Anaemic black mist creeps its way between toes,
crawling eyewards, worming stealthily up shins,
pausing only to cup bolted knees and find more
progress toward the stomach's pit where it will rest,
For now.

The soaking - from outside in - is a violation as a pore
stretched aside is all the space this ten tonne mass
needs - a callused finger pulling back a fleshy curtain
to claim squatter's rights - mashing its body into a crawl space,
It curls.

Right here, in the depths, it will feed from its host and
gradually weave a tendril through intestines and bile
like a periscope, seeking and feeling for a route to the stem:
The source of everlasting sustenance;
The end goal.

Once it latches, it will live forever suckling stance.
The insipid parasite, the binding leech; as it takes hold,
consumes with its voidwalker embrace
and paints every memory with your fault;
Perpetual guilt.

The tide collects it all by morning;
The drama and the ***** napalmed across the path.
The scenes at second warning for most had been swept away
Before they wiped the sand from their shoes.

Empty cans of Dutch and Tuborg slouched on the dunes
Are tight-lipped about the Velvet Strand's secret ecosystem;
An underground microcosm;
A peripheral cluster of seething emotions drowned.

Memories of those years - although some expired,
The vestiges take pride of place - hold a cosmic clump of smells,
Tastes, firsts, goosebumps, hangovers, and ends.
I never before understood what I was holding on to.

Winters down in the shelters nearly killed us but we
Huddled through the cold, lit cheap firelogs and
Found our oblivion. It didn't take much for me to develop  
A stagger - tolerance for a lot of things was learned later.

I narrowly recall my first taste of poor judgement and
Hazy-headed stargazing. Six cans of Stonehouse
Dry cider - most of which ended up on the hillside -
Was a ridiculous endeavour that will always be sublime.

At the heart of it, I did it to impress a girl;
The one every boy has or has had that sticks;
Who holds your firsts and your hands and makes
Things simple if only for her complexity;

The one that never fails to bring upon digression when
Pens are involved. Revisiting reminiscence on a jarring note,
I think of my Junior Cert exams and a cross-dressed man
Exposing himself to two uniformed boys behind the public toilets.

This one doesn't stir the joy of the others.
This one I wish would dissolve;
An ugly, awkward blotch on a childhood.

Luckily fondness trumps disgust when recalling that place
Because of sunrises and sunsets absorbed from the roof.
The Summers spent jumping the gap and drowning in the
Heat of the sun were everything.

The fugitive sand between our toes and under finger nails
Became an accepted nuisance, a part of the territory;
A lingering grain or two to drag you back.
I miss waking up with the smell of last night's faded fire.

For Idil Ibrahim
In memory of Tim Hetherington - 1970 - 2011

I cannot stay and speak my truth while the front line has no voice.
The carpet doesn't share substance with the blood-clumped
dust of Liberia; Red wine doesn't stain nations and it hasn't
changed the world.

I cannot stay and walk these steps while the fragile youth stand.
Our Sunday morning route doesn't cover landscapes of wounds
and bodies; Central Park has never felt a thousand welted
feet march for death.

I cannot stay and see your face while molten plastic scars her world.
Your delicate eyes have never seen the darkness of a child's grief;
Our democracy cannot fathom the searing, slow drip after a family
massacred.

I cannot stay and feel worthy of your love while injustice goes unseen.
My lens has immortalised what we held dear, but is yet to capture
the human condition; I spoke to you like I spoke to them;
Through decades of mortar fire I spoke to them.

Fleeting, rolling days, weeks,
years of half-memories with
no faces,
but places - parks,
playgrounds, forests, ditches -
in which youthful time was
spent without a thought for
permanence or preservation.
The "best years of your life"
twisted, tarnished, pastel-
smeared to indistinguishable
faces, places, seasons,
feelings, fears, loyalties -
scrunched up and abandoned;
left to seep inside a clockwork mind
teeming with trivial tenterhooks
and patchwork recollections.

I've walked the path many times
before and since.
It is always calm -
baron but teeming
with a muddled
disquiet of
once thought
final thoughts.
It's a place of peace
in which everything
resonates chaos
to the point you can
feel it invade
each synapse -
Ivy smothering
your process.
A slow-release
maddening hum
amplified by the
wind sweeping through
monstrous, scrawny
trees in formation:
They held the bodies
and winced when
their branches broke.
Yet still there is a draw
to the energy
festering there,
be it from the asylum
at the top of the hill
leaking memories
of abandoned
sons
daughters
mothers
fathers,
or from the long submitted
acceptance
of martyrs who inhaled a
sharp cluster of reasons
as their last
with solidarity.

Candy floss and a visit to the arcade:
That's all it took to bring things back an hour
to the moment before a missed step.

Panic, pandemonium, a parallel universe
is what I came to; Landed, rag-dolled on a weather-worn,
rice field imitation rock. What I would give to see myself

From the edge. To see the angles my body chose
while I was away bringing my dearest to my side.
First I collected my sister with a scream that belongs

Only in stories that deal with grief: Guttural.
Come to think of it, that acrid ancestral call didn't belong to me.
I wasn't the one who pricked her from her periwinkles

And guided her over the barnacles to become a silhouette.
It wasn't me who dragged the adrenaline-fueled arms and legs
of an undressed, distressed father from his bed, through the

Haze of his own thoughts: a descent he wont soon forget.
I wasn't there. The things I describe are born of a situation
I have spent fifteen years rebuilding; I'm ashamed to say

I missed it. I never felt the chaotic shift of the wind and was never  
able to expect the worst because I was too enthralled with her face.
It was my sole focus as I lay down.

I watched intently - in slow motion - distortion explode into
her cheeks, tearing her mouth to the seams; scared eyes
enveloping lids and unwavering, taking me all in.  

I have no doubt she remembers the moment as well as i do,
Probably more so, for she experienced the backwash.
She was certainly shown the quickest way down.

I remember that it was beautiful that day:
A real Irish-sunburn peak in Liscannor Bay.
I also remember walking down the garden

To the cliff stenciled on the back of my hand
with the cheerful arrogance only an eight year old
can get away with.

As the day breaks and the shards embed in your soles,
Tread lightly.
Don't be the one to take away the glare;
A blanket that draws you -
Hand over brow for an empty salute -
To the vast empty spaces where
You hold the only shade.

If you're who I want to be,
You'll give it back as you found it.
Calmly picking up the splinters
And trying to make it right;
Right so the slow tick lines up with the
Imperceptible order of things and no one feels uneasy;

So no one shivers as you cast it back to the horizon,
Waiting once again for the ricochet.