Now Is Never Soon Enough

Light crashes in now, pale thief with no manners left, no apologies, just the overdue bill shoved under the door, and my eyes pry open on the couch that’s cradled me through the night like a drunk mother too stubborn to let go, sag deeper, warmer with my own sour sweat and the ghost-ghost of spilled lager. The room’s gutted clean, considerably emptied is the velvet lie; truth is hollowed, carved-out, chairs tipped like soldiers who quit the war mid-battle, glasses weeping sticky rings into scarred wood, ashtrays bloated with yesterday’s confessions nobody wants to claim. Only a handful of shapes still breathing the stale recycled air: girl with head slumped on armrest staring into pure nowhere, a guy in oversized jumper scrolling blue death across his cheekbones like he’s trying to read his own tombstone, another slumped wall-ward trying to dissolve into plaster, couple near the speaker murmuring so low the words drown before they reach anyone’s ears.

From the old scratched box, speaker seams splitting, wires coughing, “How Soon Is Now” leaks out slow, and the tremolo guitar shivers like rain hammering corrugated tin, and Morrissey’s voice curls in lonely, tender, knife-sharp: I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar…

It’s deep. At this hour it is. Rib-deep. The song doesn’t play the room, it becomes the room, turns the emptied space into a cathedral for atheists who still drop to their knees when no one’s watching, and I sit up slow and feel my spine creak like wet floorboards after a flood, and my mouth tastes streetstone, old want, yesterday’s cigarette ash, last night’s bad decisions. How soon is now. The question doesn’t beg for answers, it squats heavy in the chest, like wet wool draped over the lungs, refusing to dissolve, refusing to leave.

Now the room’s much bigger without the swarm, the air thinner, colder, and every sound knife-sharp: the radiator tick-ticks down like a cooling engine giving up, ice settles in a forgotten glass with small crystal sighs, the speaker hisses its last desperate effort to keep the tremolo alive. The girl hasn’t blinked, or maybe she has and time slipped in unforeseen directions, staring at the wall.

Me, halfway vertical now, still becomes, still breathes the same recycled breath everyone else is exhaling, that same stale cathedral air of leaving. How soon is now. The lyric loops back, the guitar shivers through the floorboards, and the thought unravels fast, the thread yanked hard: maybe now is never soon enough, maybe now is the train we keep missing because we’re always late to the platform of our own damn lives, coat flapping, shoes untied, excuses still smoking in the pocket like cheap cigarettes, when the body whispers I don’t know how to stand in a room without cracking something soft and irreplaceable inside. The emptied room has cut the fat, and left only the night-bones, the ones that matter when the music stops pretending it’s happy, when the lights come up and there’s nothing left to hide behind.

Róisín flickers in again, just her precise absence in this thinned-out space, the way she’d fill it without effort, look at the tipped chairs and say “Well, that’s that then” in that quiet mercy-voice that makes endings feel almost like grace. Song keeps going, relentless, gorgeous in its refusal to hurry: I am human and I need to be loved just like everybody else does…

Aye, ´words hit different at this hour, when the party’s carcass still steams, when the last guests are too tired for lies, too tired for anything but the truth leaking out sideways. Human. Need. Loved. Small nouns grown monstrous in the quiet, grown huge enough to swallow the room. I look at the shapes — strangers who were comrades for three sweating hours, now just heartbeats with fading outlines — and the ache flares old and familiar: we’re all asking the same dumb question in different keys, waiting for someone to answer without mockery, without walking out the door, without turning the lights off on us.

The track fades into itself, starts again, a repeat set by tired fingers or exhausted machine, same as us, same as everything. Light strengthens outside, grey bleeds to silver, city sounds creep back in: a bin lorry growls low like a hangover, and the city wakes up slow, pretending last night was just another line in its endless, indifferent ledger.

I don’t move yet, because the couch still holds me well, loyal in its broken-spring way, loyal in its sagging refusal to let go. And now — whenever now bothers to arrive — sits dead center, patient, unhurried, waiting for us to catch up, give up, or finally say yes to the small, criminally vulgar, stupidly human act of needing someone, anyone, to stay just a little longer.

Dalry Road is a book-length prose-poetry project set in Edinburgh, unfolding through long, rhythm-driven fragments that trace a city across night, memory, and movement. Neither novel nor traditional poetry collection, the book occupies a liminal space between narrative and lyric, where sentences stretch, loop, and accumulate like footsteps on wet stone.The text follows a wandering first-person voice moving through streets, bus stops, stairwells, and fleeting encounters in the hours before morning. Weather, light, and sound are not background but active forces: rain writes, streetlamps mutter, stone remembers. The city is experienced from within, not described from a distance, and language mirrors this intimacy through dense, breath-heavy phrasing and a jazz-like cadence influenced by writers such as James Joyce and Jack Kerouac.

Rather than telling a linear story, Dalry Road assembles an atmosphere. Past and present blur, faces recur in altered forms, and memory intrudes without warning. The fragments resist resolution, favouring repetition, drift, and sensation over explanation. What emerges is a portrait of urban consciousness at night—half-dreaming, half-alert—where walking becomes a way of thinking and listening.