Writing: Ollie Turbitt
Illustration: Dani Rothmann
Ollie Turbitt is a student, musician, and writer based in Edinburgh. His creative inspirations include avant-garde music scenes, DIY culture, the Beat Poets, Zen Buddhism, lots of coffee, and the experience of living in the city. So far, Ollie has self-published one volume of poetry, and another one is on the horizon. For all enquiries contact: ollie@turbitt.co.uk. 'Everything, Nameless' is a stream-of-consciousness representation of my attempts to find my own identity in and around Edinburgh.
Crowds gather, dissolve, regroup & disperse
thick sheets of harshest rain
obscure everything -
I’m here again,
tucked into the neatest corner
of a generic coffee-shop,
drink half-drunk,
talking to myself
& searching high above the heads of everyone,
wet, displaced & grumbling
through the blanched glass
& out into the cold -
myself reflected
equally cold & empty;
me with Roman nose,
inherited anglophile attitudes
& everything else
that separates
me.
I know I exist
somewhere in the city
somewhere
between the first cup of own-brand coffee at dawn & the long walk home from some student pub in a lamp-post auburn haze at night,
between the dying autumn leaves at Greyfriars - a blood-red footprint on black snow - again & again & again,
between monumental piles of withered books & yellowed pamphlets, designed to remove myself from here & now,
between familiar cobbled labyrinths & cold-hearted brutalist wasteland & overwhelming light under the motorway,
between tourist information & an empire of tea-cosies, overpriced whiskies & I-heart-Scotland shirts,
between shaking hands with the university Marxists & accidentally befriending fascists on the way home,
between old comrades & a constantly renewing fear for the future,
between a hundred rows of disavowed teenagers, packed like crestfallen sardines in some grim club, awaiting salvation night after night,
between god knows who,
between the conversations of everyone else, everywhere else: endless supermarket newly-weds, gap-year radicalists & nightclub romantics, all on the same page -
between lucid depictions of Christ in the Cathedral & the resolutely godless high-rise utopia that suffocates it -
between genuine ideals at Holyrood & transplanted fervour manifested through pale crosses on cheap foreign fabric,
between pale crosses in the graveyard
between me & myself
between me & myself
I still haven’t found it
crowds gather, dissolve, regroup & disperse
thick sheets of harshest rain
obscure everything -
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