Four Fascinating Poems by John Doyle

 

A Few Hours Later

 

The Virgin Mary strangled Ted Bundy

soon after Jefferson broke my pool cue

right across my back.

Nothing meant that much that night 

after I’d turned around,

Old Roscoe snapped in quarters

on the shamrock velvet.

Cop car lights chased a Mustang back to Nazareth,

me holding my dreams in four divorced shards -

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, I now called them -

like Bundy's neck missing from his spine - life separate 

from itself. I called up to Jefferson a few hours later, 

what was the fucking point?

his brother - as usual - more drunk as a sad old man 

sitting by the reservation,

just looked out the window -

told me go park somewhere else, this is poppa’s space -

then he grumbled and sneezed, 

as Jefferson somewhere deep inside 

turned wine into water

Angel in Garadice : 8:24 P.M.

 

I’ve become an Angel in Garadice, 8:24pm,

headlight boys hunting me from all sides - Coole, Agher,

 

some like dive-bombers

from Summerhill;

 

strange they know nothing about Bruce Springsteen,

roaming the flat and cobalt horizons, 

 

exact replicas from his V8 plots.

I am the Angel of Garadice, 8:24 p.m.

 

ascending to a layby

to write this scripture.

 

At Kilcock I turn down a dead-end street

so I can arise from death,

 

I see skeletons on their knees,

I’m disappointed.

 

This road is long and lonely,

these boys are shooting stars

 

who fade in scissored sequence

on my split-screen mirror - boys are grit crumbled on a lay-by

Mexican Stand-Off : A Northern Variation

 

There's an earth so flat

a song and a dance began sprouting like t'maytoes on it, 

 

Sunday's child in a fugue state stray cats neglected to take advantage of.

There's a recognition of an entity’s sense of self,

 

that Lacan slapped me across my locked-tight jawbone

thrice to edge on home, before cows came for milking,

 

before Charlie Parker lay on a sweaty bed with a strap

numbing his arm. A wheel that spun like falling coins

 

rained down slicing planets in half -

Henry - all 2 miles and 58 tons of him - looked out

 

from his bedroom window - 

it's late Henry, no-one hears those screams

 

said Henry's mom,

clawing down towards Australia a wooden window frame.

 

Henry?

Hello?

Burt Bacharach Sunshine Soundscape : Autumn Mode

 

I filled-up Emily's gas-tank,

as far as the good lord would let me. 

 

Hell, 

let's be honest,

 

a little more I poured just for the road,

for the blues-men who let the home-team down 

 

by somehow being alive.

I put a pretty penny through that tank

 

leaving for County Kilkenny before sunshine

got bored, twiddled its thumbs, and dropped its holster,

 

leaving my lawyer to fill me in.

He told me Hannibal Heyes had a grandma

 

from County Kilkenny, I said that's swell Mr. Smith,

now tell Cousin Jedidiah I know who he really is.

 

This was October; If I'd forgotten

that sad terrain October was -

 

brown as barbed-wire 

in the latter years of its life -

 

then Emily wasn't letting me forget,

singing another song about surfing,

 

how summer was on the way in Australia

two-hundred thousand light-years from here.

 

I clung to the left-hand side of my saddle

listening to Bacharach

 

pour his coffee, as his orange juice went flat.

In the back-seat of her French-made car

 

I held the fetal position long enough

to make her notice

 

how flat those fields were

with tractors hiding on their sides like horses,

 

a harvest lost in time this year, 

stuck in Swedish speaking homesteads

 

circa 1870; Emily never really left Stockholm,

I was not going to be another of her syndromes,

 

thumbing

on the side of the road just like Malcolm,

 

mixing a voodoo potion

to ooze forgiveness from his wife.

 

Just like a golfer comes home 

one day

 

to a heart attack and divorce,

a pair of grifters head south

 

instead of down - down to Australia.

Emily, she sure did rip that clutch a new one

 

trying to get us there;

County Kilkenny, hon?

 

Nah, let’s just never speak

to each other again...

John Doyle is from County Kildare in Ireland. He returned to writing poetry in February 2015 after a gap of nearly 7 years. Since then he's had 6 poetry collections published, with a 7th collection, "Isolated Incidents" due to be released by Pski's Porch in Summer 2021.