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Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
KISSING FOR THE MOON

Full moon in Sorrento
witnessing our kiss

amazed(envious)        
of this...our human love

and the power
of it

Trying to shed some light
on the secrets

our hands
tell
each other's bodies.

The moon muses
to itself

loud enough
for us to overhear:

'****! I wish I
could do that! '

Shine on moon...shine on!

We'll kiss for you!
Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
WRITING THE SILENCE

scratching at the silence
the pen's nib spreads the word
the empty page now overcrowded

the clink of an inkwell
the pen drinks its fill
word chases word

the pen drunk with words
blots the page
the poet curses

now the pen stops
to think. . .
before creating the next word

the candle fearlessly
standing up to the darkness
at last the last full stop

his head
rests upon his words
the candle loses its fight

in the morning
his words line up
for his inspection

his words
once only ink
dance in his mouth

he repeats them
to the walls...the furniture
anything that will listen

his thought
once invisible even to himself
now parades across the page

outside the world is
waking up
the dawn yawns

". . .these are my beloved words
in whom I am well pleased. . ."
his face smiles back from the mirror
Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
BLEAK HOUSE

bride and groom figures
that smiled from their wedding cake
kept still in attic
groom’s lost his head...bride broken
mirroring their own marriage  

NO EXPECTATIONS

a tailor’s dummy
wears now her old wedding dress
like Miss Havisham
cobwebbed in attic...candle
throwing light on past...love lost.
Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
XMAS MARKS THE SPOT

I don't
(normally)
do this

you understand
but I am

staring at her
chest

in particular
where her ample *******

meet in a more than ample
cleavage.

Did not this
awesome architecture

of female flesh this
confluence of mammaries

just go
...tweet?

Yes...there
it is

for all to see
in a daring low-cut top

a robin redbreast
in her cleavage

making all who see it
...smile.

A tiny broken
robin

with an injured wing
(poor thing)

nestling between
her *******

(well it is
Christmas after all) .

She feeds it
every hour

with a tiny
dropper

as it nestles
snuggly.

'Peep...peep! '
it pipes up

every so
often.

Come Christmas
she gives it

the gift
of its

freedom

nothing but
blue skies

all day long
it returns

to its
human

as if it were
a living

Christmas card.
Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
. . .giotán de spéir briste. . .

bits of broken sky
litter the road
the fallen mirror

broken bits of mirror
become the sky
they look at

bad luck you say
no. . . such beauty
a sky scattered across a road
Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
IN FLOOD

You run down
the stairs

quickly quickly

your floating skirt
flowing step by step

after you

as if it were
your own private river

splashing at your heels

my heart flooded
with desire.
Donall Dempsey Nov 2018
BEYOND THE CLOUDS

He runs
for the sheer joy

of being
a little boy.

"Brian...Brian!"
I try to rein him in

with my voice but
he escapes even that.

"Watch out...watch out!"
I throw the words at him

"Or you'll hit
that cloud!"

Two clouds glower at him
and he stops in his tracks

suddenly uncertain if
that is possible.

And so perspective
cowers my little brother

and he runs back
holds my hand.

We tiptoe past
the threatening clouds

leaving them behind
he laughing nervously.

Now far far from that time
beyond even death

I call his name
and he runs and

takes my hand.

The clouds can only
look on.
It was only in death that Brian became my little brother again. He was able to make his way in the world easier than I and became the solid, dependable honest fellow so that he was able to deal with anything the world could throw at him so that in fact he became the "big brother." I on the other hand became a PIP( a poor Irish poet )stumbling from one thing to another trying to keep up with the world that was fast outpacing me. He was going to go for early retirement and move back home to look after our Da when he suddenly died. This planned retirement made him more open to the leisures and pleasures of poetry and he began to want to know how a poem happens and where it can come from. I told him ya know in frosty air ya can see your breath writing your words upon the air as if your soul was leaving your body and dancing with the stars upon a midnight...well it's a bit like that...an organic becoming rather than any planned thing. Like a human spiderweb spun from your self. I said do you remember running away from me when you were a little boy and I called you back by putting the idea into your head that you might hit your head on a cloud? I  recited Ivor Gurney's IF I WERE TO WALK STRAIGHT SLAP and he so how it was so that you could grow the most ordinary little moment in a life into a bunch of words that hung together to capture in sound a time that was gone and would never come again in exactly the same way or that a poem was the best time machine a chap could have.

After a while he could recite Gurney back to me and so started to keep poems in his head like a little room he could go into and treasure a moment again.

IF I WERE TO WALK STRAIGHT SLAP

If I were to walk straight slap
Headlong down the road
Toward the two-wood gap
Should I - hit that cloud.

He also came to love Raymond Carver's LATE FRAGMENT. It always made him cry. This was the one and only thing he said he wanted. One night we waited in the dark for a fox that would invariably come to the glass door and stare if at us as if the other foxes dared him to...to see what humans do in their little boxes. And Brian asked it....

"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."

I wasn't to know that friend fox was a psychopomp come to carry his soul away.


Later much later he became a card carrying member of some Cloud Association! Once when he was only his tiny self he asked me if "You die will there be weather?" I didn't know how to answer him and asked "How do you mean?" "Like...will there be clouds." Knowing no better I assured him that there would be! I still know nothing and he possibly knows everything.
I only hitting my head upon the clouds...talking to the skies.



I hope my little brother knew that he was beloved on this earth.
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