Caelan Scott

Underneath The Christmas Tree

A short poetry collection featuring festive poems about love, family and the cold winter months. A great stocking filler or great gift.

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About the author

Caelan is a nonbinary author of speculative fiction and poetry, inspired by their youth amongst the moors of Yorkshire, England, where ordinary lives are often entwined with the unusual. Caelan is also pursuing a career in healthcare, enjoys walking their Shih-Tzu and playing cozy games such as Fallout.

"The Night Talks" explores the world after dark, when what we know for certain, our beliefs, our hopes and fears merge. "Packing my records for Mars" is a speculative fiction poetry collection exploring the end of the world and what comes after. All internal artwork and book covers are done by the author, who wants to make the most of dabbling in art and an overpriced Adobe subscription.

Caelan is currently working on a speculative science fiction novel, loosely inspired by their latest poetry book.

About Packing My Record For Mars

Meet Ed, a man who considers himself unlucky enough to live at the end of time, and his daughter, Lelana, a kid with buckets of hope and an uncertain future. His wife, who finds herself traversing the boundary between this life and the next. Join them as they enter into the slow apocalypse, fighting to survive alongside artificial life, visitors from other worlds and humanity's left over.

Get to know Mixarthur and Dandie, a couple of grifters that made a mockery of time, through the logs they left behind that sit preserved in a museum in the distant future.

With a drifting, interwoven narrative, Packing My Records For Mars uses poetry to envision the end of Earth, the bittersweet hope of creation, exploration and the struggle of surviving regimes that emerge in dark times.

What creatures might be waiting just on the other side of the moon?

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some poetry

The Road

Beckon on the dying light,

so there might be a moment shaped

like an evening soft in spring

in a world without seasons.

You’d think in unbelievable times

that my mistakes would be

overrun by hunger or fatigue,

or the panic I feel

when my daughter talks

and the vespers

might hear it.

As we drive down empty roads,

I see the past stood in silence,

ageless spectres,

a second-hand respect the living

have yet to learn,

and dogs given to the wild

lay dead for reasons

that have nothing to do with

tyres, or tired humans, or

the attic cult where I was born,

where my secrets sit with

no one bothered

or breathing

to find them.

And what of the roads

when I am gone?

Who will grace them with song

and swerves

now hopes have grown

limbs enough to reach,

and dead trees are strewn about

like people thrown from a car?

Will I stand by the side of the road

in death and watch my daughter drive?

Singing out of the window,

wondering if her father ever loved

because he was so busy

trying to save her?

Will she know that I was relieved?

Will the trees and dead dogs tell her

that my poor words of wisdom

were stalled,

and made beautiful

by having not said them?

Will she know that I was at peace?

Will the road ghost of me tell her

that the attic rage in my heart

was culled

by the world’s ending howl?

-Packing my records for Mars

some poetry

A Library of Universe

I wonder what black birds are thinking,

if feathers could be strung across space,

or if fever dreams can be translated,

turned upside-down and re-arranged.

If empty space in life can be transcribed

into desires understood by creatures

on other worlds, or invisible wings

that ripple the shifting cosmos outwards.

If there’s a soul nesting in cloud’s language,

wishing to croon to us in words we know,

desperate to parse the tune of sparrows

and the softer drawl of human tongue.

Let's bhang song’s pale hours in a birdcage

and call it a library of universe.

-Packing my records for Mars

The Hill-dweller

The human on the hill-top amasses the world's wealth

in big hands, cupping love, real, false,

sieving out the lumps,

greedy, unneeded.

The hill-dweller says:

Kindness can fix the world,

and we laugh: Kindness never fixed anything.

And why is that?

The hill-dweller asks: why is that?

In those big hands there are many colourful rocks

and hearts, virile—if eaten, makes us volatile with obsession,

makes liars of delicious apathy,

appropriate passivity,

we're masters of the ordinary

and disdainful of the kind.

The hill-dweller keeps sieving the clay soil, rooting

for seeds of empathy, convinced there's a planet's worth.

Looking for some more words?

We ask, scornful, running up the hill, out of breath,

eager to push the hill-dweller off,

but loving hands hold on. Another prayer to give, hill-dweller?

Another thought to spare?

But loving hands hold on.

-The Night Talks

Coyotes

Nestled inside the dry rivers of this empty canyon,

there was a city inside you but now there's none.

As the sun is setting and your volcano is aching,

I can hear coyotes in your dusky streets.

Listening in the distance from my mountainous perch

to echoing music that salts the earth,

as beating drums fade into the icy night,

I can hear coyotes in your dusky streets.

The uninterrupted sky spread with a thousand lights

and a forgotten city that rests dead in the sand,

as rocks roll through ancient neighbourhoods,

I can hear coyotes in your dusky streets.

-The Night Talks

Caelan Scott

Packing My Records For Mars

Underneath The Christmas Tree

About the author

About Packing My Record For Mars

The Night Talks

some poetry

The Road

SIGNED Hardcopy - Packing My Records For Mars

some poetry

A Library of Universe

SIGNED paperback - The Night Talks

The Hill-dweller

Transitions

Support the author

Coyotes

inside the night talks

Short Works

join the reader list

Interested in poetry, books, film & television?

Contact the author

info@caelanscott.com

Send a note

Packing My Records For Mars

Underneath The Christmas Tree

About the author

About Packing My Record For Mars

The Night Talks

some poetry

The Road

SIGNED Hardcopy - Packing My Records For Mars

some poetry

A Library of Universe

SIGNED paperback - The Night Talks

The Hill-dweller

Transitions

Support the author

Coyotes

inside the night talks

Short Works

Social

join the reader list

Interested in poetry, books, film & television?

Contact the author

info@caelanscott.com

Send a note

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