Five Poems by John Kenny

 

The Shape of Now 

 

Is it the shape of now 

that forms my memory of  

that night, when I saw the  

embers of our dissolution 

in the wasting firewood  

in that glowing room? 

 

With the snow-blanketed  

fields pushed away outside 

and us cosseted and  

gazing at each other,  

cherishing the  

fleeting moment.

 

 

People Came This Way 

i'm. J. G. Ballard 

 

Drained swimming pools, detritus  

accreting at their deep ends, 

 

remote crumbling villas 

baking in hot desert suns, 

 

sonic art in courtyards 

forever tinkling unheard, 

 

cracked concrete intersections 

pointing to barren nowheres, 

 

multi-story car parks stacked  

with silent engines, and 

 

vast, empty shopping malls with 

TV monitors spewing commercials 

 

on an endless loop, relieved at 

last of consumer madness, 

 

show that people came this way, 

and went. 

 

 

 

Invisible 

 

Look at me, my worn, torn face, 

my limbs withered, pencil thin, 

marked by a fierce relentless time, 

aged with terrible swiftness. 

 

I’m only thirty, hard to believe, 

you’d add ten years, fifteen, 

as you glance my way, walk on, 

wrapped in other concerns. 

 

Is it embarrassment at your comforts 

that won’t turn your glance to a gaze, 

that halts your tongue from greeting 

my blanket-covered huddled form? 

 

I can’t conceive your three-bed home, 

your central heating, your car 

sheltered in garage from frost, 

your nine-to-five, your slippered evenings. 

 

You’ll never know the endless days, 

eternal nights curled in doorways, 

the shifting struggle for vagrant warmth, 

the sole desire to keep feet dry.

 

 

Sofia 

 

Liberated from the Ottomans by Russia, 

Nevsky Cathedral built in celebration, 

now ex-Soviet, the scars remain 

in brutalist architecture, in 

vast granite monuments 

extolling the glorious destiny  

of the workers, and built  

with great deliberation 

to cast long shadows 

on a man, hunched,  

crossing an immense 

cobblestoned square.

 

Exhausting All Sympathy 

 

To exhaust all sympathy,  

that’s what they want. 

The plan is obliteration 

in the face of objection, 

 

carried to its zenith, with 

corporate enablers guiding  

the way and ad campaigns  

designed to misinform. 

 

The plan is to tire us out,  

with distraction make us forget, 

so that half of us sleep, 

while the other half burns. 

 

But think of the profits, 

contracts for reconstruction, 

access to land and resources 

‘til now hindered by people, 

 

the bulging portfolios, and 

shareholder quarterly reports 

that speak of a world dying 

and glorious short-term gain.

John Kenny is a writer and editor, and works as a tutor in the Irish Writers Centre, with short stories published in Uncertainties, Revival Literary Journal, The Galway Review, Transtories and many other venues. His poetry has featured in StepAway Magazine, Smashing Times and Every Day Poets, and is forthcoming in Prole.