melancholy.

One can't leave. Hostages are herded into a close little room.

Panicky middleclass people, like befuddled tourists on a hijacked plane. Sweating. Thin excitable lady secretaries, middleaged potbellied guys. The English middleclass, scared and ineffectual.

The hero on the other hand looks like a character in a 1910 melodrama. Confused and humble, but poised. Full moustache gives a sense of reassurance. With a slight shift of emphasis, could be a circus ringmaster.

One of the secretaries is inconsolable. Her friends are trying to calm her. Skinny-armed in blue top, long-nosed. Greetin. All of a sudden she disentangles from her friends and makes a bolt for the door. Out onto the landing. Brownwood, plush, antique feeling. A figure looms calmly toward her from the head of the stairs.

This academy is like a mansion, walnut doorframes and panelling, brass knobs, like the house of some old doctor. And this the hostages are in is a study.

The figure chases her back through the door. Quite calm, maybe even laughing. Looks like a B-move monster. Black monk's robe with cowl covering head, shadows in the eyes. The way it glides forward. Yellow-gleaming teeth. Marked with a terrible jagged scar across the cheek. Seems like monster movie makeup. He hefts a big axe. The axe is beautiful; long handle of work-smoothed, sturdy wood, a heavy head seemingly unblunted by years of use.

The hero is shunted forward and nervously stands his ground. The axeman snarls and backs off, gliding from the room.

Now is this a prank? Some student joke? This kidnapping and herding them into a room, these masked and robed figures that hoot and snarl at them, armed with maiming weapons. Are our kidnappers capable of real violence? Manifestations of chaos and violence, of disorder, suddenly breaking into our ordered lives, so that we huddle in a room. The suspicion is that they're just trying to scare us.

And yet the doubt remains. The hostages consult amongst themselves. They are armed and dangerous. Maybe just a drink-fuelled student prank. They have not shown their faces. The one dressed like the black monk, waiting at the head of the stairs. What waits behind that brownwood door.

Message from the German Lady

My new apartment. My three books freshly published. One a them's as thick as the Bible or Dante. It's a sort of anthology. Newly delivered. I sit on the mattress, crosslegged, lookin at it. Plus two other nicely published volumes.

I give one to a fellow student in the art studio, a middleaged German lady. With a dedication.

I move into my new apartment. As it is late at night I go to bed. Lyin in bed tryin to sleep...

The German lady lives next door. I hear her enter her flat and begin moving about. Walls must be paper-thin, I seem to be able to hear her every movement.

She turns on the radio, click! Plays it at full volume, the fatuous DJ voice. Now I can hear her breathing, directly behind my head. She must've stood up close to the wall. She whispers, Miiiichael...

Then, in a whisper: Fuck you Michael. Don't you ever hang up my phone again. The message from me is that you can kiss my fucking ass.

"Eat Drink and Shop"

(If you walk out from here to there. If you write lines of lies.

Cos it's pop n all that. With a machine beat.)

Down in the city centre, there are banners everywhere: "eat drink and shop". I can't help reflecting that once, in a city like this, a hundred or five hundred years ago, there may've been banners or pendants that celebrated something else, the glory of God, or God and country, or some political ideal. Instead, it's been replaced by a monotonous mantra, issued forth like a military order, with no appeal to reason, no appeal to anything higher.

One of the slogans of the Bolsheviks was "peace, bread and land". "Peace, bread and land" has now been replaced with "eat, drink and shop". Which translates as: spend as much money as you possibly can, make as much profit as you can for us before you drop dead.

Am I reading too much into it? Probly.

Britain Needs Poets

We'll go out walkin. Concrete is very beautiful in its own way. We'll embrace the community and the community will reject us. Britain needs poets. It doesn't need another footballer. When we started valuing footballers over poets, captains of industry over highwaymen, SAS men over rebels, that's when we went wrong. British capitalism doesn't even have the dubious virtues of the American model. It's fucking mean, and pinched, and narrow in every sense. It was the south of England as always that let us down. Their values were a dead weight that dragged down the rest of the island. I realise this is a generalisation but you know what I mean.

Whatever happened to the London mob, that were just as ferocious as anything in Paris, marching on parliament chanting no king, letting free all the animals in London Zoo? Their descendants are at home watchin telly.

Descendants of the London mob,

Your fathers were the scourge of God.

And yet you sit here pacified

On the very ground on which they died.

Library Dream

'91. Calendars come and go, paper sheets flap mysteriously in the wind, annually. One on particular numerically-inspired day-divided piece of nonsense, that pertaining to the nineteen-hundred and ninety-first year of our Lord to be precise, on the last few papery days thereof, on the tenth month, the great primeval swellings of sorrowful Autumn already billing and swilling in its bulk, fuck the calendar in fact, on a lamplit warm darknight temple of the last day of calendary October, in a stupid and solemn room, westeringly lit by October's death, I had nothing to do but go to bed, sleep snugly, and in the stirring gasps of the night had the following dream.

I found myself in the depths of a library, searching about, casting glances up at the decks and rows of paperbacks. On a wide expanse of culturally carpeted thin floor I ambled, struggling with my own anxious thoughts of what to find in the studious must rows, learning leeking from peering woodblock librarians, custodians of silence which accompanies the older dustjacket volumes, written by old men who're dead now and don't care whether you read them or not. Near the wide expanse of brushed carpet I traversed, dimly seeking something, emerging from the huge room space from the blurred darkness of pre-dream, to see grand lofty architecture above the bookworms, nobly aggrandizing its masonry in the big chalk spaces of the room.

In fact naturally it was the local library I was in, or a standardized personal dream version of it, a big normal granite type building on its own, full of little women librarians behind its thick Greekish artifice walls, Carnegie patroned, a rain-washed vault, bespectacled librarians busily stamping books (that's a bit clichéd) faroff in their brownwood desk wit computers and tings. There's big plaster murals on high-vaulted roofs as I stroll and trip below, this is the normal big lending department where're kept all the books too crap to buy, but like I said, in the dream it was a more personal visionary little version, dreamed or dredged up of course by me like a liquid reality fable of mind. Womanish owners busily perform workstation miracles, I wander beatly and bleakly around my huge playroom, anxious. I had the feeling (during dreams you always get an unconscious intimation of some previous or unproven affair which affects you like a questing sickness) that I'd been there for some time, casting around and looking desperately upwards to the rows for some kind of salvation. Wasting time in a whirpool of Godly time called fate. Letting myself walk in dreamtime library comfort midst the dark electric arcs of the childish mind, my eyes dreamily bulging to see or seek destinies, wildhaired in the buzzy mist of cotton pillows.

New York dream

On a visit to New York.

Get off at the Port Authority bus terminal, make sure you know where and come back for re-entry scuffed weary and sleepy-eyed as you are.

Your laces need tying stop at a streetcorner your faded skateshoes.

Look in Manhattan shopwindows.

Traversing the five outer boroughs it were only like walking five blocks, wit mom beside me in summer T-shirt pointing out the sights.

Did ye know from Long Island to Manhattan there are blocks of old yellowed brownstone where stand on corners the ghosts of moustachio'd pizzeria owners. Frowning, like pioneers in sepia photographs.

We leave them behind. Then we come out onto the magnificent iron bridge mom n me, grim suspension bridge not golden but grey-gated and splendid with wires... Two-lane traffic, blazin station-wagons.

-Cin you walk over the bridge? Open to pedestrian?

-Sure ye can.

There seems no trouble. We walk easily across the lengthy massy bridge with the sun past its zenith in the sky. Manhattan awaits on the other side.

The five outer boroughs can be traversed fairly easily. On the bulwark or concrete stanchion of the bridge to the left stands the familiar statue, tablet cradled in arm, hand holding torch upraised, though she looks curiously ancient, rusted, hollow-eyed, frayed as a monument. The expression on her face looks almost painful.

'Member Brian sent me that postcard from N.Y. saying, in typical deadpan, "I saw the Statue of Liberty and it's tiny"?

Well look it's just like Brian said, it is indeed tiny. Pointing at the decrepit and dusty statue.

Somewhat of a disappointment almost like something you would see in Europe.

But no matter since we are traversing the perimeters of this great and infamous city.

Tonight I was restless and couldn't sleep. I'm suffering from the most terrible cold, and I was tossing and turning around, my head restless on my soft grey pillow, my whole body too hot, itchy and cumbersome in the hollow of the mattress. My legs felt as heavy as my flu-ridden head, my inflamed sinuses, my doleful weeping eyes. Every now and then a grim staccato cough retched up from my throat and broke the deathly stillness of the night.

Too much on my mind. My thoughts had dwelt for hours on terrible fears and pressing guilt, and these combined with my physical discomfort made me lurch up from bed and snap on the light. I picked up my wristwatch from the desk and glanced at it. 3:40 in the morning. Going to be about three I thought I heard outside some ghostly voice shouting in the street. I thought perhaps it may've been some drunkard returning home, some nameless teenager running up the street and shouting far-off for some imaginary girl. I heard his sharp footsteps very distinctly, puttering up and down the road, heard his ineffectual shouts forming muted, untranslatable sounds. But when I snapped off the desklamp and twitched aside the curtain a little to look outside the street was completely empty and uncannily silent, completely devoid of life. The only movement was a tiny star grimly twinkling its blueish light in the inky blackness of the sky just above the horizon.

So much on my mind. I have to, and will, get up early next morning. But my mind is consumed with too many thoughts to sleep.