Four Poems by John Doyle

 

Hot Potatoes (For Abstaining Comrades)

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door

Bob Dylan 1975

 

No-one fucked up, I just can't remember who you are, 

hot potatoes, hot potatoes, momma told me how they drop,

breaking like ceramic hearts across a floor

until nothing remains there anymore,

hot potatoes disappear like him and her, like those and them,

who and what, where, when, how -

like you and me,

hot potatoes saying bye bye

    hot potatoes saying bye bye

                   hot potatoes don't cry

                           adios, 

                                           sayonara, 

                                                 bye bye

 

 

Iwaskingofthefuckinghill

 

I have come to fear the highway.

Let me tell you what I learned - hieroglyphics in Helvetica

couldn't sooth me in the midnight hours, magnetic lure of mechanical beings 

accepted everything fate hung their larynx from, sound nothing can be done for.

The sound was a screaming sibling coloured blue, previously orange, or red, depending how late dispatches had arrived from this demi-Armageddon,

we have amassed this debt, sooner than death, regretful rubber fossilized on a cemetery of asphalt.

 

Fear I stabbed into my clutch days before that meat-wagon had come.

I feared sadness more than decomposition, sadness is death already, here in these telesales faces,

drunk on their own stupidity, their statistical morning, 

company car and trophy wife.

I fear all of this, this concrete chimera and sun-mourned suburb, 

malnourished,

un-European, 

undead.

 

 

Autumn Bedding Plants for Sale

October 2022

 

Autumn bedding plants for sale, side-road, level crossing,

three miles short of Athlone town. Not that Athlone's a town anymore,

town-hood dies short painless deaths under town-less souls

pouring brutal futures into hard-hat holes.

Autumn bedding plants could fill those holes I guess,

bring us toward that muddy Utopia 

gears reverse down level-crossing lanes for -

close an evening's eyelids to

see trains in sunset's creed go past, 

a raven's stripe cross its kindled tan

says Patrick Scott will never die,

Autumn plants doggedly eternal, in borderless seasons

Abnormal Service Resumed

 

My skull was a false alarm,

my skin covered it to suffocate its scream -

watching this, moon and sun step in present climes

sending me back in time to make new music in my head.

Either way, they are forms of light stealing something from each other;

I refuse their assistance, familiarity breeds a certain contempt,

how they burn my skin to leafy-crisp. nothing left to mask this cranial globe -

how they make the loneliness of music after dark

a spotlight Sinatra haunts me in, lets his hoodlums pin me down in.

Other thieves are less honest about their trades, above me at dawn, around me as dusk, different mirror-balls for devious music, abnormal service resumed

on the megahertz of purgatory

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.