Introduction
Here you are. A mixed bag, some commissioned, others 'found' and  developed from various prose pieces. Some are songs, not poems (eg. Dunedin,  Project Paradisum, both for classical choirs/ consorts and The Land,  pts 1 and 2 penned orginially for a Celtic Irish-Scottish folk-rock band with art-song female  vocalist). Ned Black's Dream was commissioned for the Royal College of  Surgeons' 500th anniversary via the Scottish Poetry Library - in an  anthology called, 'The Hand That Sees'. Project Paradisum was for an  international Africa AIDS triatholon choir; Conference of the  Birds, a truncated, indigenised version of the Sufi classic, was for nva's  The Hidden Gardens Project in Glasgow; Paradise Gardens Carpet was for  two groups of asylum-seeker and local (mainly) women, one in Glasgow and  the other in Edinburgh, who were making carpets and this poem was  commissioned for the National Museums of Scotland. The 'Glasgow poem' was  commissioned for an anthology of such poems by Glasgow City Council; Hafiz in Scots was for an anthology of poems  translated into Scots, edited by James Robertson; Dancing in Vienna is a  story in poetic prose (based on a nouveau roman by Claude Simon), while  Mistigris is a prose poem - I include both to illustrate the continuum  and also the fact that my prose tends to be intensely 'poetic' (whatever  that means). Easter Monday was commissioned for an anthology re. the  10th anniversary of Nigerian poet, Ken Saro-Wiwa's death, 'Dance the Guns to Silence'.

Some of the others were commissioned for small projects, here and  there, and some were tributes to freinds and family who had died (eg.
 Issa, A Million Candles). The word, 'Cailleach' is Gaelic for 'old woman' and  here it refers to The Old Woman of Winter.

I see language as more than just a means to an end, a materialist tool
 - though it is that of course, stories from A to B, merchants in Sumeria, etc. - but it is also music and theology, the word of God (or whatever it is, is not or may be), a vertical as well as horizontal entity, a set of instruments which can be used to the full and then some: 'more is more'. It's a Persianate concept, perhaps. One can communicate on  many levels simultaneously and often tangentially in a long-term manner,  dropping seeds into the ocean, as a cod-haikuist might say.

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aleph love

a million candles

issa

kun

m/other tongue

paradise gardens carpet

priest

the thoughts of saTan

tulips