Burns Monument After Dark

Here we are again,
and your grey eyes and mine

avoid the distant lights –
still an afterglow remains.

I can deny reality
but what of my fears?

Secrets are just lies
by process of omission:

shadows amongst shadows
and tonight the dark scares me.


20 November 1984
 
 

In 1976, when I was seventeen, I wrote a poem called ‘Burns Statue After Dark’ (#376), my version of Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’. It was a good idea but I don’t really pull it off. There are twenty memorials to Robert Burns in Scotland (at least according to Wikipedia) and it doesn’t really matter which one’s mine but I’ll still keep it to myself. Suffice to say it was the one I passed on the way home from F.’s in the early hours of the morning drained and yet still filled with guilt.

Burns died when he was thirty-seven. I was thirty-five when I wrote this poem. Burns was a womaniser. I wasn’t, although I’ve always preferred the company of women. And yet when I think about my poetry it’s in blocks based on the women in my life. I wrote my first poem for Carrie on 1 December 1996 and, by far, this has been the longest and most productive period of my life even if the poems do appear to be tailing off at the moment. I’ve thought that before.

The romantic in me has always wanted a muse, a Nora Barnacle or Nora Batty perhaps, a battery I could tap into. Or a place I could go to clear my head. Sadly, no. I just have this hellhole in my head that occasionally spits out a good idea but most just spits flames.