Her baby was buried
in a grave alongside 827 other babies.

Who knew no mothers.

Her mother thought it best
to let the nuns help her sell the child to the Americans.

The babies would have had names like Dermot, Aoife, Sandra and Sean

"Would have" isn’t an awfully good thing to think about.

It was a typically miserable November Sunday
When they brought her over there
after that last mass.

Unrelated to this, there is a launderette named the Magdalene
in the city I live in, which is nowhere near Tipperary but in the East of England.
In fairness, it is located on Magdalen Street, without the second “e”,
A once rough and tumble but now an up and coming kind of place,
where among the students and young professionals getting their whites cleaned
the only ones likely to take offense at this are students of history or the named émigré children of
Irish parents.
I’ve been told it’s now a chain of launderettes, but I imagine the owners have enough on their mind
without constantly Googling their services.

When they let her out of the home for troubled girls,
it was the warmest July she’d ever seen.

Some days the baby’s name is Michael, others it’s Matthew, recently, it’s been Corey, Ryan, even Sean.

But she never wishes that it would have been a girl.

Roses announce the bedroom clipped from your thought
dilapidated vintage chandelier shakes with light
we might as well make the moment
when it's that cold outside
the mirror glimpses angles that escape our eyes

Daybreak child
would you be my sleepy wonder?
consumed with life

Grey bleeding into blue eyes  shock gives way to wonder
ertswhile Goddess of the night

My angry words have taken the violent locomotive
of the words that fill the books upon your shelf
but that was before
Now lilacs mute the bedlace
the wall's painted sea is our sky

Would you believe all those things I never tell you
or would you spit their underhandedness right back at me?

Mock turtle rhymes the sound your mouth makes when you're giddy
moves lies a breaking sundial
Fingers that are off-white feel to the touch like a promise
And
Now you're a plate spinning on it's side.

In places underneath or between the rain
Blossoms are budding, suffuse with stalking light
Until the evening drags off towards
a slow, easy death
Each hour an ending in itself, reflected against premonitions of waning chance.

This curse of a spring, supplementing
calm for action, cautions a new spirit of resilience
in, taking with it the attraction of deference
Like the waves that crash at the shipping bay
Now, all is circumstance

I read the newsfeed everyday
as a means of counting against this stifling reassurance.

First morninglight through windowpane
falls to kiss
the carpet, our front garden’s Clarkia
left no trace of last
night’s condensed mist.

Is there happiness enough
to fill these rooms, or
could there ever be?
Like the relief that echoes
through living rooms on Christmas
noons, like the smile rising from a voice
at the suggestion of “Tea?”

Will the cosy silence play
to win out the crowd’s
lament? Will the dinnertime rustle
deliver imagination out from under
time's sway?

Do these questions sound like
asking the weight of water?
A cup of late youth’s innocence
to be drenched with irony,
pity’s daughter?

The home to while the world away, where to
process life’s refinery

A well-made plot that shuns
a twist.

A dry-witted author
Whose lust is the mundane.

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.

Our urban commutes are punchlines without any stories. Climb out, rinse, release, restrain, converse, intuit, insert, recharge. Why narrate?
I used to talk to God a lot when I was very young, never a ******* word back. Just strange developments ;
the family life taking unexpected detours into anger and occassional uprorious joys at Christmasses,
that sort of thing.
Amidst all the second guessing that real pursuing sense of lonliness,
at quiet moments of the day, particularly when outdoors.

You think you can stuff everything that's inside of you into a plastic bag,
it doesn't work like that.
The wind blows open memories at unexpected traffic intervals, but it really hasn't gotten anything to do with nature. Memories are just like the wind.

That weekend
When we reached the lake house
After it had rained enough to fill
The floodbanks for an entire decade
Do you rememember...
what it was like?

To walk down the footpath dissected by brambles
And see the fog surround the land
And those first moments
So wonderfully calm

It was if we had found a minnowing horse
We once thought was wild

Seeing into the eyes of it,
We stayed for a whole week
Every day so different from the weeks that came before
Yet every day we felt absolutely settled
in that place.

The past recedes
Into memory
That is all we are capable of.
Still, all the same
We never fail to remember
the past emerging
an old punchline
Only half forgotten.

The happy shouts from the playground display
the jumps and twists that brought them
by sun that steals the chill away
This unexpected autumn.

The trees that give their leaves away
to the breeze that walks between them
Their boughs are hung majestically
grant hopes as gifts to dream with.

The river’s flow, The dangling rose
The barking dog’s bright welcome
A moment’s pause, to photograph
these scenes
should memory forget them.

Such worry thoughts face as evening strays,
on mistakes past and unproven
What paradox, then, to bring mind at ease
watching the late sky fires of autumn.

Can you call out to the night
in a voice that
reminds me of innocent days?
Where often I
appreciated the sunlight's grin
as likewise I did your own, and exclaimed
my surprise at the late evening's
chill, a breeze milder, really,
than any touch of hands
that knowingly await
their bodies' compromise.

I sing of a frankness lightened by
a cherished voice's warm reprieve
which follows in tuneful  
adept time.

Mournful as that time without you
being spent half in memory
And yet still
courting bliss.

These petals that transfix
the passagemakers of this city
when falling they touch ground
markers of these
Labrythhine stowaway quarters
Petals that are eyes open on a map
offering views restricted by
Their very habit
of spreading across.

These watching fellows are not
but could be
cherry blossoms whose
sudden appearance
wakes up students
on elevated trams
They are not
the spires of those finest, sun cracked churches
but they could induce the
same inspiring awe as though
they were crystallised, white on black,
boughs that made the roses of this land
appear washed out
like bleached hair
after a shower.

A downpour begins, and as
gracefully passes over
by you turning toward
our balcony window
as if hearing the songs of
The night call back to you.

Calling all the city's secrets
only rumours
Simply songs for worrying Lovers
Lovers who should trouble only to remember songs
and let voices, floating rise
Above.

A spectacular butterfly
splendid in its monochrome, leopard-print reflecting armour
flies unto the lavender branches
recently budded in my garden
Fancying myself a faithful reader of Nabokov
and drawn to anecdotes of self-glorification
I thought I should become a Lepidopterist
and catalogue its striking corpse
beginning what could become a masterful collection
Me, the quarter-tanned Irish bopping all in tennis whites
with mock-radioactive web of butterfly doom among the wooden yard dividers

But where should I keep it?
this hype-building collection of one
amongst my dust-collecting books
my backdated journals and flaccid-worn glossy magazines
my "value-appreciating" vinyl records
the more prettily curated and precision-hung images that curate my partner's collections?

No, it is not for me
to stop it succumbing to dust, to allow it turn into something beautiful again
if a tragic kind of beauty
amongst the dirt, for something becomes more wonderful when
it's beauty is not forced on show
but produces itself through more layered, yet uncomplicated means
returned back out of the dust, without any of our artificial light
recording again it's eventual demise

You appeared to me during the mind's violence
That presents itself as the diving board of sleep in witching hours
More a hologram outside the boundaries of life's time than any dream

First an oversized playing card
Dappled in dripping black ink
Showing a landscape of Auschwitz, or
Perhaps, in another interpretation,
A spillage of flavoured stout
Then diluting, white light through the macabre, unmistakably into you
With those analysing , innocent eyes
And that lopsided smirk

Standing as if to guard yourself against the approaches of some other beyond me
While fixing back your gaze to say you find me here, aligned, knowing, persevering with you
And the image distorted and a strange throb of silence shrieked through your body,
dream-plunging severely alert to the Oracle assuming your intrusion
And the spokes in in my head an accelerated
Fluth Fluth Fluth Fluth

Even in mid-dreaming I dreaded for you
Expected you dead or in unstable danger
What else could this mean?

Some obvious code communication relatable to the Gothic novels you wrote about?
Sensitive as you were, now their subterfuge of a warning collision provoking a Countess of undistracted night,
A sage of burning, mottled thought
Hair ravaged black where before its black spoke of a sylvan birthright
Now gorged, destabalized somewhere in memory

I can't know why I half dream a scene like this, but it has happened somewhere else

II

In a different bedroom. Possibly overmedicated.
My 15 year-old self, thinking I should try attempt writing in the voices of the dead.
Then later, when finally to succumbing to the yellowing fog of a dream
I appeared to see two girls, roughly my age if not a little older
Seated gaslight on a black couch different to the one in that room
Hair streaked blond & the other Auburn, I think, both in tights & skirts darkened as their leather seats
And the blond was saying "he thinks he can hear us now.
He must think he's brave."
Before I was ripped into a deeper haze, the image evaporating, but this one's fade more of a silent
sSuuUuSHhh...

As if they needed me to be quiet.

...

I'm not sure why I have been placed in the midst of these disappeared & disappearing women
Taken to drowning or crude burial or just forgetfulness, distance
Maybe the key thing really. Years, eras.
Sometimes it's the work that finds you, rather than you finding the work.

I extrapolate. I bore into what was thought dust. Glass filaments, old rumour mistaken on the wind, tables discounted elements. These are what I seek, after being intruded in dreams.

The perfume smell embedded in a boxed up scarf, motive.

Roth was a great lover of music

Old-timely big band show times that evoked memories in living rooms across white America
Provoking melancholia for what was assumed lost.

He was a master of writing technicalities
Knew the stitchings in a pair of men's brown leather driving gloves
Like they were poetic metre
Knew the nervy velocity attended to the beating of a heart through a stethoscope .

He wrote more novels that can be read in most lifetimes
As he had five different versions of himself to think through.

He wrote half a novel in the voice of an actual ex- lover

He was not particularly good at writing women.

He was unsurprisingly/surprisingly good at writing about the realities of race.  

He often cared little for reality
but could tautly pierce at the authenticity to be found
in "social realism."

He wrote standing up
Cried that novel was dead when really he was dying
He was both acutely aware and ignorant of this
He will be buried outside of Newark, presumably.

His career trajectory is unique in American letters in that it crystallized the vogue for American letters, ****** up the body, peaked and troughs with death, surveyed the end of American Innocence over four decades and closed at a summer camp.

His themes, in that order : Heartache, ***, Motherlove, Therapy, Body Horror, Satire, Egomania, , father hunger, Death, the state of the nation, regret, race, life inside the academy,fascist media darlings, liberal terrorists destroying their family narratives,Death again, old ***, absolute suicide in words, adolescence.

On the day before the UK is finally left to go **** itself

I watch a politely forced interview in my British front room

David Cameron is looking like he's just come after dropping a bomb of Molly

The only kind of bomb he'll ever be allowed drop again what

And I start almost to feel bad for him

The way I've felt bad about all the other poor ******* who get a whoosh too quickly

And start rambling all sensitive and vulnerable and so ****** sincere

But then I remember I shouldn't feel sorry for him at all

Because when you **** it and it's your idea you're supposed to stay home and try not talk to anyone you know

Not talk to the BBC about how you're still surprised you ****** it

But you respect those you took advantage of your naievity and schoolboy ambition

His eyes are like what you see staring one-eyed into a half empty bottle of stout, lads

Wrecked

The EU have been like the kindest hotel managers

Who are trying to allow some deviant family who've wrecked their best rooms

Away to to the police with some last shred of human dignity

Because they know they are killing their children

There's a song that mentions a man standing waiting for a train
On a particularly English rainy summer day
By a minor band with good players
That would get my mother excited
If it was played on the golden oldies radio slot

It would even get my mother excited when she heard
Even it was arguably "depressing"
Because it reminded her of being young and disillusioned
And it sounded cutting edge and new
It was the sound of the future then
In the nationalist wasteland of early 1981
And the double tracked vocals sang "We Fade to Grey"

I write this, not wandering into the cinder zone of Hiroshima
But just sitting half-prostrate on the sofa of my tastefully European inspired British front room
Not as a warning to the world, but as a half-arsed lament for a world out of warnings.