some payload, linger at neighbours’ windows

with trauma sensors all lit up,

to rat each other out

with the assistance of an airborne scrap

of the 21st-century unconscious

beside which the old machines of delivery appear

inefficient, comical, overlarge, like a Quaalude,

quaint as any former bond between

the watcher and the watched.

Laws of causality and continuity reside in

the vertical din. For over such forms as my heart

is wont to range, did my eyes then range . . .

MERCENARIES KNOW THERE’S ALWAYS ROOM FOR SPECIALISTS IN THE MARKET

“Security contractor” is the term preferred

by a growing industry of private actors who,

at the sharp end of operations,

aren’t kidding ourselves about the economy.

Money is a country I can take with me.

I walk through the battlefield

as through my home town, self-actuated,

valued for my talents. In this territory

also known as Fuck You. Your home town

is now my home town.

These abstract northern wastes

are even more so when you’re in them

fighting alongside those you’ve fought against.

The Picts, fortunately, are unmistakable

in their fondness for nudity and tattoos,

in their grim, barbaric language

whose struggle to remain alive is bold

and clearly futile. Homer, in Smyrna, blackwater

of the Meles flowing through him,

knew some individuals are born in combat

and others ruined, frantic with belief in meaning

as a thing outside them

they can’t find. All saved, nonetheless,

from poverty, dishonour, boredom, irrelevance.

A durable disorder is in our best interest

to sustain, and loyalty to a paycheque purer

than to a man, or god, and more flexible.

Non-linear. Mission-based.

If the plan does not fit the game you see,

call a few audibles, and change it.

THE MERIDIAN

Fishers, who mapped Kilrenny steeple

as a marker to direct them at sea, call it St. Irnie

to this day. I can’t bring you back.

My imagination’s not enough. Or maybe

it was lost with you offshore among the rigs,

between domestic and foreign sectors, its beacon

unattended. A loved thing shared and doubled

is in solitude never whole again.

The harbour’s full of sightsee daycruisers,

private recreational vessels, a few trawlers left

to cross swords for Talisman Energy’s odd jobs

on their bellies in the mud. When the sea,

even knowing what it knows, dares flood back in here

with whom will I watch flat fish rummaging

in the sediment, the Canadian sport fisherman

in new gear, baiting his hook with a fillet?

WHOSE DEATHS WERE RECORDED OFFICIALLY AS CASUALTIES OF “THE BATTLE OF MAY ISLAND”

1918, last of January, not late, but dark for hours

Sliding under the Forth Bridge toward the North Sea

Cruisers, battleships, destroyers, and the K-boats

Big, steam-driven pigs

Wallowing in the troughs and undulations

Under radio silence, and no lights

Pursuant to worthless intel

To opinions more plausible in formation than they might otherwise appear

En masse, you can’t see past them

Is he still a boy