Five Poems by John Doyle

 

Mary With Eyes So Cold and Empty the Angel of Death Fell to His Knees and Wept

I sense cold spine-chewed air,
which, given what time has done

can make the devil run scared, the angel of death 

dangle by the neck

from a lone leafless tree on a barren prairie.
Downtown has made a corpse of me, I'll admit,

the serpent made from smoke who burrows through our morning
said this at his prayer meeting, making tea, 5 months clean from temptations;

leaning back on his chair he poked at the venetian blinds with a tooth-decay relic of a broom,
downtown makes heathen corpses of the most holy of men, who shined their shoes praying

they'd be dating women like Mary,
20 years ago bringing boutiques to town,

and black star-screeching eyes
that opened up steel-cold shutters in a shopping mall a.m.

I'd been a security guard in,
that one summer when I needed dollars and dreams to drag me through college.

The sky's blue currency burrows me through times,
small neon nothings sprinkled like soldiers patrolling the city's bulbous hills,

weeds lifted from a wrinkled horizon;
Could be cloud, could be smoke, a serpent made from one or the other murmurs,

or maybe Mary with eyes so cold and empty the angel of death fell to his knees and wept.
20 years on, the cement has dried on my soul, and the brutalist concrete envy turns to grey

every morsel of what was once my good cheer,
a clothes-hanger ching on clickety clack coat-racks

makes Louboutin's dagger bleed her soles in envy, Mary's face and Mary's eyes
and Mary's life a piece of meat

hanging by a shopping mall's cactus trees and Mary's coffin 15 shopfronts long
on page seven of a local newspaper small local business features section.

It's a shame about midnight,
It's dirtied hands, 

It's crippling toes like Chinese women in bonded shoes, 

it's haha oh so funny joke

I'd dreamed my shame
a new newspaper funny in piss red wine, 

here at this town I hold my suitcase 

in the smack centre of,

to pray for a swift in his bended skin junkie 

who wants to set fire to my poem.

Go watch its sparks
leave him in the clutches of the moon

the big water grey church of death
where Mary's remaining light would like to be quenched

or just buried. 

Either would be rest, I presume, though I haven't yet asked her,

Mary pinching shadows' crossfires

while I dream it's someone beautiful who turned to tightropes my coffee's ripples

1993... (An Android I Should Turn to Be)

All I'd wept from August’s wound, moonshine gathered as firewood, new battle-plans it seems;

the sun is loud and stinking, 

it laughs at things dragonflies bring from rivers,

men sometimes war over,

after all, nothing meant nothing 

when we'd seen our bodies dangle

where the coyotes used to bathe, being civilized. 

What were we? 

shadows of flesh, credit from oil magnate transactions? 

Secrets archaeology knew it could tell no one?

Ferris wheel sunlight casts a home-movie reel 

making electronic my shadow,

making water a language wolves

bled into stone; 

gosh - a lot of money changed hands that Summer's morn

we made our way to the carnival, 

not sure if we'd short-circuited one alehouse too many. 

I knew as I'd slowed down, hiding behind a sycamore tree when none of them were looking,

and a kid kicking Saturday's stones down the street

ran home with words falling from his back pocket.

I knew;

and I'd known I'd tell no-one, only the loud and stinking sun.

Ghosting

The - ing - part makes it a verb.

A verb is an action word.

The action therefore, is in the withdrawal, the inactive, not an action.  Perhaps

the actions of offence are active in its victimhood,

the perp who destroys the butterfly spirit of the weakest drop of rain

by simply being free

to do nothing but set themselves free from other verbs - 

she was annoying, he was irritating, we were incompatible.

We have become ghosts, all of us, decreed by this nihilistic void, senseless rationale.

Oh, how quaint thou art! child of simple snow

we did not dream our future 

would dribble down from, post-millennia…

How many more wounds can we manufacture for you?

On Reading The Aureole by Nikki Finney

Light, that's what I’ll feel before I see, 

what I damage *(or give love to)* escaping egg-shell explosions. 

It's the unlying, unflinching, inescapable light,

who (it's a being) warms Tuscan lingo 

that seeds a rolled out 

tongue

becoming something... alive, 

centuries that swivel hips in the light

and on becoming bringers of child-light to the soul,

ask more light to come along, 

join the party, 

pop open soda-pop bottles

who make sounds laughter 

stops 

to learn from - real sound

wrapped around real light wrapped around speaking contours

sparkling and asking more and more

of what time did not realise it could bring

like a gold-lip music

tadpole finding its urgency in a space

of colossal endless words

now;

how does this feel, 

dancing on the coiled effortless skin of cool

and fragrant God-mirrored 

word? Place that skin upon a mirror

and be as free as a hawk is

to mourn what something else

has done

and not been free

to understand 

or stand under

A Seat Outside a General Store in an Oklahoma Town

When dusk almost hides the body - Virginia Woolf

Witchcraft's moody stove

shimmers blue's last seconds from Paul Henry's moon.

My girls and I find peace

barefoot on garden’s blameless stones

warmed, sonata-like, in a twilight shaping.

My girls and I are finding peace,

firefly music is upon us,

be still,

hopeful as a man of 70 

sitting on a seat 

outside a general store in an Oklahoma town

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.