Dublin’s tongue snarls from a black Mercedes on the quays
Dublin’s tongue is sinuous and stealthy and swigs whisky on its knees
Dublin’s tongue sucks honey freely from the bees
Dublin’s tongue goes deeper into brand new agonies
Dublin’s tongue infers it cryptically like a hawk in the trees
Dublin’s tongue beseeches you howl fire in the freeze
Dublin’s tongue teaches you tears release no real ease
Dublin’s tongue unfurls again into yet another macabre reprise
Reading the job listings
Door supervisor
Pet sitter
Pet sitter. You sit beside the pet.
Perhaps we’ll discuss Burroughs or Keats or something
Be a pet and sit beside the pet
Don’t cry – petrify
I got a first in English Literature
An Honours Degree from You See Dee
Family intervened, graduation day no less, Twenty Three
Correction – Mother intervened
But I can’t blame her, she’s a woman, she’s been through enough
Been through what? Depression, a middle class divorce and a freeloading lifestyle on the back’s of other’s money?
She had us at Twenty Three
She had mental health problems when I was three
Residential addiction treatment centre
I knew then – I knew about it inside there
That had been going on all along
I knew I had to be there
I don’t want to be here
I want to be down there
Or up in that tree like the owl or the manically dreaming bat
I’m familiar with the lure of the Devil
The lure of caves and madness and dark beaches
I signed on immediately after Rehab
I began drinking in spite again, immediately after Rehab
I felt suicidal hitherto unfelt before Rehab
Rehab is an ingenious business plan
They still send me bills through the post
The first two
The other one I was sent there on remand from jail
I tried to tear the for sale sign off the family home, my Father is a coward
I became enormously depressed
I remain enormously depressed
And enormously suicidal
I want to decay in a cove of seashells
And have cormorants eat my stinking flesh
And they will asphyxiate on my drowning carcass
The seas will swell over us all, like vultures now!
I’d like be carried across some aqueous gullies
Wake up in Amazonia, maybe Peru, Chile or Belize
Take viscous doses of psychedelics and fuck in jungles
Feel the blood in my Irish heart freeze
Reborn anew in a diaphanous gauze
Memory, pain and soul has never been, never was
This was all a clever construct, upon you I endow
I’ll go back to reading about absurdly low paying jobs now
Frog swam in goldfish swamp made of aspic and vodka
He had a buoy in his mouth
The angry jock bear hugged me, asked me was I gay and launched us out the Dalkey apartment into a rockpool in Sandycove
The Gardaí were called and I was implicated
The cunt in the velvet dress was to blame
I attempted to assault my father’s contempt for me
It started to seep into my eyes as I looked through the dappled haze of sunlight on the Seine. Completely dislocated, a feeling of baroque sensitivity coursed through me. I had been drinking for almost four days solid, losing my suitcase in Dublin airport having fallen asleep slumped against an elevator, pumpkin seeds and vodka peppering the dowdy, scruffy beard and a sweaty, palpitating breastplate all giving signals that I was a man entrenched in gloomy intoxication. The purpose of the trip was to exorcise ghosts of the past; I had spent many thrilling moons in Paris with an ex, somehow returning to this arena of Eros and awe was going to rejuvenate me – I had no idea my addiction had become so severe that I would experience it with anesthetized senses, no clothes, no toothbrush, looking like a child’s version of a man scrawled onto tracing paper with a blunt pencil. I’m glad she didn’t see me. I sent her a picture of a cigarette warning on a box of Marlboro Red through Facebook messenger. “Bonjourrrrr. Je suis a Paris!”, read the message. Then I picked out my smoke box and sent her a picture of a man’s rotten foot, his centre two toes eroded away by some heinous, gangrenous, cancerous metastasizing process. “Fumer tue”. The image could perhaps be read as a metaphor for my mental state. A dirty decadent trying desperately to cling on to a sense of poise, of balance and care – something which had in previous years made me feel protected against it all. I was now the gangrenous foot – toeless and without doubt, repulsive. I would hear a song in a Supermarché and think it was speaking to me through some cosmic lines. I would smell the subterranean odour of the Paris Metro and think it was piquant, almost alluring in its chemical strangeness. That is the one thing I always, and will always love about Paris is the smells. As I wandered hopelessly through Pére Lachaise every morning with a bottle of Sobieski vodka listening to radio jazz, wafts of pastries and flour and sweetness and that umami flavour came dancing across the breeze and I felt momentarily satisfied, momentarily satiated that I did in fact feel and my senses weren’t in fact completely annihilated by booze. But therein lies the sadness, the peripeteia in the universe of the addict. I suddenly realized that people were out there enjoying that food. Sitting together conversing in that inimitably laconic French way and here was I, deliberately skirting around everything, perpetuating my own dolour, my own pain, my own loneliness – in fact, perpetuating self-laceration and suicidal ideation.
I stared at the graves and tombs and would Romanticize death. It wasn’t even noon and I couldn’t find Marcel Proust. I approached an affable looking man with a beautiful moustache and asked him, if I can translate, “Where is Marcel Proust?”. Instead of replying, “he’s dead”, he kindly produced his map and gently explained where I could find his place of rest. I staggered across the undulating cobblestones never finding Piaf, Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Wilde or Modigliani. I instead walked through my own slow funeral, allowing the brilliant sunlight of Paris treacle through the sycamore, stopping to listen to the black ravens cawing – again attaching some sublime significance to their presence, as if they were gatekeepers to some other dimension, to some dark transcendence.
I left the graveyard as my kidneys groaned under the weight of orangina and vodka. I eventually found a nearby hospital to take a piss in, where after emptying my load, I mixed yet more vodka and hobbled along to the next oblique scene. When you are this enraptured (falsely) by addiction, everything takes on a sort of haphazard beauty; trees are beautifully anthropomorphic, young children make you feel maudlin and helplessly pine for your own prepubescence – everything feels gorgeous yet precarious, a horribly addictive antidote to the increasingly monotonous and artificial modern world. I suppose we’re all looking for beauty, for union (in our own misguided ways), and when the lens is smeared with vodka, you can invert the pain and it all seems malleable and pliable and you drool and grin like a drugged labrador, moping about the streets, mirroring yourself against a teaming city of mad vapours and laughter until your run out of booze and you have to refill before the potion loses its affect.
I kept insisting my Irishness upon people. Je suis Irlandais. Oh bienvenue monsieur. Si, si, merci. Une autre verre s’il vous plait. I sat close to Montparnasse and drank almost five pints of beer on top of the three bottles of vodka I had already drank listening to Bob Dylan on Spotify through my headphones staring at every cohesive throng of people that busied their days with shopping, with errand and baguettes, guiding their effervescent children home from school, watching the Metro line 6 hurl past, everything coalescing in some big atomic soup of which I was looking at, absolutely divorced from it all. I chain smoked. I hadn’t showered or changed my clothes in two days. I was a bum. Not some lofty bohemian. Un cul sallé. Both realizations hit me. I returned to my chamber and looked at pornography on my phone and deigned to masturbate. I tried so hard for relief. I was limp as a cocktail sausage. I listened to the Neil Young, Hamilton Leithauser and Nick Drake until my woozy sedation lead to a dirty sleep. I had no dreams. I had not spoken to anyone expect barstaff or epicerie staff for either saucisson, vodka, rum or tobacco for over two days. I didn’t want to.
I posted some pictures of Rue Oberkampf and the 11e on my Facebook to which a couple of people liked and commented on. Tiny little endorphin rush. I knew that one of my favourite groups, Wire, were playing the night before and despite being offered a ticket through Facebook I was too far gone on booze to have possibly have been admitted entry even with a ticket. Yet more skirting, more peregrinations followed. This time I ended up in Montmarte – a long vaunted quarter of Paris for its painterly, mellifluous light and its vertiginous steps. I found it coarsely touristic and bland as fuck. I was drinking neat rum at this point and a statue of the Virgin Mary caused my tear ducts to gurgle. Any artistic inclinations I had were extinguished. I regret not sitting, breathing, writing, drawing. I missed everything. I was avoiding everything yet I pined for something. It’s this weird schism, magnetic in its torture, like a bluebottle caught in a cyclone. We are told to not drink one day at a time by the programme and with time this life becomes easier. That night I vomited into the toilet, a grainy pink bilge infused with vodka, my knees trembling and my body swaying under the harsh toilet light. This was the end of my itinerary. I was going back to Dublin tomorrow. I rose early and drank again, factoring in frugality I opted for warm, high-proof Kronenbourg of which I bought three and poured into an empty water bottle, drinking it in a matter of seconds in Champ de Mars. The decadence was gone. I had met nobody. The man I was five years ago as an undergraduate had been enveloped by this thing, this brutal, cauterizing hypnosis.
Tourists beamed and exalted at the wonder of it all. Couples shared anecdotes and instagrammed their hearts away, gushing over the roses and the magnolias and whatever the fuck else was going on. I saw none of it. I kept a watchful eye out for police and security as I was now emitting the colours and flavours of full blown vagrant, someone that looked pulled from a septic womb, battered by the sun, vital organs flagging under the savage weight of it all. I limped as far as Bir Hakeim. I hadn’t worn socks since arriving and could feel my baby toe eating my fourth toe. On the shuttle bus back to Port Maillot I could feel the cold drain of alcohol beginning to seep out my system. I bit my nails. I smelled my fingers. Nicotine. Yellowish edible scruff. I prayed to God I didn’t have to piss during the one hour bus journey. I imagined pissing myself and being left torpid and dazed in the hard shoulder, my pissed jeans and disheveled Irish thumbs trying to summon a hitchhike to Beauvais, being stared at by belligerent French cows in the fields nearby, their sour bovine heads supercilious to my flaky florid potato face and my tousled, greasy hair.
Perhaps, if that happened and I did piss myself I could just live homeless in Paris, scrounge enough to buy a bruised guitar and busk derivative 12 bar blues renditionsin the sweltering side streets, hacking acidic phlegm into the gutter. I began to hear music that wasn’t there. Jazz patterns. My brain felt sodden and the comedown, as always, comes at the worst time. It never comes welcome. An incredibly bloated American woman kept turning her head and making eye contact. She looked in the horrors too. We’re never alone. I doubt it’s because she thought I was handsome. The jazz patterns continued. You have finally gone insane and will soon evacuate piss upon yourself, the girl beside you will screech and wail and will end up declared psychiatrically unfit for travel, spending the night in a locked ward! I breathed into my solar plexus, I relaxed my facial muscles and projected calm, still thoughts into the universe. I recognized the contours of the hills either side of us. The Parisian sunlight was spectacular, the arboreal fringes of Paris glowed, I had a brief moment of clarity. It is always the radiant permanence of nature. It is always welcome. I was almost there, boxer shorts still dry, aural hallucinations dissipating…
In Beauvais the Sun’s diminishing rays began to streak psychedelic scars from cerulean to creams to pinks to almost limes and lavenders back to a waning grey across vivid sky. I smoked outside. I felt slightly more at peace away from the arterial city. An Arab man nearly fell off a railing he was coolly sitting on and we laughed together. I was feeling alright. I bought one more beer and, dodging the frowning phalanx of armed police in the departures lounge, I scurried into a toilet reeking of multinational shit. One more beer for the air. A la prochaine.
Time to board. The Irish. A creamy, baggy eyed yet endearing bunch stood patiently in line. I had no real desire to return home but I knew I had to sober up before ever travelling again. My possessions were on one tote bag, one passport, one toothbrush, headphones, USB cable, small moleskine journal and one burberry cap. I felt comfort in that. I was lighter. I made conversation with some Irish girls in the queue, the first successful contribution to humanity I’d made in over 96 hours. I was back, baby! In the back of my still emptying brain, I was still half fearing to be deemed too physically wretched by the airport police and hurled into a white room to be deloused and perfumed. There was a momentary delay as I breached the final gate. I was on board. Still no pissing, no more jazz syncopation. The flight was brief and I managed to feign a sleepy pose and avoid all glares of judgement.
I was back on home soil. Donnybrook. Old Wesley Rugby club, where, as a 13 year old I would drink vodka and smoke fags. It is sixteen years later.
Hurry the fuck up you fucking shit tock wanker. TIck tock shit talk shit t0ck tick shit. Thick shit. Typo. Typo? YeaYea a typo you fucking gee bag, what did I just say? I said typo you mong – you fucking geebag sap tick tock shit talk tick tock suck cock. This is crude. This is low literature. I’m trying to be good. They wouldn’t publish this. Who’s they? MSM? Paropublishers? Fuck those cunts. Shower of special interests. Trump. Look at that cunt. Fucking stormed into office, storming into orifices, not a bother. FUCK YOUR SPECIAL INTERESTS. Hilary Cunton. Bill Cliton.
Yeah, it goes like that. The whining inner guy, won’t leave yer man alone. Deepen it they say – at least Bacon said – or was it cabbage – deepen the mystery. All that nausea and those fucking TWEETS Jesus Christ! I’m an auto didactic socialist!! Fucking hell, mate. What’s going on at all? Where are we at all? I’m trying to stay clean. Trying to skirt oblivion – the abyss. And then you read about Science with a capital $ and it’s all Apollonian and they’ve shunned the macabre – the stuff I’m living, the gunge and the puke and the piss and the vomit and the $cientists reduce it to a lower case system of AAdictions and so and so forth but to me that shit is more vital than staring at a black hole. I’ve stared at a black hole manys a time, mainly on the internet and I’ve jizzed all over my thighs doing it.
There’s a fuckin boyo.
Going to the library. “Do you have any porn in stock?” “Any pamphlets on expedient and painless suicide at all?” “Anywhere to score morphine, oxytocin, dmt, laudenum, fentanyl, opium or just take a bath?”
T w e e t w h y d o n t c h a.
But then she comes over and it’s all honey warmth, Joyce derivatives now and you see how the brain pounds down fleshy fear all fiery and orange in the hearth like dungeons.
Morpheo – the God of dreams
He stared at the back of the fridge – full of emmental and brie and was it e mental or emmental or what he didn’t really know and the laughing cow – what was it laughing at? What was so amoosing to the bovine raconteur ready to be milked and eaten like some dairy soup – are we all just happy to be packaged and tinfoil wrapped and eaten after all, refrigerated knowing our cannibalistic destinies after all?
Ye but you don’t have to — you could have it all sure don’t you know that, the crepuscular cake and strawberries and the gorgeous temperature of a hot shower after deep sex and perceive infinite secrets hidden between a lover’s ears and experience things to their bounteous and glorious depth, not sabotaged, distorted behind the ghastly lens of liquor! Sure you know you’ve got a sweet capability, are a nurturing young man, bound to real virtue and all of that Satanic excess is just a dreadful inversion in all that is good and saintly in you!
You’re a scholar and a saint and I will do my earnest best not to be glib or duplicitous and to trust and follow you as if led by a lightbeam made of honey that will dissipate that Godawful fear in me and lead me to the sweet dreamlike peace of nonaddiction and unshackle me from this repetitive yarn!
Good man.
Ah the blust! The crossfirecomedown and you can’t fight it at all sure didn’t you know that hearing crying as laughter and laughter as crying and God forsake us he has foresaken us it’s a terrible auld master the Plop, what! The plop of the porter or the stout or Godhelpus the naggins of Vodka in the phoceaid and off down Camden St for a gallop into Whelan’s for a few more fizzy tonics and then out like an unsteady reaper up the Luas tracks under the madmoon and home to bed to surf the web and whatchamacallit your littlechap before you fall asunder or ablunder or asleep or was it sleep at all? I doubt it. Didn’t feel like it, doesn’t feel like it for a few days, a few fucking days after, a blister on the mind that you cannot burst and Godhelp anyone who comes a breath away from you the fucking state of you. Irascible — big angry serpent eyes on ye and the cravings coming and going and cursing and fuckin and blindin every which way BeGod it’s an awful louse of a thing the Plop. But you’ve gone through the horrors before, the primal horrors, the evil terrors before with the anxiety so present and every sinew within you grinning taut like a mad elf, you’ve been brimming and glistening with sweat and scratching and itching and writhing for the life of yourself, you’ve cut flesh for the want of it, choking the littlechap lifeless under the madmoon for the need of it and then after a couple of winks and a benign scent comes across the breeze then and you’re back romanticizing it, back seduced by it, except you dislocate it, you fantasize it geographically and situate it in a less banal sphere. Ringsend maybe, Sandymount, Glasthule — all less loaded and egregious environments where you wont be inveigled into drinking yourself to within an inch of hell. But you do anyway you silly auld cunt.
