Friday 4 August 2023

Four Poems by John Doyle

 



My American Poet Friends Sure Don't Smile That Way


Nope. nor should they.

Because it's hard to smile broken-nosed three days after 

fighting barflies over Thistledown's fallen steeds,


a superintendent hunting rent, bringing muscle 

fresh from dishonourable discharge again, 

hard to advertise summer school lectures online


when your mugshot is live on C.H.P. bulletins

saying approach this man with caution,

angeldust might be hidden on his person.


The cats I know wouldn’t dare smile that way

when mom brings them round for Sunday supper, 

hand covering face driving past Barry Barickza, 


giving D.U.I citations from here to Monterrey -

“Place a bet for me at Leopardstown” I ask ******* ****,

(remaining shameless to protect the guilty),


he blanks me, busy smiling for a Leaving Cert bio,

he rides off to Hell on his Arabian pure-bred,

leaves me trackside in Saratoga


waiting for C.H.P.  to come 

and weld those tingling cuffs,

like icicles choking my wrists. 



Beauparc Level Crossing, County Meath, July 6th, 2023


Immediately what strikes you

is how clean, organised, everything is.

After death, you except symbols of horror -

a contorted face, tooth-stabbed limbs;

death, I feel, was equally as surprised, stalking battlefields,

slitting throats for gaslamp streets to mourn,

death too, swallows hard, eye to eye with

ghosts of iron, ghosts of zinc, ghosts of screeching wheels,

miles down a clean, perfectly peaceful track.

Shit just got real, my poet-in-arms told me

about a time he made it from the badlands, dragging what remained of his life.

Shit just got real,

in lands where orchards 

could return to me, a voice of priests and nephews

photographing fearless 071s



The Low Days


The low days come down that valley

where uncles who remained free of sin or bloodied by silence


lived for a year or two, then moved on to Spain or France

or anywhere else they could take up Roger Waters' offer to sit on that beach


alone, dying from that smoker's disease.

These are how the low days congregate, 


axle grease for a calendar stuck in second gear,

October welded on a wall last wall-papered when Nixon was Gangster-in-Chief.


These are the lowest of the low days,

war-time warnings kill my radio’s rosy-red cheeks,


my ration-book is all but a novelty

from a time when wars meant summers swimming with cousins in a joyful mountainside brook



Donnie James, Rio


A cooler fan yaps its alphabets away from sunsets on the bar, 

like the one that got framed for taking out Fr Louis 


when the feds were outside 

putting bad karma on the fuse box.


I quit the job, Tuesday, 4:21pm - hours after claiming from the man free tropical fever shots,

I told them they could go fuck their dental plans, 


no one needs teeth in Hell or even Heaven,

I knew how to stick it to the man


taking bulging bags of complementary soap

hanging open as I left the conference hotel -


screaming white hot murder

at fifth-gear taxis - no-one wanted to arrest me,


I was a toothless vampire

in a town that fell in love with Prohibition.


He's the first guy born after moustaches died to look good wearing one -

kid in the corner, Wednesday night, Jimmy Page sweaty shirt, Knebworth town,


going new-wave

on the swinging necks of those Beaujolais-drowned radio stars. Oh how they loved


to paddle-boat their way down the Swanee,

how they loved to put their hands in my pocket


and show me Baron Samedi sitting at the front of the locomotive

every time they’d broken the test-pattern’s heart.


The dollar bill was so fresh it had rigor mortis

six hours from Diablo City,


I looked like a Swiss heart surgeon with these sunglasses;

Theodore said so, using matchsticks to kick-start to the cool cool-breeze,


the mountain got itself one more story to take it to number eight,

I added another two to make it an even number,


putting everything else on a horse my true love and I

brought back from monsoon seasons a whole handbreak turn


after summer's boredom had ceased -

the rook ascending into Heaven,


folks who keep the Sabbath Day holy

praying for the passing of the funk.


I couldn't get them to fire me no matter how hard I tried,

the moon damned our glistened bodies 


as I drove three blocks 

from there,


worried my greasy tax-returns might catch fire

from fall-out parts of that neighbourhood were well used to by then;


each house said its prayers a long time before midnight,

but come every tomorrow those TV stations closed down, and it was all bets off.


I watched from three blocks away as Miguel and that woman from San Juan

walked upstairs holding hands,


that was as far as they got

after moonlight damned everyone else


still watching in technicolour,

rather than let something not yet written in the Bible


do their bounty-hunting for them.

There was the engineer's daughter, 


her clown smiling like a nihilist, spine-wardly down in its grave,

there was Chief Sitting Bull


concrete-faced 

in a crossword puzzle,


smelling a shakedown from 12 miles beyond the state-line,

there was a loose-lipped ex-marine called Nancy Dupree


who had a toy monkey banging cymbals together

she liked to call her up when she wasn't calling it her pet.


Donnie James (from Rio) was an electrician

who drank here a few times before, his bar-tab getting higher


everytime he forgot which way to close a swinging door - which way

to open a portal in a psychedelic black-hole -


he saved Theodore's life tonight, 

telling him matchsticks only work on T.V.,


funnily enough when we switched the T.V. off

Sitting Bull was home from his tour of duty,


holding the engineer's daughter’s head in his fist,

praying for forgiveness.


Even the nihilist smiling in its grave

learned to forgive him, it should have learned to forgive itself -


golf, s’n’m, and cyclists’ rights advocates crushed his spirit before he’d met

Donnie James from Rio in the bar after Judgement Day -


after learning the rich and bountiful life that came from reading the bible,

he decided to at least try to learn about golf.





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.

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