livestream, hope street
outside she flexes in her silver sequin sheath
and everyone watches her birl her arse to the
damp-beat-inside-behind the window’s neon
breath vapour pinking sinking into bright
trickles from stark lanes where guys lean into
walls and almost sleep | at red a yellow car
spits loud flames and two guys closing up the
bar next door shoot fresh skin-fades round
the grille pale soldiers sync’d in white tees
black trousers armoured in the doorway with
creatine muscles they watch the tarmac show
and laugh out mouthfuls of smoke dragging
end-of-shift bins out back | green and four
with sculpted hair emerge through peacock
fumes, get bounced before they even reach
the door for some reason (or other) while two
baldies across the street shove chests, harder,
harder, hug | everybody’s wrecked and raw—
nipples prod t-shirt logos but nobody knows
it’s cold knuckles of the buckled jangle in
front of food bikes uphill speaking slo-mo
uncertain gradients holding up till the next
bar dangling on knees needing home | the
bartenders spread into trainers bolt the grille,
neck a pill and pelt downhill ‘cross uber surge
—cartoons in the headlights—catching up
with the night | ahead a crumpled girl holds
the pavement like a soft golden boulder while
a six-pal phalanx armed with phone torches
scans her goosebumped flesh for incel
punctures groundfrost blackens the rim of
her and the guys shocked nearly stop but the
pals have set her right way up and they bound
over her melted silhouette as if she’s still there
inside the club
white breath rising
they can’t get her
out of their head
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2022. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2022 was Ifor ap Glyn.
Editor’s notes:
I loved the exuberant energy of this piece, the words unbound by conventional sentence structure and punctuation as they spill across the page. Six scenes are described separately against the background of a city night out: a woman dancing in the street, barmen taking out the bins, a queue outside a club, a girl collapsed on the pavement with her ‘six-pal phalanx’ around her, and so on. It’s late night/ early morning. but this prose poem captures a part of the city that still pulsates with an unspent energy: ‘baldies (…) shove chests, harder, harder’, and although others are ‘dangling on knees needing home’, (yes, we’ve all been there!) the bartenders ‘bolt the grille, neck a pill and pelt downhill’ to ‘catch up with the night’. Wonderful!
Author’s notes:
When my teenage son’s restaurant shift finished too late for him to get public transport home, I’d sometimes pick him up in town to save a taxi fare. Waiting outside each night I’d watch the same characters flow by – workers ticking down time towards the end of shifts, revellers at various stages of having a good or bad time, bouncers bored outside the karaoke bar next door. The glass windscreen between me and them made it a spectacle, hence the title livestream, and a stream of consciousness style fitted the constantly shifting scroll of moments coinciding and rushing past each other. Alongside the routine, I wanted to capture the urgency and vulnerabilities of all these possible nights. The hope. I often reference news stories when writing, and at this time there was a rash of disturbing reports about women being spiked with needles on nights out by embittered incels (men who blame women for their involuntary celibacy). The detail about the torches is a real experience that was recounted to me.
