My kingdom for a Dimplex

We’d not embraced in Scotland
until February 2009,
though I’d played the voyeur at times:
you loitering thinly around
some tramp, or defiantly buttressing
the Occupy camp; hankering and
bleak like a possession.

That night in February
I returned home to a
blaze of ice, each breath a
shape-shifting mist of
knives; water in vases scared
stiff at your coming.
You bullied the cornice out of its

opulence; made the fireplace’s
form choke on its function,
and came and laid with
me in bed, too close for
comfort. And stayed the night
lecturing my inner ear
on history, and how everything

I’d loved to date that was rock, and
brass and stained glass and
wrought iron – and even vaguely
Victorian – was a lie; and
clamoured instead, in your icy
camel breath, of poverty. The
next evening, I executed you on a pyre

atop an open fire, a beggar’s Costa cup
on the Cowgate slightly heavier.