It's so scary I'm always weary of new faces and I leave traces of salt in my wake
I'm strolling, drunk as a punk, past a house. Bright yellow eyes. The thin transparent membrane lets me see.
Your son's in the other room lit by tv. You're in the kitchen mixing drinks, I think and, in lieu of familial hug, you give him some spirit.
I've been out and about i've had my fill of wind-milling people and slow-swilling chat. Semantically a worthless night but I must be fuller cause i need to pee. And that's that.
The Also-ran (first poem i've made that i've liked
Hey stupid title, not that i've liked, first that i've liked IN A WHILE
Also-ran
The Also-ran went down without any show shod legs buckled shedding rider and crop. The turf absorbed the thunder-clump. At that speed, to stop scars rump and everything riding on it
They think the carpus pierced the throat, the radius the lung. It undulates, the skin on its flank - A last little ripple like the flags on the course before, with mad eyes staring, the wind dies and the standards swoon with excitement. .
Robin thoroughly enjoyed splitting and stacking logs, they were two sides of the same coin. Neat. A good split is just that, neat. The axe had to become like
This is a couple of paragrpahs (the first ones, seoc horror) of something I'm writing that I thought i'd put up to see what people though. see if i'm going in the right direction
Obviously will critique people's pieces back (I hope I have been anyway! )
The dog was named Seoc.
‘Jock!’ I shouted out. My girlfriend Lauren and I were riding in the car on the way back from New Galloway, puppy in the back seat, trying to think of a name for it. Her lips pursed, her eyebrows fell and I knew her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth before she laughed ‘No, don’t be stupid’. I looked at her pointedly and said ‘I was being jocular’. She didn’t laugh, but she did give a slightly condescending smirk, so I was grateful. This drive really had been going on too long: I don’t think her tether could stretch all the way to New Galloway and back again and any respite from the steely, silent anger was welcomed. The metaphorical red mist was literally suffocating me. Well, not literally, but close enough.
9 hours we’d been driving; whilst New Galloway was only around 150 miles from Perth. If the idiot women they’d bought the dog from had told us she’d changed the deal or, rather, that her twat of a husband had, we wouldn’t have had to drive back half the way we came looking for a damn cash machine. Trust her to live out in the middle of nowhere, stupid cow. Her children sounded ****ing retarded as well. I remarked as much to Lauren. She agreed and we both cathartically and explicitly examined their future career options. In the end, cackling, we both agreed that they’d end up as colliers because they thought they’d get to play with dogs. Later I remembered the littlest child wailing as we took the golden creature away and I felt guilty about this cruel, anarchic outburst.
In the end we named the dog Seoc, apparently any link to heritage would do. That said I was also quite fond of it because of the strange shock of white hair that carved a canyon through the beasts back from hind haunch to head. We checked with a friend to make sure it was pronounced 'shawk'. It was. We’d laughed (well, I’d laughed) at the idea of calling him Jock, but upon arriving back at our home we’d were so drained we decided that simply slapping a Gaelic translation on top would do fine. You see, we both suffered from what we’d taken to calling the Scottish malaise:
Scot-tish ma-laise N 1. A condition that causes one to yearn for a culture that has been thrust all around one, but never successfully pinned to the donkey in question. 2. A condition whereby the sufferer reports several symptoms of ‘Scottishness’ and exaggerates said symptoms. Apparently so as to ingratiate one’s self with the local tourist board.
She had it worse than me, but we both still had an alarming propensity for casually reading up on Gaelic or reading poems in Scots (what is Scots anyway?). We laughed at the American tourists who came to buy turf and wear kilts whilst we frantically constructed a different, subtler, identity from the tourist board;s cast-offs. The quirks of history that weren’t quite quirky enough to make it into the tour. The traits that, as a nation, we’d managed to lay claim to. What other nation hoards traits? Dour? Oh yes, we’re all dour here. Everyone! Have you met Callum? Dourest guy I know. Have you met Stacy? Oh what a lass, what a fine, bonnie wee lass. It's despicable.
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meh!'s blogs, last updated : June 20, 2009
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