Buried deep
in heaps
of code,
your syntax
draws joy,
like blood from a turnip,
like a sword from a stone.

It purrs my restless heart,
evens my jaggedy, craggy,
spindly hope.

Were there ever another composite in my furtive brow,
my angular eyebrow, my deep, deep heart,
it would pain me.

For the sheer innovation
of this moment, as you cook,
your back turned to me,
is sublime,
like a yurt
on the grassy plains outside Ulan Bataar,
the singular granularity of green
in my imaginative soul,
the creative violence
of captured imagination, of memory.

For all the clumsy stabs
at placating emotions, mounds of
barren placebos thrown in a deep dank well,
sleepless nights, twittering and electric, have led me to this.

This sun, this day, this soaring mind,
streaming the earth below for fodder, for food;

If ever you were mine, yet you are mine.
Mine is not me; for I am you.

By Michael Gallagher

My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.

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