Scotland or Bust

Let's go to Scotland and trace our past lives. Let's go, russet autumn colors on our backs and a Scotch Whiskey Experience. Come on, Scottish ballet and the International Storytelling Festival. Please, the High Street and boutiques. Let's go, the National Galleries and gardens. Come on, rooftop restaurants and basement bars. Please, clay target shooting and photography on the beach. Highland dances and bagpipe riddles. And if not, I'll go toss the caber of rejection.

So I go.

Traveling is my blood's flow and a quiet drifter carries my soul. I can't leave it all here, all of me, can I? Yes, gypsy fortune has hold of my hand, and fortunately there is written poetry of me and foreign lands romanticizing, like the air in a bagpipe that becomes warm and encircling. Enticing and inviting and consuming and stealing and unrelenting and timeless, the edifice of land and ocean as one, intersecting convivially, in a vivid expanse of harmony. And I am hastened to keep searching for its beckoning pulse, its sweat of streams, its matinee of blue, because I haven't broken its untrammeled heart yet, not that it seems very frangilbe in its steadfast environs. Only the dying memorials have apologized, under their pallid curfews. Hand in hand, Scotland walks w/ me, under a glistening chandelier moon, and the shame burns my eyes, like low billows of monochrome smoke from a blistering yellow flame. Mother dies for me to walk next to her, though unworthy as I to imprint her soil w/ my roaming gait, and the shame covers my heart, the heavy weight of ancestry.

But I go.

That high place of mulls and inlets draws me inward, to its loched-ness embrace, where mysteries never wear thin. Or maybe it's Stevenson on the Royal Mile. Or Franz Ferdinand in a stained glass pub. Or tying tartans on sun-catching turrets. Or crop circles you can only see fully, carved on open meadow, on iris skin, after you've ascended toward space or heaven, whichever manifested first. Or the Gaelic secrets told thru the wood & mirrors in The Barony. Or the osprey because they fought extinction while wearing a migrant's crown. Or the regicide in Macbeth. Or the Frames who thought they were still in Ireland. Or Paul McCartney filming the Fool on the Hill w/ his zipper down. Or a mini-cooper w/ a proud Scottish flag painted abstractly on top. Or blackface sheep, like trembling rock stars, singing long vibrato notes that float away. I would like to elucidate the rationale better; all I can say is I am so inclined. And I crave somewhere else to hike, a new dominion, the range of motion I have to live in. Perhaps I will reconnoiter twisty paths w/out a compass and dangle my feet over an overhung ocean, while pressed hyacinth colors my hair, and where I can drop American coins just to hear their rush. And then I'll scrape the word "nostalgia" on a thick tree.

With sgian dubh on right leg, I go.