GUEST POET: Rowan Holligan
Old grey resumé
Standing on the street
Looking out and transverse
The heavy steps of rheumatoid coughs
Clobbering the soul into a waking nightmare
Suddenly weak
Suddenly opaque
Looking into the reflection of murky puddles
And wondering
Wherefore?
What?
This creeping feeling
This eternal dread
Of irrelevance
Of pacing
Of circular notions and wandering feats
The tremors beneath a winter sun
That beats
Like the silence of a skinless drum, and tells
Of its own lying past and innumerable imagined futures
To grasp the heart of something not quite defined
And catch at the breath
Of a rasping cold monolith in the mind that quakes at the thought of up
And bellows into the night in a squalid dread call
Too late!
Too late!
The departing train
The whistle of fading memory and fog of steaming coffee
Set upon the steel table in Glasgow’s late winter early spring alleyway full with muckers
Going about their own terrible loops.
The haired men
The bearded wakes
The spinning tome
Inexorable masts upon a doldrum conversation with the past
And where do they go?
These little observations
And promises of presence
Where do they go?
All those useless regrets
Fettled by the fire, those shards of light
A summer sun on the back
That seems to point to the open door groaning at the end of a long maze
a gauntlet lain, remaining unrun until the last minute has already elapsed
and the spin of time
that eternal rub
has collapsed into another unspoken dream,
just a hopeless fragment placed inside the pocket of a dancing woman in the field
bereft of lucidity, she no longer cares
the weight of this burden
the humanity of it
too light to bear, too buoyant
it too, like the lying autumn leaves
swirled in a vexed expression of humour
‘ah well’ she says
‘it was you all along’
The great deceiver, that stole even from your own mother, from your own self
And pushed, into the final night, an epistle crumpled between the lurid glass
Floated down a stream of unconsciousness
To lose
Too late
It rushed away
Into an ashen morning, of naked trees, and half-baked stars
drooping from the sky, hanging on the moon.
A vast expanse of peace
That welcomed the doldrum and melancholy of before
but was left with an empty table
just two steaming coffee cups
and a bowl of untouched sugar
a silent farewell
an endless goodbye
Rowan Holligan, an absent Aberdonian, is an inconspicuous member of Berlin's poetic scene, scribbling the strangeness into stranger lines.
Standing on the street
Looking out and transverse
The heavy steps of rheumatoid coughs
Clobbering the soul into a waking nightmare
Suddenly weak
Suddenly opaque
Looking into the reflection of murky puddles
And wondering
Wherefore?
What?
This creeping feeling
This eternal dread
Of irrelevance
Of pacing
Of circular notions and wandering feats
The tremors beneath a winter sun
That beats
Like the silence of a skinless drum, and tells
Of its own lying past and innumerable imagined futures
To grasp the heart of something not quite defined
And catch at the breath
Of a rasping cold monolith in the mind that quakes at the thought of up
And bellows into the night in a squalid dread call
Too late!
Too late!
The departing train
The whistle of fading memory and fog of steaming coffee
Set upon the steel table in Glasgow’s late winter early spring alleyway full with muckers
Going about their own terrible loops.
The haired men
The bearded wakes
The spinning tome
Inexorable masts upon a doldrum conversation with the past
And where do they go?
These little observations
And promises of presence
Where do they go?
All those useless regrets
Fettled by the fire, those shards of light
A summer sun on the back
That seems to point to the open door groaning at the end of a long maze
a gauntlet lain, remaining unrun until the last minute has already elapsed
and the spin of time
that eternal rub
has collapsed into another unspoken dream,
just a hopeless fragment placed inside the pocket of a dancing woman in the field
bereft of lucidity, she no longer cares
the weight of this burden
the humanity of it
too light to bear, too buoyant
it too, like the lying autumn leaves
swirled in a vexed expression of humour
‘ah well’ she says
‘it was you all along’
The great deceiver, that stole even from your own mother, from your own self
And pushed, into the final night, an epistle crumpled between the lurid glass
Floated down a stream of unconsciousness
To lose
Too late
It rushed away
Into an ashen morning, of naked trees, and half-baked stars
drooping from the sky, hanging on the moon.
A vast expanse of peace
That welcomed the doldrum and melancholy of before
but was left with an empty table
just two steaming coffee cups
and a bowl of untouched sugar
a silent farewell
an endless goodbye
2019
Rowan Holligan, an absent Aberdonian, is an inconspicuous member of Berlin's poetic scene, scribbling the strangeness into stranger lines.
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