Further Education

  

Those interviewed, cue slightly-damaged goods,

redundancy, divorce, grass-widowhood,

this one's different. She's unpredictable,

reiterates, finds it impossible

to concentrate. Stripped to the quick, bare bones

ill kept, no eye make-up, tram lines - home-made -

on wrists, like scratches by lost souls who mark

up time in prison cells, warnings kick in.

She talks at you from inner cyber space.

Behind her, everyday, viewed through clear glass,

is shifting red and disappearing fast.

Recording on a loop, constant refrain,

her narrative leaks out in dribs and drabs:

 "Aliens come for me, hot wire my brain."

 

Self Employed

 

He queries what you do, then, bending, scoops

to feed the grumbling concrete-mixer sand,

cement and chips in guttural shovels-full.

You tell him how you write a bit, feel like

that swotty kid again who can't resist,

his aching to be taken seriously

the joke. You watch politely, itch to be

dismissed. He sloshes half a bucket's worth

inside the rattling drum; gauging by ear

and eye, adds egg-size gobs till satisfied.

Reply flexed shoulder-blade and raised brow-ridge,

perused, you exit left. Man of few words,

the meaning's blatant as lump-hammer blows

and patent as his pride in what he is.

 

The Curlew

'O curlew, cry no more in the air' (W. B. Yeats)

  

This tearful horn-anglais refrain haunts like

old Irish pipes, high-bubbling trills as shrill

as tribal widowhood. St Beino blessed,

his sermons rescued from the waves, tale goes,

blurred like a needle's eye by candlelight

and lost again before you know, they weave

between two worlds, of living and of dead.

These browns, burnt olives, duns add clout: hard times

abound, present and past; echoes of fly-

blown gunnels and consumptive back to backs;

of guttersnipe, folk old before their span -

famine, disease, debilitating dust;

of gamekeeper, mill owner, magistrate,

pawnbroker, rent collector, tallyman.

 

Dublin

 

This place has grown a skin like drying turf,

the quaint decay, raw as a curlew's eye,

incensed by snarling traffic fumes ('Enough

to wake the dead!') and goosed by all things new.

Seduced by ancient history, grave goods

invoking ancient wailing rites, Danelaw

and Eurogeld, 'Queue now to view the Book

of Kells!'. Though folk still cross themselves and talk

in tongues like a tridentine rite, good craic's

the wanton whore, those rare old times revised,

mouth music piped and pitched at tourists tamed

and canonised. The flipside of this bright

new store, mass genuflection of the will,

some wag has scrawled: 'I spend therefore I am.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Old Bog Road

County Galway, Ireland

His face adds texture to the ground he cuts.  

Cured by the wind and rain and written on

like pages from long-faded paperbacks,

he's tenure here. Recall to mind those men

you laboured with, who mocked your eagerness

through smiling eyes, fond summer days on roads

and building sites. The air is dozy with

the sense of drying peat. You watch him turn

new-sheening turves to cook, then try his spine,

lean on his crook to craic the time. 'I worked

the motorways for years. This called me back."

He's shaman-wise, stacks visionary truths,

old as these hills, we burn unwittingly,

like youth's fair-mindedness, to smoke and dust.

 

'Raindrops keep falling on my head'

1.

Harry Longabaugh & Robert Parker

 

Weighed down by money belts and hot pursuit,

through killing heat and cold, dust storm and rain,

there's no place safe to bide, buy luxury

you crave. Corruption, killing, drunkenness,

sex bought and sold, the Town Disease thrown in

for free, death cheap, is what you've known, but life

in your new century is shifting fast.

Hole-in-the-Wall and Robbers' Roost cleaned out,

the Wild West sanitised, that photograph's

fixed you all right, big bounty on your head.

It reads pure Hollywood, this storyline,

myth of the superman, a Robin Hood,

who flouts The Law for common good, with fist

and gun, beneath a Samuel Palmer sky.

 

2.

Mr & Mrs Harry Place & James Ryan

(Coney Island, New York, February, 1901)

 

Just as the door to Mr Place's room

began to close, you glimpsed a pistol in

its holster, sort of thing they use out West.

But mindful of his tip, you thought no more

of it, until a few days' later, when

you read how Pinkertons had chanced upon

a photograph of members of the Wild

Bunch outlaw gang. And there he was, him with

the classy broad in tow, the Sundance Kid

no less. You recognised the piercing eyes 

from the adjacent suite,  Butch Cassidy,

would you believe? You dined on him for weeks.

They left next day, the Argentine, some said.

Whatever, they were never seen again.