Ardnamurchan Point

Who are you to take all these selfies with me,

your lens-mirrors cracking in the sightless winds?

What is this mad dog, barking fearfully at each wave

that rinses my rocked-root feet, watched the while

by spellbound car-lopers? Who owns this dog?

Nobody owns me, or any dog, out here on this ledge.

There are now no human beings within me –

just ghosts of lonely men and stains of imagined lovers.

My innards, my heart, my liver, my gizzard

are all electronica – my guts are all LED viscera.

I stand staunch in the deluge-rhythm of day,

waiting patiently to stab night in both its eyes.

Lazy gazers dub my spinal column Concrete Phallus

because I fuck the news, because I rise erect,

suckled by the spuming sea’s salty mucous:

I call this the phallic fallacy. You see, I never wilt.

There is much more here than metaphor:

I am the singular triumph of tripled borders,

those harshest marches of water, earth and air

where the fire of my filaments burns aloof.

My radiant hand reaches out beyond your labels,

I scorn your nation-frontiers, your stated lines.

Like cactus flowers that bloom only in moonlight,

the lost, the imperilled, turn their heads toward me –

stark-shadowed above cliff and stone-stack:

the one giver in a world of indifferent shapes.

I am too much for you to comprehend for this reason:

perfected against the storm’s annihilating desires,

a vision completed, a hypnotic cycle of light,

I will be alive here long after you are dead.

Until then, I see children in boats, I see my ocean swelling –

for I watch, I warn, I withstand, I welcome, I witness.

Ted Eames, 2021