2nd place, 2019 Robert Burns Poetry Competition - unpublished section
INGRESS/EGRESS
(or: I went, I earned, I capitulated & returned)
that lucky country
where White is Big as Sun in Too Clear Sky
where I took my lover; left then
for another golden lover
& the money in the mines
and there was money
and there was love
and there was no money
and there was no love
and there was death &
where to roll in pubs of jugs
with Union men before frozen taps
below screens of discarded chicken bones
where to roll in gutters
playing knives with Italians
sharpening tongues against curbside tables
where to roll balls in corner pockets
with Sudanese & stub out cigarettes
to enjoy injera with vinegar lips
where to roll down highways
in Lebanese jockeys' sports cars
with golden mustaches & thumbs plugged into eye sockets
shots fired I had to take a ride
the Undertaking over to a home more broken
than that wich was as I’d left it
now a long grey land of saltpetre sky
phosphorescent & divisionous
a decade foreign, not lost
a decade spent, not wasted
now with none to trust to guide me
and I also A Little Boy Lost then
with the blood on his palms
offered too many rides to too many stations
with Wonders before, to Eat in extreme
to belly scrape the bottom
to come up to air
to return to forgotten
the soil beneath my bare feet loaming
where colours blink in a days afternoon
yet to capitulate
yet to return to me.