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.

Those who've lost, or who've been lost;
The people who have nothing left.
If what that red-brick shell provides

Soothes but one of these sufferers,
It serves a purpose to us all.
A purpose it should not overstep.

An hourglass, tightly bound,
fused grain in streaks;
each one taking on a different stain
giving the illusion of a thousand horizons
stacked to make up a body - empty but aching
to be filled by waves.

From knots wound into a headstock
grows an addiction: a need to revive  
the skin left behind between grooves -
skin which serves to soften the break,
but also feed character to the swell -  
granting purpose to decay.

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.