Four Poems by John Doyle

 

Role Reversals

Ladies and Gentlemen
Nick Drake
Has Left the Building
in his gaudy diamond-studded jump-suit,
prescription meds
making his gut swell with bile and water,
and Elvis Presley
sits in a field in black jeans
and a white t-shirt
waiting for someone to collect him
after his gasoline ran dry,
waiting for his bed and tea and toast and nothing else

 

 

Real Valladolid 2 Real Sociedad 2

October 29th, 2012

And the rain
and the orange juice
and the night Valencia gives me,

hundreds of miles of thick mustache-black road from the
frontiers of the north,
and consumerism and sadness, and retail windows across

La Zenia,
waiting for a stranger, who crawled inside me like a
worm,

and half-time and full-time and the lives caught offside,
blinded to submission
on a retail park T.V. screen.

Thank God I brought my slide-guitar,
the deltas sneak in by sunrise, leaving traces
of what might have been. I departed that next morning, it

too was stalemate

ITV4

I'll
miss

ITV4
when

its bubble-wrapped plastic logo sinks from a delivery van
into an eternal cauldron of death

at the end of time and space and it’s the last of our pop
culture artifacts to go

alongside Coca Cola and the Rolling Stones
and God feels a little sad and sighs as he drives that

delivery van away,
wondering

how
he

could
possibly do things better than this the next chance he gets

 

 

Ikea

The coffins of the opposites of death
lie obediently awaiting their exposure to life among the
sentients

stacked agelessly high towards an aluminum sky
numbered like the best prisoners among their ilk,
top hats, trilby coats ready, for release into modern

middle-class life,
the coffins of the opposites of death, veering high into an
aluminum heaven

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.