David Ross Linklater is a poet, originally from Easter-Ross in the Highlands, but now based in Glasgow. David’s collection Black Box was released on the subscription in February 2018. Black Box was illustrated by Tobotix
David is a graduate of the MLitt in Creative Writing course at the University of Glasgow. He then went on to receive a Dewar Arts Award and was shortlisted for a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2015.
Black Box was illustrated by David’s good friend TOBOTIX who is an absolute legend.
Landlady, This House is No Home
Coffee and thunder, my mail is rejections.
A dental check-up but no plans. Flat peaches
warm in the sun, silver cars move and telephones talk. Index and thumb spinning a coin as it coffees and
thunders. Distant voices in song. Avocets dive.
A photograph of everything, a willingness to lose
over and over as fields season out and in.
I haven’t organised but believed there’s time.
I used to be a tree in the mid-morning full of leaves.
I used to be a robe of chrome and white teeth.
Now it’s all gone, how are you?
A garden overgrown on account of the tenant
underserviced, near neglected he withers away:
the rule the streets wear is faceless. Blonde dog
wearing a lightless lamp post, clouds doing nothing.
Looking for a softness that goes against grey
old men and young, wild things like leopards
the pamphlet creased in circulation, increasingly
contorted with each pair of hands. Today
it looks fine, no bends, fairly sleek. As if
last night it was simply realising it was a pamphlet
before settling into its inheritance, as I have mine.
Phoned the landlady, she’s not dead but I have this
feeling that jabs, points and knows it’s time to leave.
Chest of drawers brewing, Colombian coffee
Cracks the glass pot. This home is trying its best not to be.
Park Rd
The coffee is going cold.
An umbrella in the beer garden
has lifted from its socket.
Uniformed children stop
at the lights. The cars peel out.
Roads are remade, these are the edits.
The shop fronts changed, the country
changed. I have grown facial hair.
There are leaders of countries
and leaders of facial hair. I am neither.
I am neither is a perfect sentence.
Faces and countries are curious things
looking for perfection, that’s alright.
The moon does a slow dance,
sky wears the parched breaths of stars.
Romance is not dead, is worn by the streets.
The lights blink thousands.
People cross, are endless, sweet people.
A new pot of coffee to see this through,
another cigarette. The birds demand
the names of everyone alive.
