Caesar’s February Strategy
Dog-eat-dog embrace,
Sweat’s sour radiating salve, [ with senators ]
Spring-light offloads chill.
River sucks gods-light
From suns seasonal weakness. [ with friends ]
Fears a flooding weir.
Light’s going, moths drift
To any candle flicker. [ with the god Caesar]
Roll on "Ides of March" .
Studs Terkelling
Eastern, chilly-cloud, cream-snow.
These basin-inverted Knockmealdown hills
On my right. We roll slowly with the flow,
Long line of lit-up vehicles like aliens waiting,
In early evening, on Cork border roads.
This is a brooding, intro pan shot
To an imaginary Studs Terkel movie,
Where perceived lives are, were, or could have been,
And in process become lightning codes,
Beyond a nod of mere distraction to fool’s-gold,
While gods of bone-scraping intractability bend
A knee at this foolhardiness.
Kith & Kin
Sister
...................
Dog swallowed by blood,
Be-there-Eileen reaches out.
Blind snaps the world.
Grandmother
.................................
To the U.S
All courage at sixteen.
Angry & married with five kids,
In West Cork of 1915 .
"Daughter.....which way is home?",
At the local crossroads 1950 .
Grandfather
..............................
Were you ,as some said,
A street angel,house devil?
DNA rides god .
The Hurling Game
Where fields lie, like mounds of
Exotic,green folded napkins,
Between Bandon and Newcestown,
I come upon the god of war.
Innocuous challenge game there,
Involving neighbouring places,
With dusty,turning,country roads
And memories shaded as dusk.
From first whistle,cornerback-2
Is at it, gurrier tactics,jersey-pulling,
Slapping,spitting, mouthing unknowables.
A knowing-crowd awaits inevitable twist
Of fortune's wheel. Suddenly he's hit,hit again,
Fists finding flesh,blood splashpainting nose and face.
Guy next to me says"that's sure well-deserved".
At wire,I hear a child screaming"daddy".
I can imagine this kid come-darkness.
All those future-chaotic dreams,
Like black-ice in clever disguise
At moment of slide,as once I would slip.
Now I'm tired as creaking backbone
Of a fallen idol who's seen too much,
Cold and calcium-calling for some god,
And how I want this game to end !.
My adrenalin flows over
A strange abyss, fossilizes that child
In the heat of dark momentum,the game
Stopped as these fighting men seem stopped
In Bogart and Bacall time-frames,
By the blink of eyelids in fear.
Optimum Time
Too much time for thinking
Makes a man turn from
The grasp of things
To inevitable darkness
Of finding the meaning,
When a white horse
Chasing some truth,
Dies foaming on the horizon.