Seven Poems by John Doyle

 

An Employee in a County Kildare Pharmacy Whom I Briefly Had a Thing For in January 2015

You cross-examined me with your silence,

your name years short of earning my history

in a cobwebbed city's poem or a wound-down car-window 

roadside in County Kildare, the kind of window

old tobacco-roasted men 

with hopeless sense of place

acknowledged,

dispersed in a willing wind crooked with longing.

Your lighthouse is sinking on a haunted shipping forecast

flash-lamp martial-law curfews gave that city, 

its cobwebs scalded on the moon.

I am a butterfly -

I am bionic,

your mechanical cocoon punctured

and your clouds only briefly outwitting the sun -

nipping in and out of tin opener traffic

an experimental year 

sunk deep into all our boisterous deaths;

 

tomorrow it could've been a city one of our kids

was monarch of -

thank Christ I'm a pauper so, the richest pauper in town,

your legs deadened by your yawning,

your eyes fluorescent in your fading

on a vanishing clock in a bric-a-brac shop near a boarded-up pharmacy.

Song for the First Animal I Ever Ate 

I'm a wild dangerous thing 

made hours before reason shelters fox, 

choosing dove's cobalt armour 

as something tame and logical cradles me;

your memory - which has bled history through me, drowns primal fangs from a bleached river 

ten centuries outside town, 

emotions chewed on a supermarket shelf -

until you found these poems I'd slaughtered, cradled me for the first time and tried forgiving - time will tell that tale, 

will lean on me, and carry 

each crime from my rib

Lovers In a Late Night Launderette Would Never Notice Things Like These

Motorbikes are sleazy and slow as they make love to falling rain

kidnapped by tarmac's mad confessor; night's not truly here -

until death chases away morning's silence.

He was so cheery walking in, I'd hoped he'd make less noise than winter did

when I screamed at its wound to be silent. 

Anything we'd lost on that stock market crash, I'd told him we left behind for snow to interrogate -

the embers of which swallow someone's speechless fire. 

That's not good enough, is it?

A man at the side of the highway kneels before his motorcycle and begins to pray, 

hovering beneath the damage to his song-smashed face;

nothing has ended, nor has a valid excuse

in the glass-cold reasons of dawn.

The Demolished Hotels of Atlantic City, New Jersey

In a photograph of the Marlborough-Bleinheim, dated 1906,

a man and woman stand on the middle floor terrace

plotting their Bolivian skedaddle - its a mirage - folded tight on time's bitter warrant

no more distant than that Pinkerton posse showing their credentials at the county-line, 

Jersey electric in this wild romantic dark.

Nothing's afoot, otherwise, sounds coming through from New York City on telegraph wires

we imagine deal with finance,

automobiles and simple deaths surrounding more stagnant lives.

At the Traymore, in 1910, families called Abbott, Bartlett, and Deveraux sip their Sunday tea,

and, speaking of scoundrel men and scarlet women, 

discuss the humdrum of their vacation to Bolivia.

The beach holds itself firm against the calm of Protestant sea, 

Sunday in Atlantic City, freezing the urge of their momentous clocks

Stranger # 294 Confident of His Place on the Highway

For when I see the moon living in your face 

I see the dreams of neighbours creeping 

                                              down the drains 

and I hear the closing arguments of jurors send a boy to the electric chair 

                                                            and I grab my hand from my breasts and I hold 

          you so tight I've made a photograph in the visions of my room 

where we have loved and killed and prayed and been cheated by the rising sun, 

                           and I love the moon rising in your face and I've made us all 

                                some breakfast and become stranger # 294 confident of his place on the 

highway thinking we look swell in wrinkled sepia photographs

          people are looking at

      secretly knowing every drip of water is a drip close to a full glass in some jurisdictions

                     and a number of towns as we near the border

The Apple

The apple awake and terrified on the supermarket floor

I intend to write this poem about has been returned to its shelf 

meaning death and screwing 

loom again as subjects poetry has sold its soul to.

There are no more apples to speak of, 

they all look so alike, 

like people, helpless red turbulent shapes of larger teeth 

a language fattened beast ends their senses in. 

This is sad. 

There cannot be a poem. 

Sex and death and sorrow bore the boy 

by the anarchic arenas running through his teeth a willing coin

a boy and girl called Adam and Eve gambled their two-room apartment 

above a fast food joint for

Song for Mahmoud Darwish

I’ve found that water, when spoken to, giggles as children do;

when lives of poets and their assassins

have incongruous value 

amongst shattered skulls,

those armadas crossing desert sting nude as the wordless tongue

too dry to seek that giggling water,

too softened at visits from the skies 

by electric-winged death.

Someone turns this water to rhyme,

unstarves our voices with alphabets

begotten of the splintered desert stone,

someone - who washes our souls as a neighbour washes our feet. 

Someone writhing through this song.

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.