Four Poems by John Doyle

 

The Liminal Figures 

For John Compton

 

A solitary man occupies the mirror-ball

on Friday nights, shattered like Lacan's infant jigsaws,

 

his moral aspects perched exact centre -

like a student from France who gatecrashes eyes

 

halfway through the news,

peacefully protesting armageddon

 

while a cop halfway up the ranks bashes his head open with little fear

of anything else

 

but further commendation - 

time, being, feeling, exact centre like that blackboard

 

on trade-test transmissions where those two creepy fucks

serve some purpose

 

more so than freaking out

six year olds with homework on one side,

 

the psychedelic Seventh Seal, 1967-style, peering from the other.

No-one told me any of this, I was the centre of someone's world,

 

I did not fight, I did not hunt, I didn't light fires to ward off ice and snow

and the horrors of death's dream within me.

 

I was the centre of the universe and it made me nothing

when I stood in the centre of the street outside, 

 

expecting all and everything

to stop

 

and notice.

I was graced that cops were so polite this side of town

 

 

Inertia 101

 

A mattress wedged on skirting board

like iron-lungs,

 

a moonlit sneer

three of them

 

lined like smoked mackerel

in a jagged tin

 

are emphasized by -

Ulick's car parked outside

 

as if little happened,

except weed, ash-end packed cans of supermarket booze,

 

a chase across rain-sodden fields doing things

students do on nights like these,

 

nothing in-between

soggy socks, the stinking inertia

 

of the inevitable rites of passage

I move my soul to the corner of this bedsit from.

Bridget wakes up early,

tells everyone how she likes to dance,

 

it was Pan who gave her these gifts,

how she will heal the universe through her art.

 

These are not the days of wine, Sweet Jehovah,

nor are these the days of roses

 

 

Love Song for the Year 2019

i.m. Ronnie, Michael, Joan, Eileen

 

We've surfed asteroids before -

no crystals ever sparkled like these;

We’ve strayed from astral spectrums before -

 

no planets spun like these.

Down, under that boardwalk, 

music eases water's chills,

 

above us airplanes hanging like seeds 

that flowers give

to reignite, to coat secondary roads in something 

 

like that stadium shivered

from its lungs in 1978,

Argentina arriving to become immortals,

 

like now,

trains taking some of this into their own aether, 

caramel wind and sand-grain truths

 

that I bring back to the archangels 

at a desk minute-soaked and loitering 

with tomorrow's Le Monde;

 

oh, how I wish for anything

but the knowing rain,

the rain that cannot be silent and grazing in its song

when that ewe

gave birth,

and we gathered round, electric in our music

Jesus Christ, Mr. Dubois, and Those Dreams of Voodoo
For Conor Alexander Lynnott

Squally showers
bring gossip from tobacco plants,
young still, though rooted in original sin;

a farmer called Dubois checks his stock
like snakes shining under studio-lights
move through plastic skulls in horror movies

or representations of New Orleans voodoo
maybe 200 hundred or so miles
from these dreams I keep having

where tobacco plants look down on me
and all I see overhead are the dreams of Jesus
as he sits on a connection from L.A. Ex to Mexico

wondering about men named Dubois
and the strangest dreams that voodoo priests,
steam-punk writers, and quarter-backs laid-off with broken legs sometimes have

John Doyle - I like to write poems about Atletico Madrid, freight trains, and Roger Moore. Sometimes other stuff too.