He is a self-taught poet and has had work featured in Neu! Reekie! #Untitled Two, And Other Poems, Ink, Sweat and Tears among others. He has one collection, Imports, published in 2014 by Appletree Writers' Press, and a pamphlet in preparation.
Your Driver
clamps a cigarette
between red lips;
she straps her seatbelt over
then reaches for the lighter.
She’s marched you up the Spanish Steps
to sit among the students,
to stall a while with those who
work less,
work better,
and beat you
at surrendering to pleasure.
She’s brought you mists of 1910
on stairs at Rue Foyatier.
You caught Lapin Agile
and then she brought you down again
to breathe in the boiled rice
glued on plates of paper.
She’s strapped you in the back seat
of a sleek, sick and numberless car.
Direction: city limits.
Destination: waste ground.
The Leisure Jets
From rattling steelworks fences,
gusts give way to rumble.
Shonky dawn detects
cheap thunder ploughing on,
the grim sound of business.
The urgency of leisure jets
roars above a dirty shirt
behind whose flannel
light bulges, belly forward;
light spills and spreads and sparks
tobacco. Light ricochets off crutches.
Light disappears off radar
in red brick parks
where plastic bags
play tattered crow
propped dead in bitter branches.
And rumble, rumble…leisure jets
scramble for Winter Sun.
Scottish Poet Roy Moller
The World is Waiting for the Sunwise Turn
Recollection
offers precise location
of my dumbest utterance,
worst-judged kiss
and saying no when I
quaked for yes.
Recollection
splutters out map reference
for acts of wasted capitulation.
Sleep comes
in fits and starts and fits and starts,
like all my other effort.
My eyes take the pulse
of inanimate objects.
I will myself to a drugged horizon,
lit like a prison ship,
welded to silence
till sky starts squawking.
Building riffs from stuck ignition,
birds scream various shades of murder
and kill the hour of confession.
It was Roy Moller’s ailment, dyspraxia, something I had never heard of, that prompted me to read his poems which I admire a great deal. Also his suggestion that he is a “self-taught” poet. I always thought “self-taught” poets are the only kind and then I remembered all the MFA programs and degrees in creative writing available to aspirants. This confirmed my belief that “self-taught” poets are the real ones unless someone with that native ability spends the money to pursue one of those degrees. Maybe to teach later in one of those programs in order to eat while writing poems. I still think you either have to write or you don’t but if you have to write you may not mix well in a poetry workshop.
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