Five Poems by John Doyle

I Hope No-One Gets Angry With Me Today

 

As I slip into something more comfortable - like a coma

(bless your Danish pastry heart, Uncle Emo),

as I veer from left to right on the highway’s spectrum,

(no-one mentioned Fascists or Communists, did they?),

as a wheel fell from my dreams

(steamy-windows, all along the plasticine boulevard),

crooked and bandy-legged like the witch getting an oil-check on her broom

(woah, Mildred, take some time to reflect, you can’t just kill folk at the drop of a hat),

daybreak slipping into Florida as a pickpocket inexplicably falls into unconsciousness

(they say a Mickey Finn a day keeps the doctors away... from those actually suffering),

watching the Monkees on my gelatine TV screen

(why do the classics slip from ITV to BBC and right back?),

What’s Going On? Hashtags, bacon and eggs,

(also an ode to the former county called Desmond - imagine a county named after a person...)

when all these queens fell into my scene,

(I took a scissors and some dye, made my hair the same shade of shame as my left eye)

And Monica and Victoria, and Stacey and Jane

(who didn’t know their arses from elbow, or Chad and Bulgaria from Madagascar and Spain)

and I made it over five mountains today

(to find 18 more waiting - maybe 18, Kronkite told me it was 20 - last count)

what was it that kid in the bible said

(about liquor, gambling, and fishing in empty rivers?)

I don’t know. I tell them I don’t know. Really, I know nothing. Nothing ever

The 1970s

 

Formula One drivers burned like Hiroshima or were snapped in half like twigs 

summer left straddled for autumn's fangs,

smoking to a sunset in July 

or brittle to a call of death 

some weeks later.

 

Circumstances -

we re-evaluate as we go -

except men back then who rode on vicious horses, then they died.

Otherwise all was good in the world, King Features Syndicate funnies in evening papers.

Every day we opened our door in 1978, it was warm, so warm

Spiaggia Di Portobello Nord

 

We must forget what we are not

to begin what we are,

a colony of flesh, our dreams within it,

 

though electricity is its disguise,

life is still a skeleton

absolved by a camera's tongue

 

in Summer,

where, as we outnumber sand grains,

we are syllables in a solar prayer

The Earwig

 

The things that come from the factory come from the factory 

         

 

                               that the things that come from that factory come from, being

 

                                                                        the factory that the things 

that came from the factory come from - that is - the factory 

 

that the things come from 

 

                          that 

                          the man who drives around outside on a forklift loads up 

 

                                                        things for the factory that the things for the factory do not come from anymore. 

 

                              They cannot come from the factory anymore. 

 

                                                      An earwig crawled into his brain and so he drives around and 

 

                                                                                                 around that yard in circles and circles, 

 

               steering wheel locked-hard, 

 

                   eyes bulging like he's had a stroke, and drool dribbles down his chin in the yard 

 

of the factory where things used to come from. 

 

                      They no longer come from the factory because the earwig crawled into his brain

 

                           making him drive  

 

                                                      around 

                                                              and 

                                                                     around doing nothing to help the factory 

 

                       progress in the new age of living and self-happiness.

 

                                         No.

He drives 

                  around 

                       and 

                              around 

                                and 

                                         around 

Pat Hingle is a Component Part of the Multiverse, As We All

Are

Albert Einstein murdered four coffees

when he told me time is relative,

what those coffees did to deserve such hatred,

how should I know?

On Einstein's council I picked Pat Hingle jumping from Dirty

Harry to Magnum P.I.,

Miss Piggy to Hotlips Houlihan,

AC/DC at their lowest denim-shorts

ebb in 1986,

his near death-experience

at the swampy depths of a lift shaft, lost there for years

Albert told me

were relative. I guess Pat chalked crossed-off lines on that make-shift prison wall,

cops driving past dangerously under the state speed limit,

crystal-spheres of eyes on lakes, bamboo-shoots as windpipes

to make it feel more like something

Hitchcock hauled from his pants

to his wettest of dreams -

a lift-shaft's zooming din, howling in eternity,

Pat Hingle as a cosmic thing, floating in stages through

matter, being, non-existence,

we the cosmic brothers and sisters of endless time, perpetual possibility -

lift-shafts, AC/DC, Miss Piggy,

everything that has been, everything that does and does not need to be

drowsily hanging from a time-piece

swinging from the waistcoat of eternity

 

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.