Three Poems by John Doyle

 

Trains Passing Through French and Belgian Towns Late at Night

 

Rochfort-Jamelle  

   gathers up neon 

     waltzing from tongues 

       like Betjeman is

         sleeping beside me,

           Grupont

             a moniker for

               dusky mushroom vines

                 lingering under night,

                   and I turn

                     to a nuclear

                       family beside me 

                         dated by a 

                                                                              

 

tattered school-book 

 from maybe 1975                    

  first showing me  

   what France and

    Belgium looked like,

     in trains passing 

      late at night

       through towns with

        names swollen on

         Pye radio frequencies

                       

Finks

Gas pipes 

are broken collarbones 

in pick-axe streets 

 

where the guy in shoes

no man under 60 should wear

wants to cure people 

 

of their communism and their sodomy.

The stained glass windows of St. Mary's 

finger finks like pebbles hiding in milk,

 

sneaking away on their bicycles

their guts trash

like a shroud against a typhoon

The Journey of the Proton Through Mass Production and Global Consumerism

 

Secretly - I like to read Thom Gunn - 

after darkness falls like cheap airline jets and poisoned flies;

 

before dawn it's Sexton and Plath

last sighted on a cargo-plane 

above Harare,

 

heading 

towards 

Burundi.

 

Because

they think I'm a spy I'll be one, 

(howzat grab ya?)

 

for Mossad, 

MI5, 

the Shriners

 

and the 

Vintners 

Association

 

of  Kyrgyzstan.

Numerous possibilities exist in marketing right now,

the iron’s hot and it's time to strike.

 

Tighten that tie, you son of a bitch,

in my previous life it was a noose 

standing

 

on a gallows in Cheyenne

(or Shy-Anne as I called her, her sister Betty, well she wasn't that great either),

 

and I piss a cup of Joe

standing by the water-cooler

sharing the secrets of tarot cards

 

and golf weekends

and Bud and Lou fighting back-stage in 1949.

But how do they fit the figs in the fig rolls?

 

was all I heard them say that first day

in Marketing 101.

And opening the 18th floor window to a Roger Waters 

song

 

I took flight, jacket off

and tie slapping my face in a cross-wind cruising over the bay.

 

Hong Kong was in all its glory

and the number count of protons

holding the world economy together

 

coming in at 15,894 digits across the slimy scales

of the stock market

raping penniless widows

 

across the tumours of the horizon. 

Whoops big fella, 

easy on the Miracle Whip,

 

you may end up with a coronary 

instead of a knife to your throat.

After they scraped me

 

from the sidewalk

they took my Thom Gunn away, screaming like a loveless baby;

they cut through his spine like an old Saxon road

 

and counted every 

proton, 

neutron,

 

and atom welding as one their dreams 

of Ferraris, 

cocaine and poontang.

 

Plath

and 

Sexton

 

threw dandelions 

on my grave,

took a taxi

 

straight to the airport. Could’ve been a whole lot worse 

I guess, like poor cousin Leslie

lying on the floor in ‘72

 

writhing with the ungrounded microphone

and the guitar like Dante in his other hand,

Mama Cass

 

and her heart 

about to burst in the claggy London heat.

All they did to me was send me to the gallows yet again, hoping to get it right this time.

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. Best of the Net nominee 2021.