You reading that Bukowski again?
She says.
Why are you reading about that drinking
Fool of a man
With his whores and lowlifes
And brawling talk
And gambling bullshit?
And all his women
Who screw him no matter what!
Why? She screams.
A pot of spinach cooks
Slowly on the gas ring.
He keeps me company,
I reply,
For times just like this.
The immigrants have gone,
“Fuck off the lot of ye! I’m sick of feeling for ye!”
The emigrants are here.
“Come on in, there’s loads of space, some fuckers are gone!”
Tit for tat
The market claps. I leave.
In the dead leaf forest a ghost shape
Lives eternal beneath the tree
Where fairies gathered, their voices the breeze.
Some days I stand there and stare. I leave.
Bricks of cash slotted into the ATM’s.
Security vans with paranoid mans.
Block banks for minutes, all synchronicity.
Each scaffold of words a Pollock monstrosity.
My country is dead, long live my country.
What is reborn is here. Wait while we kneel in the ditch
And cry our eyes out for an hour or three!
Jaysus, mo bhron, me hole, there sold, old Ireland
Gone, how she loved her little wet arsed children indeed.
Mores the cocks missing too. From altar and ballot.
Gone too. Mores the quiet herds who knew but said no.
“Shut the fuck up child.” They said. With voices dark as shadows of the fear
Beneath thousands of small beds, ripe with pee.
Mores the oak trees and bog worlds, gone three. I leave.
“Do you miss whacking the missus while slobbering over
Jesus at mass with your tongue hanging out like the intestines
Of a car battered badger whispering with flies?” A multitude of lies.
Christ!
Or is there a history we can revisit and count up the children
Whored to a darkened Irish Eros mixed with a whiskey Thanatos,
Whisked together in a baking bowl and oven cooked for a thousand years
“It was the Brits! It’s the Brits!”They’d say. Creepy.
( The Brits never black and tanned my arse. Nor the Queen. )
Now now now, in the here and fucking now,
The cocks must actually make love to a woman for the release
Of seeds, – this is the game for fucking’s sake –
Now what did Jesus say about tossing your seed?
Ah yeah, on to the rocks, ya facking gee eyed eirinagees! I left.
I miss none of it. The good were there. The good still are. And always will be
Despite the best intentions of the nostalgia artists and forward thinking
Scientists and much loved careerists – you get me gist. For many
The answer to the questions was to be completely pissed.
Exit all cello bullet holes, quieten down the banging drums.
I pray sometimes like bees on flowers, pollinating.
It is yes, exasperating. Yet
I love our clouds
Which multiply now as the world heats up, they bubble,
They ferment, they torment the blue sky,
They darken like depression, erupt in manic sprees,
Piss all over Dublin zoo’s chimpanzees.
They are our own chapels equal to the Sistine.
I love our clouds
Wet as full grown women
Full of sacred heart and venerable gee
Who scream out of themselves with the force
Of Powerscourt waterfall after a shower or three.
I love less the poets who misty eyed opened only the one eye
And left the knife to the butcher, white aproned,
Bent above the naked host. Dig that motherfucker!
All rise
I love our effing clouds
And how they fornicate and multiply
And leave us all wet and steaming
And afraid of catching colds while we dry.
Ah yes, the rains say yes,
Falling upon our heads, these only used occasionally.
I add out of charity. Hardly at all.
Is mise le meas.
Mr Talk a Lot of Bolloxology.
I search for the voice stuck under the gas rings
While the pot bubbles and spews forth lady
Macbeth in various colours all screaming distress
Mice with very nice top hats parade across the floor,
Whistling tunes out of a grinding monkey organ.
Horace their dead mouse friend with trapped neck,
Elongated pink tongue frozen beneath his eyes
Popped in a hell of cry, this is the body they are finding
Where is hazel or magella, the girls who stripped naked
Beneath me fogs of smoke and cheap wine? Where
The firm breasts of yesterday, their pussy licking
Moanings a humping beat under my cranium sky?
Here comes josephine, who will be tickled by feathers.
She got ’em all stuffed, some basting comes slow,
Midnight hours tearing up like funeral comings,
Train tunnelling out of her mouth, oooh! oooh!
Must be a devil in the ground I keep hearing,
Hark his feet dancing on that other side of earth,
His head pointing into the molten red hot centre,
Hear him dancing on the other side to my feet.
Down in the hole, Down in the hole
Damn him, he’s down in the hole
And he’s calling, calling for me
To join him, and burn all me moanings.
See the nights wandering off into distance light,
Meeting like old friends in the horizon’s breaking
Of that too distant sky. See some heads knocking
Words around the airs in low lilts, homesteads
And warm familiar lairs. See the men rushing
Like thunder to each other’s lightning on streets,
In alleyways, a collision of angers – The sirens
Call, no desirables on rocks but teetering angels
In miniskirts and fake tan stained sex smocks.
See the child held close to breast, crying, testing,
Laid down again, for rest of her or his, some parents
Climb towards the bed once more. See the oak rising.
Amongst the factory lines, in offices of glass and shining
Steel, colourful names pretend at books that reveal.
See the bark, scarred and pitted with all weather
And lover’s knives, growing and growing towards
Some other sky that ends no where but forces
The tallest leaves into the beginnings of us all.
See the branches hung with lost and found, faces
Gobsmacked at the eternal round, some laugh,
Some cheat, some hide knives beneath the sheets
As lovers stab each other once more. See the oak
Overhanging the graveyards, the charnel yards,
The smoke chimneys of the crematoriums. See the leaves
Falling onto history shelves, recounting the soaring, despite
The warring that births each new flag, each new people,
Pretending the beginning is now, all lies, pretending the zero
Is the starting block of our counting in ticks and tocks.
See the oak rising through the thoroughfare of capital city,
Breached by dirty river, fading under boardwalks,
Slow and shitfaced with junkies talking in tongues, cat calls
To the younger ones pretending this is no future. See the
Waves on the shore riding up the thickest trunk while
In the air above the clouds some woman waits, wrapped
In linen shroud, her naked glory unseen and unheard
While beneath all her rings of age, the people’s frothing
In time creating a world of our own on the last branch
Where sky meets the ending of all these beloved lives.
See the oak bearing the mortal dream of the tower
Of bedlam creeping higher and then see the woman
There, under oak, waiting for men fearful to be her lovers.
Of the time of school and times tables,
Of numbers counted from zero
To an end, a ten, a twenty, a thirty.
An introduction to the idea of no end
Was all numbers plus the latest one,
And on, and on you would walk down
The dark tumbling roads towards a home
With a wild birthday cake of sparkling candles
In the black sky, and then comes the shaking,
The unmentionable fear, the crying,
The muddying of knees, the mind slipping
A gear and reckoning with forever
For a moment stretching without end
And the body, all earthly and born,
Broke into pieces of an early death
While some other state mourns the boy.
Whistling in the dark fighting off floating
Nothing always surviving in the end.
Raggedy arms clutching at air. Some
Skin feeling the roll of wet shock – the body
Raising a flag of surrender to the end
And for a moment you lifting away,
Changing into some other universe,
Uncounted and unperceived, a place
Beyond the lick and sweat and electric
Shocks of the brain seated on warbling neck.
Some nothing resting at peace beyond
The screaming, loving, laughing, fighting.
Some nothing full of the everything that would
Come and the everything that would go away.
Some part knew of an end and the other,
That lost place of no mirroring self, that
Place of no worded understanding,
That place walking into that boy that night
From every place that never was born
In the shadow of this sun and her afterlight.
“I’m so full,” said the boy. “Full of what?” asked another. “Irrelevant question!” said the boy. – mh
We made chips all night while the hookers
And local ladies ignoring local fuckers
Lay down for the brave men of the jfk
Moored off dun laoghaire
And the local boys wanked alone in empty rooms
Like forgotten heirlooms
Women swooned and told husbands to fuck off
As they charged after the white suited sailor men
And at 5am stinking of fish
And burned oil
I turned and said
We’ve no more fucking chips
Ya imperial bastards, go home!
And so another year went carried away
By an aircraft carrier
That had loomed like death
Out there in our little bay
and perhaps
Some war
Had been delayed and some violence disturbed
By our brave, wet and willing local birds.
The stimulation of economies, fueled by randy carrier rats; coming and going… (mostly coming) – mh
