A fitful sleep,
a nightmare bark,
a dance of death,
incredibly dark.
A Billy Pilgrim
feebly, I surrendered
to the violence,
festooned in the back
Venetian panels
of my darkest
thought,
deep in this deepest
of Octobers.
I woke
and breathed
in (as deep as a sulphur well)
the morning
and reached across
the empty bed
(in your defense, we do have an inviting
sofa),
As if your skin
could erase
those mental tremors,
those fits
of imaginary evil
that occasionally
vex me, us.
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.