Greenland

Here it is,

There is a crescent moon

A depleted, lunar centre

Like a cake with only an eighth’s frosting

Only a quarter coconut pastry (although doughtnuts are the thing now – some analogy for the purported shape of the universe)

Maybe it’s an analogy for the shape of consciousness – always encircling, never stuffed

What kind of weird generation is this?

The half-self, half-frosted, half-sure all the time, hollowed by this virtual realm

The self can be uploaded, updated and tailored to suit the material vision

Will we ever go back to porridge and brandy and poetry

Do we even fucking want to?

My father reminisces about times when pubs were organic, flexing forums

Not instagrammed, not whatsapped and facefucked to death

There is very little left to discover

Very little untapped earth to breathe quietly

Very few arcane hamlets in Goa to perform white yoga in

Very few exotic fruits to pair with humans

Except maybe when Greenland thaws

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The Hair of The God

He entwined their hands softly under the February morning light. With her heart in Mexico and her future in Canada he kissed her sadly, knowing that these were the last mornings. Mornings he would often spend in an agitated fugue, feeling the alcohol drain out his system, like a cistern replenishing brandy with spring-water. They had met on an October night in Rathmines – she a pioneer, having never touched a drop of alcohol in her life. He was forlorn at this point, living at home with his Mother, a sad and dreary symphony of thoughts would percolate through his brain for hours – attenuated only by, and paradoxically exacerbated by, alcohol. The mist is a cruel thing. Call it depression, call it any snazzy code word you want – The Black Dog, The Hair of The Dog –  so many Dogs involved in this pernicious union of misery and addiction. But, there is hope. Hope in the way he looked at her. Hope in the way the dawn’s chorus settles on the wind like a treble clef made of caramel twined with minims and clovers made of dewy glitter. I’m going to be thirty in just over two months. A decade spent silently howling in pitiable penury – an interminable maturing. It’s not going to be another melancholy departure, a shocking abandonment would not creep over his heart again like wire. This time it is different. This time it will be the Hair of The God. 

Valentina

Coping on the horizon as the internet stretches and bleaches the stitch

My arrow anxiety, the daily archery to the artery

Or was it his soul? The wound is pink anyway, awkward like chicken wire on my arm

There is no pen to grip, just keys to mash

Only organic, gluten free craft free porter free from additives

Sexually coloured like a ruby cloud in my glass

I pour it over my skin

And comb the intestines of Temple Bar in the wind

Froth

The morning curdles over us

Cuddling like two spoons in a meringue

You’re the strawberries, your thighs the cream

I’m the blueberries, a syrup, clean

Twenty Nine: Two Thousand And Eighteen

The silent yellow hum of hundred full buses

Drive through Rathgar at dusk

The carriages rattle with blank tablets head on unambient

The sad Venezuelan frame overworked and underpaid

A limp visa sewn to her heart

A niggardly recompense for a dastardly socialism

I sit, White and anxious, once young and angry

Now just tired, stomach-fluttering, trying not to drink my age in Tequila shots

 

Victorian morning

He looked at his talon hands and made some coffee in the blue morning, the slumped carcass of some Victorian ghost outside, the 5:45 am mould peeling away from the window. The murmuring inside, a phantom’s hand pinching the flesh. He’d walk to the off-licence and start all the sweat all over again, start off all of the manic chattering again, the skeleton splinters and the wine falls out with shards, in shards and like shards of light and pain at that. Put on your slippers. He put on his slippers and went outside for a menthol cigarette – the minty chemicals playing tricks with his tongue and the streetlamp an orange menthol itself, some cryptic union. What’s that in your dressing down pocket? He fingered the seams of his Dunne’s Stores dressing gown, an old and discoloured blue with white stitching. Lint, dust, some loose tobacco leaf and half a pill – the size of a doll’s fingernail. He popped it in and chewed it. Mixing with the menthol he knew by instinct it was a sleeper, so he resigned himself for another four hours, as the clouds congealed overhead.

100 bowls of cereal

The frosted, putrid Satsuma

Decays in the yellow office

The bellicose White salespeople

Flog dead produce

To the tired Irish

And there’s only so much piling up of bodies you can do, only so much crying one Mother can do, before the chilblains grow teeth.  The fanged landlord can squeeze them like that Satsuma. Draining their piss and shit into a savings account on some grey main street. He pulls at his gonorrhea with soft fingers- the vicious, yellow honeyrot peeling away from his urethra like gum between fingers.

There’s only so many bowls of cereal you can eat. There’s only so many accumulators you can strike lucky on – so many cocaine-fueled Saturday nights in CityWest, so many ouija-boards, so many humble bus routes, so much organic hummus, so many flickering halogen street lamps, so many cold airport terminals, so much Camden Street, so much graffiti on the Dart line, so many leaves in the Phoenix park, so many yummy-mummies in Range Rovers. There’s only so much of it you can take before one bowl of cereal must become one hundred.

But you see the sweetness. You see the sweetness and humility in the people that come here in search of a better life. Zagreb, Serbia, Vilnius, Krakow, Lagos, Guadalajara, Caracas, Riga, Rio they’re all here. And it’s the inverse that strikes me. The inverse dynamic. TO BE THE HARBOUR. TO BE THE GLIMMERING PORT. Before it was the Irish in Boston. Or the Irish in London. Now we are creating new Southies. New Kilburns. The boroughs of Blanchardstown will be the bosom of some new vital and maudlin second generation pathology.  Welcome it. Welcome the new blood, for our blood is tired and deranged.