I thought about the best way I could have acted
Speaking over the TV
Lying back STRAIGHT over the sofa
Just when Dad came home

Instead when he asked me how school was
I only mumbled "good' and headed into my room
to play The Clash CD I had gotten at the library
and sat alone on my bed until dinner
Even though I know he likes that band.

It's the pieces of the best thoughts I have
that fail to come together
Just when things start to happen
and the panic sets in.

Blood felt in a caress
Was the last gift of love I sent you home with.
My thoughts gently clinging to the curled ends
of your hair.
The moon bright as a baby's skin
The wind from the sea leaving nothing untouched

I could think of a Springsteen lyric
but this isn't the summer
and my clothes cling too tightly
To this body which I intend only to please you.

I think instead of a friend telling me of a power-out
When he lived in a minor Chinese mainland city of seven or 8 million
And how all he could see for  miles around for an entire week afterwards
was smog.
And I contrast that
With when in the relatively far west of this tiny island
We stood laughing in wonder at how the stars hung so closely down on us
And how smog is all that fills my head
When I try to remember words you use
When you speak of the moon.

When you die
People you will have never met
will give your family condolences

When you die
Spurned former lovers will
send delicate flowers

When you die
People will be summoned to
make you look beautiful

The way that you felt on nights
you enjoyed being yourself the most

When you die
Cautious children will cry
without ever learning
of your conflicting views on children

When you die
They might hang the church wall
with pictures of weddings
and graduations

When you die
You may not be alone

When you die
You might be the first and
the others will all follow

Having made no preparations of their own.

When you die
They might play your favorite song
or they might play a more "appropriate" song
as they lead you away
and some people will be scolding themselves
about forgetting where they parked

When you die
They may have forgotten that you didn't
believe in the afterlife
Quotations from Leviticus notwithstanding

When you die
You could be the the one who made
the most important impact on your daughter or son's life
You might have their life worth living

When you die
It may be to no applause

When you die
It may inspire your mother's gynecologist
to visit a church for the first time in almost half a decade
and feel genuine empathy for the rituals of human dignity
regardless of the tribe

When you die
none of your siblings may attend
the rain might pore on your last parade
and people might go home early

When you die
Everybody may just have a great time
heads beaming, shoulders high

When you die
It might be the longest day of Summer
with waterfights in the park near you were born.

When you die
You will have lived to see
all your ambitions come alive
Even if that penpusher "Reality"
explicitly states otherwise.

The insurance company billboard sign
That lords above my head
As I walk past the flats
Proudly sings of

    "NO FEAR
     NO SHOCK TACTICS
     NO SCARY ADS"

Yet last night the pretty lady
On Yesterday's six O'Clock news
Told me how Putin is plotting World War Three

Under the Dartline
The supermarket corporation
Urges Dublin to

"LOOK OUT FOR SOME LOCAL GOODNESS"

While across the road
A man was car-rammed and then shot
Outside Luigi's takeaway
While we slept nearby

The world is an unpredictable
And ever more lonely place
No one pays to disperse that knowledge
Thus earned is rarely desired

I'm done with lullabies
I'm finished of singing you to sleep

Because your dreams
Won't provide you with the same solace

Somebody
had thrown a cassette
of Therapy?'s "Troublegum"
its nicotine-hued tape
mangled like the innards of
a gutted fish, or
so many sprayed limbs
in a crowded car pile-up
-decorating the bare branches
of the winter-stricken trees
which lay beyond the barbed wire fence
that separated the state-supported
and architecturally sound
playground facade of the solitary concrete grounds
-with empty swings-
of our mixed gender primary school
of 200 plus students (whom were
referred to as "pupils"-which reminded me
too much of eyes, but children are all eyes, aren't they?
With golden-hued irises, who seem to remember
everything).

Who had thrown it there?
Smashing all the angst-sodden, ripped guitar reverberations
-the fruits of a few individuals hard grasp and compromise, toiled out through a probable number of significant years-
that had lurked inside?
Why that gesture and why in that place?
Perhaps it had been the jettisoned request
of some clandestine love affair
(ephemerality also lays claims to gifts, to its plural gesture)
or, maybe in a more obviously classical mode,
it was only the result
of a bored friend who cared little for the music
or the efforts behind its delivery?

Whatever the reason,
its one of a handful of memories
that have stayed with me
when my thoughts strayed back to that school
(mostly without an intended purpose).

Also, across the same wasteland
there were assembled corrugated shacks
lined in front of back-garden walls
strewn with illegible graffiti
anticipating the waning rave culture
where we supposed-and were frightened by the thought-
that were the hang-outs of Drug users (AIDS was still a topic then)
and Pedophiles.

But then again,
we never tried to find out.

This home is becoming
Like a weathermast of the soul
Beaten into responding silence.

To awaken here again
And to only wear this armour
As a riposte sufficient to self-assurance
And to rise, out of lazy eyelids and
Consider the opposing wind turrets
Laid as the proposition
All slack and starkly
Poised on the trapeze


The wallpaper durability of family headaches ;
The spurned lover's recurring luminosity
The marked and re-imagined lists
Detailing personal no-shows and defeats
Bookended by
The passing on of friendly eyes.

Assuming the universal, and in doing so, blindly holding out for the miracle :
For falling out of love is completely plausible
Whereas letting go of shame is mostly incomprehensible

Regret is not
The fleeting deferral of
some brief romance
Regret is
the inability to react
to the irreversible moment
of something created
slipping away

(My boy Jamie being led
  into that bitter cold by
  a hand that should have
  been none
  but my own)
  
Photographs
faded pulpit dark and
winter noon grey
are but the same as
extinguishing candles
to mark , instead , what
could have been done
for the world

(I thought they were better off
being together
with their own kind
so I used to hurry past
them waiting for the trains
their children tidy and
smiling, nevertheless)

And the Angelus bell
will continue to ring
long after we all rot.
And the ghosts we share
will take all but their
names with them, to
be dug up for some
purpose of record
to fissure a cause for disquiet
along the nuns' walk wall.

(Before that, she had been
such a carful girl
and these days I
wince at the sound
of giggles which
remind me of hers.)