Bernard
People on the fringes of something
bite their tongues asking
"how many bricks are in the Battersea Power Station?,
why wasn't I listening to Paul Simon 30 years ago?"
People who wish I was their shadow
ask me something not quiet as profound -
"why didn't Jesus stay a carpenter?,
why did Bernard who sat four seats from us in school
end up a janitor down at the lost and found?"
I don't know. Bernard was a smarter kid than me;
"it's a mystery still", I tell them,
my trowel hissing on these bricks, my boss carrying a plank across this scaffold
Fugazi
I’ll build a new world order
from the cloudy rubble of tower-blocks
and the souls of blues singers
who died from cirrhosis of the liver,
or country singers
with their throats slit
two-hundred and twenty-two miles wide open
by hitmen
hired by Satan.
Norm Jenkins
phones me twice a day.
For fuck sake, Norm
I stopped playing golf
that time I popped four discs in my back
that night we ended up
in a lap-dancing bar
a few blocks from the United Nations.
Norm’s a real sweet guy,
looks after his mom.
It came as no real shock though
when they found all those heads
frozen solid in his fridge,
the postman, the superintendent,
that lady from Mexico
who left the banisters on the staircase so shiny, so bright.
Some still had their glasses on, the detective
with the pencil perched on his ear, told me.
Norm wears glasses.
That’s still no reason though, is it?
I used to be able to cry so easily,
now it just hurts my ribs
‘til it cuts right to my knees.
Social security checks and golf-clubs
are an uneasy match anyway,
like Newman on one side
of that Towering Inferno promo-shot,
McQueen on the other,
one pretending the other one isn’t even there.
When I picked up the bible
I felt the electricity shoot right through me,
like ice-cream through a hole in my teeth,
I spent all morning with punk-rock bands
who released one album in 1978
then ended-up working in door to door sales.
Those blues-singers come looking for me
crawling up the slippery sides of skyscrapers,
it was sweet the way Adam West and Burt Ward
would do the same thing, and maybe Sammy Davis Jnr
would open a window
and commend their efforts
at keeping the city safe.
Anyone who cheats Satan
isn’t as heroic
as one might think, given a moment to pause
and reflect
as I should have done,
when I turned to that page in the holy book
and a boy from a town
where everyone kills everyone these days
stopped, and offered to build a new world order
with something better than
jagged stones from tower-blocks
flat on their backs
like Kafka’s only known victim.
Too late, as I tune my guitar
and fill its chambers with silver bullets
Paris Junk, 1979
With love,
reason (or reasons)
turn to fictions banshees and cowboys
were shot down, exorcized for - a flick of a knife
on a street in romance language
empties his tongue in
wordless guttural wailing -
the taste, Paris gives its fostered son -
sugar from the mountain, crumbs that cockroaches
build empire after empire - acquiescence from, the loaf, hollow - unconsecrated.
Junkyard blues play for me some wild frontier ballad -
of a Comanchero shot down, down,
deeper and down, that great disaster,
shot in bantam-weight bullets, black and white figurine
on Éireann's silver screen -
Sorcha’s walkway serenade
is an emerald shade of green,
dissolving traces of Paris Junk
that withered
a black rose in bloom
Two Red Lights on the Tail Wagon of the Liner
are universally removed from red lights on a DART tail carriage,
Harmonstown, April's coda;
no one cares, life is dead.
Two red lights on the tail wagon of a Galway liner
looked like evening's eyes making sundown smile,
smell of engine, wailing kettle,
John Sullivan's signal box symphony.
I could smell it in leather lives of Grecian books - that smoke,
for hours that came after sunshine slept,
two-red lights on the tail-wagon
of a Galway liner,
Val Joyce and Late Date shunting off the siding
Vivian
A shocking snake blotches preachers' papyrus
forming lines line one by one,
muck and sand and scripture burrow
his philosophies like bloodshot diamonds within -
Vivian - she measures these lines,
distance she knows
forms lesser evils,
bars, whorehouses, burned-out barns
lead a path
to a town
his
compass
spun like a hand-brake turn on,
lines are straight
but there are many,
scriptures snakes
cough blood
to seal Gomorrah's seed within,
he's on the road again,
and a smashed up guitar strangles a dead-end moon,
strings dribbling
succour
for a serpent's bottleneck sins
Sometimes Eugene Landy Got it Right
Taranis -
a debt collector for ceaseless
skies
re-unites sorrow with
mourner,
dragged pock-marked from cracks in a night
something religious
lines up to sing the blues -
this feral foray
squared-up in steel-yard sidings
sets the scene;
upstairs,
fourth floor,
steam rising from iron pavement-grids -
is Bernstein ready to score?
I sift through their wine and cheese and Marrakesh ash,
a corpse will lose its need for words,
a whistling caravan of sudden silence
with murderous drums
killing us one by one, double-bass
taut as a homicide,
days without darkness
weaken years without a funeral
when pen and hot-buttered penance give a kiss of life
to sulphur scent and jowls juggling sharp-edge lexions.
Ask of the growling locomotives
where their kin dangle over someone else's shoulder,
somewhere something else
moves or dies
is somewhere Taranis' tongue imploded,
haunted by the meddling meander of Cadillac cars going to a gangster's funeral,
his corpse lost its need for hope
in those street-lamp scalded shapes,
remembering nothing
except what Thomas Aquinas told him,
“sorry to say it bro, but sometimes Eugene Landy got it right”
John Doyle - I like to write poems about Atletico Madrid, freight trains, and Roger Moore. Sometimes other stuff too.
No comments:
Post a Comment