Thursday 26 September 2024

Seven Poems by John Doyle

 




The Germs Exit My Body Through Various Pores and Washing Techniques


I rehearsed your script.

Your town's emptied itself of everything except people and electricity;

knowing this, I've a fighting chance against things less sentient than ghosts and myth,


your script's breathing underwater, sinks on dry land, 

has a blind cinematographer,

people wear masks to hide faces they don't have;


I read your script backwards, it would be something Greek scholars 

squeezed mathematics between,

intending to burn down a whorehouse 


next to an unknown solar system

called Zachary

in tribute to those silly things people used to do


naming dangerous events of nature 

with Plebeian names. I read your script and turned a gun on myself

to learn there were no bullets in it


and the gun I was holding

was a feather covered in ink to atone 

for the broken bones in your tongue;


there is nothing that resembles a script, a stage,

and you are a vainglorious bird of paradise

who mocked the beauty of the rook




I’ll Make a Movie Someday With Chazz Palminteri in the Starring Role


I'm the missing piece of artillery night time needs,

a hole in it for me to fill holding up a train maybe, 

writing a song for the second and second last time 

about my morning at the gallows 36 hours later -


the locomotive smell comes under radars at Killester,

an iron-horse kettle chuffing 

industry's rampaging ribs;

an iron-horse changes faces 


every century or so,

night-time never changes anything 

but its alibis and its stooges.

The 4 pronged curry-house 


plastic fork on the station platform

is bereft of its middle-two digits, it looks like the devil's horns,

dusk says nothing, night-time's shards of silver

shine on a need to know basis,


night breathes down from its visions

of things bent and dazed in shapes that 

scripts turn to wastelands of silence,

a gust of nothingness lifts an obsolete election poster


of an obsolete being. He's taking a stand on behalf of his community,

wrong colours tainting the purest snow that fell and froze his immaculate conceptions,

life is oh so easy when the right component parts lock their fangs

on the scattered sandgrains of dreams,


I'll make a movie someday with Chazz Palminteri

playing the next guy who walks past and asks

what I'd do if I was a soldier fighting a nuclear war in another dimension,

probably nothing less than anything more I'd do 


if I was sitting in a plaza in Cantabria.

Spaniards they say, can't make tea, for love nor for financial gains,

not being one to indulge in the leaf

I can't say I care too much 


about tea or nuclear war,

I'm a conscientious objector

to every word in every song

I could never sing. Why should I do anything less than more of nothing?





I Can't Remember the Name of the Street in Barcelona Where I Went to Mass

i.m. Steve Cawte (1982 - 2024)


Van Morrison,

fireflies and warm red stones 

spitting steam that curls making question marks


I'd give a handful of silver many of so many other answers for, 

if it needed to ask. I don't need to ask.

Maybe a blues-swollen dusk


in a pocketful of April 

asking how many liners I'd see clattering through here 

has shaken liquor-cool wires, 


leaving all these moments 

flat on a curve of a song on the meanings of anything.

Van Morrison didn't have an instrumental tune until 1982, then by April-time


they'd seeped into the plains,

as freight-liners kneaded their lyrics 

thoughtfully, on crackling eyes in patient Datsuns, 


knuckle-high in Coca-Cola.

Carrer De Tarragona 

was the last time my feet remembered something handed to me, 


from a leaf that fell from a dream,

and as I was praying, 

I learned how to understand 


a melody in the lyrics of the gracious.

Simon looked at Jesus and did a brotherly thing, 

even if he had to be prompted, a little -


oh, these liners trundling on the psalms of sorrow

miming a lyric to a lover, 

a ritual of remembrance. Remember, be pretty and be a song loud as a flower





Someone Left the Taps Running in the Can


Someone left the taps running in the can,

it's a definitive political statement, whispers confirm,


none of the truckers sitting in the deckchairs at their rigs 

are to blame, they've got pressures of their own, 


war was between water and a boy smiling at the counter,

who started something he'd lost control of,


spitting on the flowers as he left, the last time he was lord of anything, 

except dust and filthy stones



Soilse ar an Uisce : Cill Fhionntain


Féach :

Bogann uisce tine 

ó sholas,

agus codlaíonn sé ina iarmhairtí boga.


Éist :

Scoilteann aigéan cosúil le foraois trí thine,

d'fhoghlaim ainmhithe a mhionnú, maithiúnas uisce -

is éard caint ná h-áit dánta a ritheann i rúndiamhra an ghainimh


Geoff FM Playing Soul Music From Menton, Côte d'Azur


I gather stones for this buttermilk moon

which splatters light

in a tobacco whirlpool

until a guy two stories below

moves in to read a tarot death sentence on his childhood sweetheart.


The moon sees this and becomes a dandelion

pressing its petals on a mystery 

my window learns at dusk.


In my brain is a tongue of his cold confession,

waiting to advance,

though this time I have not maimed him : I empty his breasts of his petroleum, 

his scrotum of a bullet.


Standing by my radio

I await the signals of Detroit, Memphis, Chicago,


I obey the mellow dreams of factory-worker kids,

I give away the darkness to holes in the ground thirsty to be saviours



At Bellies Brae : Kirriemuir, Scotland

Bronze statue by John McKenna


Bronze, steel, furious flesh and hacked to its senses bone -

none are relevant, nor a throwaway


inside the beating hearts of wayward atoms,

rock n' roll - impossible to kill;


try it - by sniper,

by war,


by strychnine in a wee dram of everything post-war summertime

posted on a thistle's powerchords,


solid rock n' roll on a wild and

Bonny road - a rock no roll could kill, 1946 vintage - priceless


“Sitting in my Cadillac/Listening to my radio/Suzy baby get on in/Tell me where she want to go”

Downpayment Blues 1978






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 7 poetry collections published. His 7th collection, "Isolated Incidents" was published by Pski's Porch in Summer 2021.



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