Hallway After Midnight

The Dalry Road Project

URBAN

WRITING

What is the
Dalry Road Project?

The Dalry Road Project is a series of interconnected prose-poetry fragements tracing a city, a voice, and a state of mind across a long night and its aftermath. Set in and around Edinburgh, the project unfolds through sentence-driven texts shaped by streets, rooms, memory, and movement.

The first book moves outward, following nocturnal walks through the city where weather, light, and fleeting encounters shape long, breath-heavy prose fragments. The second turns inward, set largely over the course of a single night in enclosed spaces, where drink, conversation, and recollection blur linear time and allow the past to intrude. The third looks toward aftermath, as morning arrives without resolution and the fragments grow quieter, attending to fatigue, light, and continuation.

cities don’t sleep
They mutter
This is transcription

BOOK 1: DALRY ROAD

Streetlight syntax.
Rain-slowed memory.
Fragments written where the night doesn’t quite let go.

Book 2: Broughton Square

Set over the course of one night,
these prose fragments trace drink, memory, and the sudden intimacy of seeing who should no longer be there. – ONGOING –

BOOK 3: MORNINGSIDE

What remains after the rooms empty.
Light, fatigue, unfinished thoughts.
Prose fragments learning how to stay.
-PLANNED –

⊕

“Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream.”

– Hugh MacDiarmid

Softagain the city seeps back in through the soles, seepstone seepbone, ah wetdark Edinburgh o’ the hinging hours where the lamps wink-wink their tired gold and the streets sigh like old men settling into coats they never quite take off, and I’m walking-not-walking, drifting my frame through the slowspill lanes where every step rings a bell in some other time, clangmemory clangmaybe, and the rain keeps up its gentle arguing with the roofs—tapnow tapthen hushagain—like it’s trying to teach me a language I nearly knew once.

Faces come loose from faces, peel and blur, a womanlaugh becoming a womanshade becoming just the idea of warmth passing leftward through the night, and my mind does that old jitterjive, hopscotch heartbeat, one-two stumble, as the city threads me through itself, alleyveins, stairwell ribs, pubdoor lungs breathing heat and malt and something unconfessed. the city doesn’t speak plain. It murmursround, talks sideways, lets meaning pool then slip away, and I follow because that’s what you do when the street’s got your name folded small in its mouth.

Cobbletalk underfoot now, clackclack sermonstones chanting their longlow gospel—walkboy walk, keepgoing keepgone—each slab remembering a different shoe, a different hurry, a different shame rinsed thin by weather and years. I feel it humming up through my legs, this oldcity pulse, granitegrandmother beat, telling me I belong only while moving, only while listening.

And oh the night loosens, the mindriver swells, wordfoam slaps my thoughts into newshapes—rainname, streetname, lostname—until I’m no longer sure where I end and the city begins, only that we’re breathing together for a moment, ah sharedlung hush, before the light comes pale and polite and pretends none of this ever happened.

Still walking.
Still becoming.