David McLean received a master of arts degree from Stockholm University 1999 and an unrelated bachelor of arts degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1982. McLean was born in Wales in 1960 but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He has been submitting seriously for about a year and, as of the end of October 2007, has around 335 poems in, or accepted by, 148 magazines online or in print. A chapbook “a hunger for mourning” is available from Erbacce Press and Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/content/1338495. More information at http://www.myspace.com/david_mcleanand a blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com/, where there are links to various online publications.

the skull in these woods

as i smoke more vapour and waste
in the night, my pollution's token mote,
i like to think that in these woods
that dress the hills black as smouldering
mourning, there is a skull
that lies under a tree gray and moulders
cold "like a peppermint eaten away"
it grins and is blind and has waited,
blind, a thousand years lonely
under its unchosen tree, it lies there,
cold, and it is waiting for me,
when i too shall be dead and stone,
and we, we shall be free

a fish in the night

this city lies like a fish in the night
and smells of meaning and the resurrection
of the living,

death lies here like a fish in our fingers
and deviates,
the productive coffin and these lungs

that work like ovens, billowing their reasoned
smoke, seasoning this semantic effluvium,
pulmonary magic that tears

a heart apart, the impasse where interpenetrative
interpretation falters, looks back, circumspectly
rejecting (the fact that)

there are facts, looks back and
starts

 

under the rubber

the raptured erasure, under the rubber
sous rature, rubber that erases
love's blubber, erased trace love
was nothing yet, erased faces
and dangerous zombies, a/theological
answers and rotten god's written
as the rapt rubber's writ, valid
still as this, anachronic bliss
faintly comic dog's bodikins
titties miss, Miss, outside the text
is just another textual set of broken
breasts ... sex,
and yet