The Western Gate

I would go to New Orleans,
where the river sweats old songs and rot,
but the gods are franchised, the dead commodified,
and voodoo—once a bone-deep grammar—
now clinks in cellophane,
a religion reduced to trinkets
sold beneath neon crosses and credit signs.
The spirits have been priced out of their own streets.

I would go to Salem,
but its witches are cartoons now,
their burnings rendered safe for children.
The past has been scrubbed and powdered,
the noose replaced with novelty hats.
Even the screams are piped-in sound effects.

I would go to Cairo,
to the tombs split open like veins.
We mine the dead as we mine oil,
crowbar eternity, siphon wonder,
then stand slack-jawed before what we have profaned.
No reverence—only appetite.
We admire the corpse
after stripping it.

I would go to the Festival of the Dead,
but I am told death there is sometimes literal,
and besides—
the women burn like saints painted in blood and sun,
and though its wrong to desire,
what art is noise without this
and my unguarded hunger
would summon knives.
Desire makes enemies faster than borders.
And I wish not to be the plaque viewed as testament to the city of dead.

I would go to the Black Forest,
where time ticks madly in wooden throats,
where beer loosens the mind’s padlocks
and the doors fly open—
out pours birdsong,
wild, disordered, irreversible.
A forest that teaches lunacy gently.

I would go to Norway,
to ribs of stone and frozen breath,
to woods haunted by album covers and old gods,
but the cost of living is steep,
and everything—even joy—
is preserved in ice,
perhaps that’s contrived;
as though warmth itself were suspect.

I would go north,
to Moray Firth, Nairn, Auldearn,
to the Highlands where my name meant something,
wear my MacKay tartan
and vanish among heritage ghosts,
one more relic smiling for cameras.

Or to Ireland,
though my diddycoy blood roamed too freely—
I know not where the hat was laid.
and down in Cornwall Pengersick Castle now hosts weddings,
where once my dead drew circles
for a devil whose name has rusted away.

Still, I remain—
in a railway cottage
pulsing quietly in West London,
surrounded by books, by music, by love.
One side paved with celebrity light,
the other muttering with addicts,
cells, and unfinished threats.
A narrow mercy between extremes.

Yet, truth,
spoken without romance:
I hate cities.
I hate their stone lungs and mortar hearts,
their stacked lives, their borrowed skies,
their crowds that press like wet clay.
Cities are monuments to forgetting,
built upward to avoid looking inward.
And there with thoughts illusions fail,
do not take me to another city.
Any city.

Take me to trees.
Put me where the roots remember more than people,
where no one is watching,
where solitude has teeth and mercy.
Give me a pen, a pad, and enough silence
to hear myself decay and bloom.

There—
alone in the woods—
I will write the truest gothic horror I know:
not monsters,
but architects and builders, termites of the cast,
and the long mistake of stone and mortar
believing it could replace the forest.