Coq

They both stood at the slope beside Teddy’s. She heard the birdsong in the trees in the park and he could hear the foghorn of the Chester ferry in the port. The sky was a deep royal blue. He had to go back to England and she return to her studies in Trinity. He was taking his PHD in medicine and she was taking her MA in Drama Studies. Both were exhausted, worn out, medicated. The sun was waning and its glow fell like maple syrup on the Georgian houses of Sandycove. He scratched his bollocks. “Pint?”, he asked? She looked at her converse. “Ehm, no I don’t think so Rob, it’s like half nine and I have to be in lectures tomorrow.” The urchins in his stomach rumbled and he felt sad. “Fair enough, well, a kiss goodbye?” Her jawline went taut. “Rob, things have to change before I feel comfortable kissing you again.” His breastplate tightened and his heart-rate quickened. “Just give us a few more months, I’ll be back at Christmas after the exams and we’ll sort it out.” “It’s not that, it’s everything, it’s your attitude, it’s your arrogance, it’s your drinking…it’s…..” “WHAT!”, Rob yelled, losing his patience. She paused and looked to the Chester ferry slumbering towards the fading peach horizon. She uttered; “Your cock….your cock is fucking tiny.”

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Veal (written sometime in 2010)

Avoca Restaurant – Dreams of Veal

 

 

The undulating soggy satin dresses of the morning brunches. The women: “Oh! Where did you get that lipstick, it’s divine?!” “Oh! Where did you get the nail polish?!” . “Oh, those Manolo Blahniks. To die for. I simply must get a pair.” The hooves were banana yellow and she didn’t look all that great to be honest. Sunday Lunch in Avoca yesterday morning. Sandra was there with her thrifty knuckles festooned with winding silvers like asps winding around cinnamon sticks, winnowing through the heady no.5 air like a butterfly wing fluttering – glazed in white syrup, flowing through the ether like intoxicated cherubs wildly flapping through some Corsican forest canopy. The Louis Vitton bag sat limpid beside her, the LV insignia chiming sharply into the June air. Her pieces were modest, simple, yet gushed with all the knowledge and crass know-how of a woman who’s been trapped uncomfortably in a lift with a bellicose Kerryman or two – their rusty, bean bleached moustaches, coated in a phosphorescent, somewhat lyrical smudge of Guinness, cast iron and that sub-human sediment that gathers at the base of the Grand Canal. Sandra’s loins percolated, gushed, thrusting shards of invisible hissing pink and sultry lilacs among the subtle amber trinkets that loomed on the walls of the glass ceilinged oasis: a copper bucket of sybaritic consumption, ensconced between the fossil old valleys of Glendalough and Roundwood. Edward, gazing directly through the hazy tufts of sunshine issuing from Keogh’s farm down by the lane, as the swallows arced and nosedived, as the crepuscular shade tightened around the souls and the erstwhile Rioja bottles, the honey bee landing on the fig compote… Sandra opened her dribbling, moist beak..

 

Premise:

 

Decaying Hollywood Queen engages in relentless reconstructive surgery. She becomes more and more haggard and grotesque with each savage flick of the surgeon’s knife. THE END.

Shell

It’s funny how the misery disappears under yet another veil of scars. You finger the contours of your stomach, imagining clutching lumps of rind – you – a pork statue, unhung in your own stench filled abattoir at dusk. The eclipse falls bright on your hemisphere, a cloth dappling moth-light and no-light and then there’s more light but it dims and fizzles and shimmers and quivers again and you fall back into fantasies of the macabre but what if that’s not it? What if that’s not really the end at all and you’re just some infinitesmal simpering sperm-dream trapped inside a simulation and dying would just reboot you, just start this whole damnable programme yet again? Yes, you’re stuck in here. There is no enlightenment only shame only fucking only infection only pain, of all kinds, back, calves, neck, temple, gut – there are wrought iron butterflies wrestling in your gut now – feel them – feel them contort and writhe like pythons in your acid. Your dreams scar you, leave your mind splayed with raw contusions every morning as you hobble back to the bottle – or to the screen – or to have a fiddle with yourself and cry silver tears all over your thighs and you want to transcend but you’re so feeble! So impotent! Where is the mercy! Where is the love in this cold shell!

The Fall

Why would you engulf yourself in porn and whiskey for five years

Sprung from clinics where it’s ascetic and hermetic

Unapologetic like a cold thing

You were waiting all of your life to be happy

You push through the screen

Through the screams

Trying to connect to a childhood dream

When things were about WWF and Leeds United

Not fantasizing about hanging off a tree

Your silhouette bristling in the wind

A damp hallucinatory shadow

I can do it all

I have done nothing at all

I choose to soak roaring in the hall

Five years ago was when it all began to fall

Coldbricks

Start a family

In a sooty lung in Inchicore

Have the young’uns

Have their teeth knocked out

At the age of four

You can’t afford braces

Encourage them to stand up to the bullies

“Gummy” they call her

She gives head for nothing now

The lack of friction helps the lads come

Quicker than the fat birds

Who’d do it for chips

 

A glimpse of ecstasy as they’ve increased the dole by .19c

An extra bowl of sugar

To inject into your groin

As your son picks up another conviction

This time for aggravated assault

Sit in an uncomfortable seat

Saturnine and grey

Read the racing post

Your daughter announces she’s a homosexual

Her girlfriend resents you

You think she looks like a bloated snail

 

Your wife has long left you

All of those puppy dreams, gone

You sit alone in your damp dungeon

And hang yourself, eventually

With a hoover flex you got in the sales

Last January

Your corpse decaying

Limp in the cold twilight

Tongue

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

The Seething Fists

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