im up to my nuts in the tide
crying defiantly
warning the waves away
im not obstinate
im mired
my rime rimmed eyes
are master of naught they survey
my hands are tied
im bound to be riled up
watching whats coming my way
regardless i try
ill stop when im dried out
or drowning
take a deep breath
and start over again

ANAM CARA
( Soul Friend )

the sun bursts
into the tiny room
seating itself on the sofa

the water boils
whistles impatiently
waiting for the human to make tea

she feels like an object
in a room full of objects
an object cursed with consciousness

milk gone sour
out of cigarettes
impossible to live without cigarettes

dashes barefoot
to the opening shops
out of her favourite brand

an impossibly old man
almost a living cartoon
turns the handle of a barrel *****

as if they had
being beamed down
from another century

the young Irishman
(she had heard him talking to)
the monkey in the red fez

when he was not
reading Hamsun's
The Hunger

the monkey yanking at
his manacled left foot
when he wasn't dancing

"Ahhh Anam Cara!"
he comforts the monkey
"Me monkey too in Chinese Zodiac!"

The Merry Widow Waltz
wafting above a tree
its music entangled in its branches

the barrel *****
erupts incongruously into
Abba of all things

she watches the Irishman
now from her bedroom window
a figure trapped in a painting

he reads all day
until the light declines
to help him

she wonders at what thoughts
roam inside his head
what images grow there

dusk comes quickly
as if it's in a hurry
to get day done

tiny stars nail the night
to the frozen sky
before morning tears it down

the Irishman
observes the lights go on
in all the windows  

he appears to be
outside of time
she wishes she had spoken to him

"Ahhh Anam Cara!"
she mimics his voice
comforting herself

not knowing what
the words mean
her voice touching their tenderness

he leaves
his Hunger behind him
on the bench

she pockets it
falls asleep reading it
dreaming of him

*

This was a park in Rotterdam as the evening declined and night came on...I was a very lonely young man. I was reading Knut Hamsun's THE HUNGER and just letting life stream past me as if I were a rock in a river. Then a barrel ***** with a monkey hove into sight and sound. I had never thought to have encountered such a thing as I had only seen them in films and it was as if it had squeezed through some wormhole and escaped into this future. It played all operetta interspersed with the hits of the day so surprising to have the Merry Widow one moment and then Dancing Queen the next. The old man looked as if he had been sculpted from pure sadness as did his monkey who wore a red fez and a dashing scarlet waistcoat. The incongruity of meeting a dancing manacled monkey dressed in human attire was not lost on me. It was like being in a scene from The Third Man and I expected to glimpse Mr. Lime at any moment as the night came on.

In the morning a barefooted woman from one of the flats across the road came and got some cigs and milk and stopped to look at me as I talked to the sad monkey in Irish. She smiled fleetingly and dashed back to her home. I had a sudden flash that maybe she was my soul mate and we were doomed to miss each other in that one mad moment. So I imagined her loneliness in her room and my loneliness in this park and how we we would never encounter each other ever again. And so my soul mate was to be this poor monkey as if we both recognised that we were both tied to this mysterious moment by a fake gold chain that let us dance but never escape the ***** grinder. I forgot the book when I was told the park was closing and the man and his monkey had long gone. I still had not finished it and it was only years later that I finally got around to its final pages.

The conference 

I had gone to a writer's conference
The room was full of authors only interested
in reading and pushing their book
I had brought a book called Hunger, written
by Knut Hamsun, the pages were loose and
kept falling off, but there was a picture 
of him a stern man-looking intellectual  
The leader of the meeting, a man who was 
proud he had not gone to college and said
he knew more than anybody else
did want to read Hamsun's book, because 
Knut had gone to university in Oslo
Since the room was full of writers pushing
their work and didn't want to be influenced 
by other voices, I left
In the parking lot, all the cars were white, my
car was a Russian jeep called Lada, but
I couldn't find it, so took my leave of the scene