The fine people at Escalator (to which I owe my presence at the Fringe) asked me if I could write a poem about Edinburgh that could be included in their press packs. I’m not sure if they used it or not (its kinda about me, rather than the Fringe, so I wouldn’t blame them), but here it is:
When I was five
Edinburgh was assembled
from the games I used to play
with my grandparents.
I turned the cold granite
stairwell of their council block
into a missile silo, ready
to launch me with ten seconds
notice into ancient Rome, or
a rain-blanketed prison planet, or
a world where gravity
was tilted ninety degrees.
Each street twisting into
some new narrative
of which I was the only star.
How unexpected, then,
to return as an adult
and find these fantasies
still running.
As if my parents had forgotten
to switch them off
when we left for England.
Worse, the adventures have
multiplied wildly, had grandchildren
of their own, who now meet up
in late-night bars, swap notes
and fall in love with one another.
It seems they do not miss me, never have.
And now eighty dance routines
live in the sanitised remains of the Odeon
where I watched Ghostbusters.
Two hundred elegies to lovers
sing out from the bandstand where I had
once foiled the assassination
of Glen Michaels from STV.
And the Cowgate,
once a huge stone heart
that let me skateboard through
its ventricles,
is now stocked with quiet rooms
where fifty overweight men
talk about how hard it is to
move back in with your parents.
Without irony, this building
is the closest thing I have to home.
Where next door, up in the ancient aorta
some eighty years earlier,
my infant granddad is sleeping
in a cupboard drawer,
slowly beginning to imagine
an Edinburgh of his own.