2 poems by Ross McCleary

Sonnet 18 Revised For A Two Degree Rise In Global Temperatures

I can no longer compare you to a summer’s day

because the seasons are blending together;

through October, November, December unease

reddens our skin and scorches the boxes that

once contained them. The crisp snows of our

youth are gone and we are left with cancers

and funeral plans. Death rides not a pale

horse for he buried it by the side of the road.

He cries with us, mourns with us. It wasn’t

meant to be like this but it couldn’t have gone

any other way. We were not meant to love

like this but we must. We cannot let this

define us but it will. Our love will not be

killed for it is eternal, undying, and certain,

unlike the days ahead.

Church Drawer

O muse, sing in me of wasted hours

and sleepless nights and tax returns and

hangovers and self-loathing and

cowardice and bad diets and abhorrence.

Anxiety and fascism and body ache

and being fired and dwindling funds

and loss of appetite. And I reckon

I could have solved cold fusion. Or

the climate crisis. Or been less of

a twat. I could have filled the

silence with useful things or

taught the demons under my bed

a better way. Instead I tossed

them in a drawer with all my other shit

and let it decay. Become void. And now

inside the drawer there is a church,

a well lit church, with pews filled

with people who I will never see again.

They sit and listen, o muse, as a choir sings.

Can you hear the revulsion, the guilt,

the bum notes? It’s not their fault because

I can’t sing either, but they’re trying. And

their voices fill the room and the waves

that don’t reflect back worm their way into the stone

and in time the stone will crumble to dust,

reconvene in the earth, become stone again

become another church, where the songs will

be glorious and heartfelt and hopefully in tune. But until then:

listen! The harmonies of incoherent rage

are reaching their climax,

burning the air with self-doubt.

Hear, o muse, the unedited drafts of my

despair, the dissonance of my own disappointment;

hear them call out, hear them sing a song

of everything and nothing. And if

I close my eyes, if I plead with myself,

if I concentrate, I can walk amongst the cloisters.

As the song ends and they turn the page

to the next one, I hear disaster in the silence.

And for a split second before I am cast out

I understand where it all went wrong.

______________

Ross McCleary is from Edinburgh. His work has been published by Ink Sweat and Tears, Intrepidus, God's Cruel Joke, Extra Teeth, and Litro. He believes in repetition and Carly Rae Jepsen.