Poem: Written

A favourite author talked about the world,
written on our bodies,
marked out in our silhouette
the small lines that tell our stories.
You are a tension in my shoulders,
a slight shrug,
an awareness of myself,
a tremor in my hands
and awkwardness in my carriage.
You are written somewhere in me,
perhaps hinted at by the grey hairs
that have started to grace my temples,
or an occasional distance,
an expression that crosses my face
when I think about you accidentally.
 

Poem: Regret

There is no reason I would have called you that night.

I wish I had.

I wish that I had thought to do it,
I wish I had done something differently,
But as it happened
I was at home, tweeting 'happy new year' 
to people I do not know
While you, in some kind of despair
Were dying. 
On your own. 

Poem: Dublin

In the morning it will be raining, or the sun will shine
And the river will flow through the centre of the city regardless.
There will be a crowd, or one or two, depending on beds and funding
It will be one short no matter the weather and circumstance.

My city is bleeding loss and hurt from the cracks in the street
At 6am they sneak in, stepping over the sleeping, to drag protestors away.
On occasion you see the missing, lost amongst the invisible
Conspicuous at last, if only by their absence.

‘We neither know nor care to look for anything but reasons’
An explanation for the state of things as they are,
But we do not want to dirty our hands
With the excrement created by our lust for progress.

You were stained with the hurt and sickness of neglect
And for weeks I watched you dying.

There is very little for which we should feel proud.

Poem: Love Stories

This is the oldest story ever to be told,
the very first tale that came with shedding gills, taking to land.
We like our words, to say forever and love
and lie with a casual banality that mocks us.
Nobody before us, or nobody yet to come, is different
and when the stars burn their last there will be lovers
who weep their soft lies together at the ends of everything.
and pretend that theirs is the first story to have anything other
than a happy ever after.

Poem: After the End

She felt she was alone – mostly this empty house,
This constant aching from nothing, nothing again.
She did not get the happy ever after that the stories promised her
The let this be the happy last page now.

Life keeps on writing the story, the parts that we do not tell.
This is murky, dirty; let us illiterate, after the ‘I do’.
A simple thing, a lying down and not waking up.
A no explanation, these things just happen, no reason.

Crumble, pour salt, waste away and ruin the dreaming,

Poem: Anonymous

In having something to say, saying it, but hiding
There is a certain kind of crawling cowardice,
In little insipid negative comments, remaining nameless
There is a nothing to respect or deign to discuss,
In being too afraid to be identified, even virtually
There is a pitiable pathetic pointlessness,
In having convictions, but no courage in them
There is no merit to the things that you are saying.

Poem: Campfire

Speaking of the past,
a crackling memory in glowing embers.
How I will remember that time
after white ash has blown away
and all that is left is scorched earth
and bitter cold. Once we ate melted mallows
and huddled together in the warmth
of living stories.

Poem: Love Story

In the morning light you said no more,
A ring on her finger, a promise in her womb
Every lie you told me proved to be true
And despite it all I’m losing you.

Built on a promise of yesterday, this is us
Shattered glass slippers slick with blood
Once upon a time we were in love.
We are mostly broken; we see the truth in hurt.

Love based on broken glass and fists,
Mouth my neck and weep with it
Slam this girl against a wall and thrust
Want, a bloody lipped parody of lust.

Then home to the woman you would never hurt,
Back to sweet nothings and safer love.

Poem: I thought

I thought, in getting older I would understand things more clearly, 
I do not understand.
I want to stamp my feet and scream at the unfairness 
That is in this.

I thought that, in getter older I would lose naivety
You have left me confused.
I want to turn back time and say the right lines
To change your mind.

I thought, in getting older I would learn acceptance 
It is beyond me.
I want to change what happened magically
Do something differently.

I thought, in getting older I would see the world differently
It would make sense.
I want to make agreements with a deity
And rewrite history.

I thought, in getting older nothing would hurt me
It would be impossible.
I want to bring you back to the living
And change everything.

I want this not to be happening. 

   

Poem: Love Hurts

There is no rhyme for this, the grubby business of dying
cannot be romanticised on this occasion, while we are watching it.
Running to the pharmacy for stronger drugs to stop you weeping
while we watch in horror as the pain tears through you
and yet, selfish as we are, we prolong your suffering,
fighting against you for every minute and calling it the love
that means we cannot bear to lose you. So we continue
this terrible torture, beyond the bounds of common cruelty.

Poem: Valentine

Briefly it made me a little sad
the lack of roses arriving, or chocolates in heart shaped boxes,
until lucky remembrance would have it recollected
how once everything was about you,
leaving me exhausted with the impossibility of making
someone else’s happiness my goal,
trapped in the misery of lost dreams,
the focus of your disappointed anger,
worn out by trying and failing, and failing again
to infuse some joy into our joyless wretched life
and calling this love despite all evidence to the contrary,
bar once a year when we pretended with flowers
that this is the life we wanted to be living.

Poem: Reactionary

I have built myself from the wasted scraps of my once upon a times,
we are fools when we believe in old magics and mages
and hide from the monsters underneath the bed,
praying to stories while we bleed and beg.

It is dangerous and stupid to wrap ourselves in wishes,
when the alarms sound we play with limited time
and lift our hems away from the filth
blinded to everything through choice.

We parade wilful ignorance as blessed virtue
but the children are still crying between the pages
of some great liars book of shadows
and blood stained words of gospel.

If I was another type of person I would arm myself with them
these shameful hurts and horrors,
but still, for all of our never again promises
we cheerfully hand over our children.

Poem: Intervention

I thought that I would do anything for you
for whom I feel the closest approximation of love
that I can manage. It is not true,
I had imagined epic bloody sacrifice
but not this quiet intervention,
the desperate plea in your eyes
that says you love me more than I do.

I was not angry with your pleading,
but numbed, numbed, hands beginning to shake
with waiting. Run away from the situation
the noise of my thoughts,
the remnants of who I was
before all of this happened, too fast.

I forgot that the me hurting, hurts you too,
the watching me disintegrate has broken your heart.
I am emptily sorry and brokenly guilty
that in the end I will lose you for this,
the only thing that you could ask for
that I cannot give to you.

Poem: Thank you

Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy day
To stop me in the street and let me know smoking is bad for me.
I won’t keep you talking, I know you must be busy,
Perhaps on your way to McDonalds to give warnings about obesity
Or to stand in the confectionary isle at Tesco’s to tut at people buying chocolate.

Then it will be off around the many Dublin pubs with dire warnings
About the negative effects of alcohol and increases in binge drinking
And all the while everyone will be indebted to you and thinking
How lucky they are that you happened to come along
And scold them into health and harmony.

Then you can take yourself into the beauty shops
And, not allowing yourself to be distracted by the flesh on show,
Explain how sun beds encourage malignant growths,
you will be forever the hero who saved their lives
and from now on they will be happy with pasty white.

Perhaps drop into some restaurants and express
your concern that table salt will lead to early death,
I guarantee that they will all throw away their chips
And not think you intrusive in the slightest
But will see your intervention as a precious gift
And not for one moment assume you’re a Git.

Poem: Ireland

The world is a shit place, lets not play pretend.
Everything is a bloody mess.
I can write you a lyric poem, if you want me to,
I can talk about the sun reflecting on glass for forty lines,
And we can all sing about beauty and sigh,
And bury ourselves in the comforting lie.

These Dublin boys are bleeding out neglect in broken needles,
Pissing outside the Blooms hotel, long since lost.
Ah sure, God is watching over us, ah sure,
Some old Irish bucket of crap, we disappear
Into apathy, disappear and never come back.

We need something outside of that.

Poem: Inspiration

It moved from the sublime
breath of Mneme and her sisters
to be diluted. Trite and useless
corporate slogans to mimic
the Muses. Lost is it now
in contentiousness, a demand to be
aroused by this. Inadvertent imitation
of Pierus, or the foolish pride
of the Sirens. Wrathful must
lost Goddesses be, with inspiration
lost in phraseology.

Poem: Mistaken Identity

Yesterday I saw you in the street
And went up to you to say hello
Of course it was someone else
Because you are gone
Lost to the confusion of myth 
And the make believe of eternity.
I had forgotten already,
Just for a moment. 

Poem

It is strange to think that when you came into my office with Christmas wishes,
that would be the last time I spoke with you.
That you could be a bride in September and gone before the year ended
and that when I sent you a stupid new years message you had already died,
the fates ignoring that you were so full of life.

When we went home for Christmas we did not expect that the next time we met
would be in shocked silence around a table, or talking about practicalities
while we tried to make sense of senselessness, not knowing what to say
because it felt like some kind of a terrible sick joke
that you would not be coming back to us.

I never imagined that I would spend a morning making phone calls
to tell your friends and colleagues that you were dead,
because you were young and beautiful and making beginnings.
Nothing about this is even close to being right,
I cannot believe that you have died.

With the stupidity of senseless morbid thoughts I keep thinking of
how you made me laugh, complaining about the cold Irish weather,
I told you to just wait until January, that it would get worse before it got better,
how stupid a thing to say, with the benefit of hindsight, all things considered
and how now you will be so cold forever.

I am waiting, like a child, for someone to come and tell me there was a mistake
for you to arrive, laughing, and say that they got it wrong.
You cannot be forever lost to us, to be forgotten, dead and gone.
It is it not fair, that you could be ended so bluntly, inconsiderately,
when you were so vibrant, so alive, so young.

I will miss you joking with me, you smiling and loud and demanding,
you vibrant, you living and talking in giddy accented rapidity.
I wish, for what wishing is worth, that you were not lost and us bereft,
but still dreaming your dreams, still loving your loves,
with a young woman’s ignorance of the time she has left.

Poem: 2010

It started on a Friday, with a suicide bombing in Pakistan,
while I nursed a hangover and navigated Dublin snow
which had just turned to dirty grey sludge when we heard about Haiti,
later to be overshadowed by 8.8 and tsunamis in Chile,
though we were more concerned when misbehaving volcanoes
grounded us in chaotic airports.

This year we watched waters spoiled by oil, and worried about shortages
and tutted at the ineptitude of the Grecian government,
not knowing what was coming in six months time.
We fell out with the French over handballs and cheating
and shook buckets for the sake of those deceased and displaced
by Pakistani monsoon rains.

We allowed ourselves a feel-good moment watching rescued miners
and one of bemused bafflement by antihydrogen atoms at CERN,
then watched in anger as our country faced financial disaster,
making November about bailouts and blizzards
and losing faith in the things we used to rely on
in foolish complacency.

At the start of it I was different; a simple passing change
inexplicably darkened the days to seeming insurmountability
which cannot be attributed to any one happening,
but soon it will be over and we can dust ourselves off
and begin the important work of forgetting,
not learning anything.

Poem: Lies, damned lies and...

Make your way in silence to the edge of our cities
and hide yourself there, behind the newest addition
of multi million showcasing we call art.
Keep your eyes downcast, do not cry out
or we will find you and bundle you off to anonymous elsewhere
to muffle your voice, fearing the human story.

You are 22 per cent that falls through the cracks of policy.
The other 78 do not want to bear witness,
as you peer through the double glazing,
flattening the flowerbeds and rosebushes
and mucking suburban content
with the detritus of a broken life.