Gathering
Thoughts
His
last-semester face
in a
series of radio commercials
stitch
my dog-tags in an old country quilt,
homesteads
on T.V. aerial hills
fall
and fall like shivering dominoes.
Passing
the liquor store
hawks
ferment in gullets
Elvis
Presley's eyes
hide
like snowstorms in -
there's
an eternal flame
down
by the goods yard
where
the 200 wagon liners with 5 locomotives
meet
ships that arrived from Denmark.
Some
dreams we have of cities
are
surplus to the size of our terrain,
they
are moments to us
we
repeat at breakfast,
fasten-up
the death of daybreak in seat-belts, dipping mouths,
a
number of children we did not count
who
spoke of flapping chopper blades overhead
Hutch McKellar (Song for a Dirty Double-Crossing Fink)
Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much
Orson Welles
Three hustles since -
opera singer, trigger-happy cop, laundering Picasso's acolytes -
Hutch McKellar's a faceless mark
in a skinny cab taking me home to my dog
two Sundays out of every five -
after that rock n roll band sell out
Third Cousin Malone's -
humanity twice removed.
Hutch McKellar's made me rich, made me sad,
made me non-grata in Guatemala City -
seconds into the howling lung of 1974.
"I'll paint your name in lights,
I know people,
movers and Shiloh's shakers,
I love you brother" Hutch McKellar tells me, holding hands
with the chief of police from Grandad McKellar's hood
somewhere subdued by the northern highlands.
Rumour says it’s where they stripped him down to his scalded axis,
hosed and scoured his low-carb Buddha
after sixteen vestal reds were broken – then that lizard green;
that they say split his personal account
into multiple new-age disorders; made him a funky-cat on
this space-age scene.
"I’ll give you life, eternal life too if that's something you
considered,
a belly dancing wife,
a secret Pastorious took to his grave -
somewhere kindling the legacy of planet Jimmy J."
It’s McKellar’s baloney that crushed his handbrake
on his lips.
I'll see he gets his fare -
McKellar owes me nothing - I'm not saying it to his face.
Why should I?
The mutes and the fools and sages of cold kind tolerance
let his stallion run loose
that morning his Mustang turned-over four times
at Kesey's Citadel,
twisted right back not once,
maybe not twice
on that pledge he took
to drag all sins against him into the courthouses of Hell.
It's nowhere in the Book of Genesis how the sick, the needy, the
weak and the lame owe every songbird
something,
the bass-man who hangs out bleeding with the drummer -
their families need time to get over their sorrows too.
Give me nothing, gunslinger I fold - this songbird's a wrinkled
hawk -
no matter;
Hutch McKellar’s headphones slide on
at a quarter past last year, opera’s loud and opera’s juicy,
his taxi's hopes and dreams high and sandpaper dry
in a hurricane of lies -
passing out his daddy's homeward stumble -
from Caesar’s Palace;
watching - I knock that secret song on the leather-strap
that winds around their door.
They know it's not Satan this time –
and I introduce myself as the kid who knows how,
who knows when -
exactly what way to change a lightbulb barefoot
standing on metal,
with my hands in holier waters.
"Hutch got stabbed by a biker gang over counterfeit bearer
bonds"
I say -
though no request comes from the FBI
for this vital information.
So long then Corporal McKellar,
professional courtesy
never killed a curious cat in that cool summer
of our discontent
Amhrán na Maidine
Feabhra 2023
Bogann
ceol trí chathair,
an
breo in aice leis, ag gáire.
Déanann
amhrán an Domhnaigh
aisling
Dé Luain dá uaigneas,
fuil
ag fágáil an coirp –
ag
filleadh ar a chroí –
tá
an saol ann
in
áit éigin,
I
bhfad ar shiúl,
blianta
ó shin
Smoke-Charred Wooden Sheds Still Standing
Things
that keep me sane -
railroad--crossing
bells,
that
sheer-sheen
of
locomotive white coming through the forest
with
my uncle standing at the barriers
rolling
a fat-one -
TV
shows from 1984
Roger
Daltrey ends up in
where
he plays a photographer with a British accent
as
Yankees like to call it.
What
I miss the most in these woods
are
smoke-charred wooden sheds still standing
where
old-fashioned murders took place
over
whiskey crossing state-lines
at
the wrong bend in the river.
Here
in these woods
are
just the bodies
themselves,
no
more smoke charred wooden sheds.
I'm
losing it.
Lucas
An
acid test with bar staff is simple.
Do
they acknowledge you outside of working hours?
In
the street,
in
church, in the local gambler's anonymous?
Lucas
was a waiter, then sales,
then
something he never quite disclosed,
then
his dislocation from reality.
He
called it his missing years -
to
be fair,
I
don't think he'd ever heard of John Prine,
though
vis-a-vis, not hearing of John Prine
is
not something you'd put on your CV
if
the urge
for
something more exotic
came
hunting
for
your talents,
or
what was left
of
your Old Testament
killer
instinct
after
a breakdown such as his.
Lucas
fills my glass,
hums
something about Jesus
becoming
disillusioned -
something
about missing years.
So
who you been
talking
to then,
Lucas?
Marchegg Railway Station, Austria, 17/1/2015
For Douglas Cronk
Winter
taste of oil
on
elementary dusk,
the
parchment
of
pan-Europa colour
on
goods trains
dragging
my eyes somewhere, somewhere irresistible...
Light Up Mr. Lightfoot's Stogie
February 16th, 2023
Egg-yolk
illuminations
take
me home, those sunshine pricks
which
warm up Wicklow's secret highway -
a
home I left on 90s Sundays,
which,
for their penance, gave me 1970s dreams and washed-out dreamers,
escaping
bare-chested homily, broken lumps of Saturday's men
stitched
together - in prayer, fiscal forgiveness.
Nearing
Bray, I stitched my past to a celluloid messiah,
who
made Sundays that same egg-yolk bright,
coming
from a mountain
some
cat drove past me, in his open-top,
his
brother-in-arms slumped to a delirium.
I
want in.
I'll
give the kid his last-rites,
I'll light up Mr. Lightfoot's
stogie from the many loves of Jesus,
paint
egg-yolk strokes on shards
of
peering rock
that
veer a slip-road into Greystones
Sandinistas y Contras
Sandinistas
y Contras
on
my tv screen like Mods and Rockers
on
the beach smashing cheap wooden chairs
from
Chinese labour camps across each others' spines and skulls.
Sandinistas
y Contras
smoking
cigarettes
as
fat sweaty men in short-sleeve shirts
hand
out soccer balls
and
candy to little boys
who
look like they were 19 years old
when
they were born.
They
give the camera a 50,000 yard stare,
an
extra 20 miles to our definition
of a
gallon.
I
drove like a Titan through the rain
that
spat and hissed
across
the highway.
State
Patrolmen flashed their lights at me
but
stood static otherwise,
and
I pressed my heel to the gas again.
There
wasn't a single car
that
came near me that night,
like
a lioness protecting her young,
while
the father prowled for fresh meat.
I
caught the Mods and the Rockers
fighting
on the beach,
some
muffled popping sounds of far away shells landing,
Americans
in short-sleeve shirts
with
cheap sunglasses and sweaty armpits
neither
walked or ran,
it
was something in-between.
I
failed to see any comparison
between
pop-culture and socio-political analogies
but
the dream was so good tonight
I
turned around and told my girlfriend -
but
she was still sleeping.
I
turned and told it to myself,
grabbed
a Biro, wrote down what I could remember,
before
resuming to dream of Godzilla,
George
Lazenby, and the Wall-Street Crash
rolling
naked like new-born fawns
in
petri-dishes made from rejected Belgian state-amendments
John Doyle - I like to write poems about Atletico Madrid, freight trains, and Roger Moore. Sometimes other stuff too.
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