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 mirror always laughs first
Spilling light onto imperfections
Alienated from the image in the dream.
A silent curse,
The accusation must remain to this world unrevoked.
Instead pretence must tissue tear stains,
To sundry up a surface glycerine.

Social man has broken all ties with nature’s earth,
He created machines capable of producing images
So he needn’t deny it.
Social Woman was always more comfortable inside
She expressed no claim of love for the landscape
Found no comfort amongst the soil
No romance laying in the dirt.

But yes, the mirror attacks.
The symptom is always one of weakness,
Of the self not having the power to leave itself alone.
The body distorts the mind at first,
Paving the way gradually for more active decline.
We hold it to ourselves to feel worth, or lack thereof.
You can’t sing the tune effectively, without first trying to think like you’re someone else.
Someone that same mirror fails to recognise.

Keep ahead of the crowd so you’re not held back
Expectations will ruin you more than your fears.
Talent is to others that which they lack
Mystery and purpose are all the mind reveres.

Gather up, all you roaming and innocent true eyed youths,
the bells that chime the maturing of years will dictate.
And our minds, even in dreaming, are flashing,overloading,constantly ON.
Burning ourselves back towards the sediment,
back towards the eve of light and the horizon’s sweet ascent,
the hope of the bettering of Man (Woman, Child, Subject, Dependent, Enemy, Statistic)
to be played out by actors unsure all over again,
Plot, attempt, market research, unlikely success, unforetold rapid decline
Walk on down that road.

Twenty-Three years of Searching and Bafflement
I still walk on down that road.
The air smelling of leaking chemicals of exported decorative garden plants
the odd fir tree to remind me of a progressive upheaval.
I’ve read about Everything, I’ve sought out Everything; I’ve tried Everything
And yet still unsatisfied.
And yet onward I trot....
Left with the only things I still enjoy doing
Reading, writing about reading and writing about life
listening to music (Both new and the old, same old...cycle ending cycle re-entering brainwaves)
Thinking about ******’
and occasionally enjoying non-self centered ***
(Giving, once in a while, such unexpected joy, and who’d have thought?..)
And always at the back of my head
wondering how if I could get hooked on some supposed poisonous deity
Billfold notes stained ******* or some equally widely condemned non-popular pariah seal
And if I managed not to impoverish myself and become alienated from friends and family
And the moral majority
Then perhaps I could evolve to enjoy even that.
What is pleasure and its pursuit if not some guarantee of routine?
So I continue walking down that road.

Away, away, soon to return another day
Fresher (hardly) enlightened, the same...
and still I cannot recommend to myself
anything else but walking.
For to which valley the wise one goes, who knows, who knows......
Turn left, turn right, only the principles of geography can begin to decide fate.
(Though I would suggest bringing an umbrella, every now and again, just in case....)
To search for others, who would bring a chance of difference, on that self-same route
who share jokes about this one man...
Who was walking down that road.

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.

Waiting rooms are a manifestation
of the Human condition.
We have trained ourselves
to sit and wonder and to twist around
the same thoughts.
Magazines are wreaths
to our patience.
Greeting cards are symphonies,
Condolences which freeze entire memories
out of our days.
Distilled moments bearing the supple hoard
of memory’s hazy, fleeting temperamentalities.

Watch, see how lives that have known one another’s
according to fathomless mappings of time
are still unsure how to react
upon both reaching their confronting
of a child’s never returning home.
As if it were not enough to wish upon
some falling star, knowing it was unfathomable
for them to know how long even that had been burned out.
What worry waits;
How sleeplessness must invade every living minute
to arbor each silence.

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.

I'm Tired of people telling me that I should smile in photographs
My resistance has got nothing to do with
An Attitude problem
or my attempt at
Appearing acutely fashionable
This is just the way I look
Most of the time
Shouldn’t what we choose to record
At least strive for Authenticity?
I'm just not interested in selling myself
Into the acceptable family comfort mode
Having my split-second cheery face sink in
Against The kitchen wall's
"calming" comfort scheme
To be doted on by ageing female relatives
and jovially mocked by visiting casual friends
If anything I don't want my past to be
Looked upon at all

Maybe it's the old story
of leaving home and the urge
To re-invent oneself
To Block out the old experiences, the old embarrassments
Freeing yourself to embark on a fresher tirade
of critical self-assessment
To be finally and victoriously
Free from the unsettling confines
of childhood
To engage yourself completely
in the waking,walking,working
Nightmare of maturity, responsibility
and devastating ambition.

Bright windy November
with the slap of cold sun sending frowns
and the absent rain not beating down
choleric substitutes of alcohol withdrawal
and spatial omissions of home fires stoking
empty remembrances of faded potential and
misplaced amorous regret
Haunted by the lingering smell of the souls of
last night's GUINNESS intake staying swell in
the nostrils which is in reality the gulf breeze blowing
gullshit down the river Liffey giver of life.

...And here I am Dublin pillaged and funded
en route to the hour-rate slog
shiny white commerce bleaching out of
windowsills distracting from rooftop
Chiaroscuro  serenading a sky
which old ****** forgotten Sons and Daughters
will die under.

Boots tapping mock-goosestep to the ground
past a girl who speaks on her IPHONE to someone
who presumably not only wants to be seen speaking
to someone on their IPHONE but who also cares enough
to listen as the girl announces to all-and-sundry
human dodging on Bachelors Walk this fateful morn
that "I realised what my problem is Now! People
think i'm saying N when I'm really saying M!"

.....quite an existential crisis you got there, EH DOC?

("This girl's SITUATION belongs in a scenario in the TV show GIRLS which young
Woman Europe-wide have embraced as their spiritual saviour in an era of Consumer
impulse control. By placing the mundane generalities and perceived social failings
interpreted by young American female comediennes as instead representing a means of
self-forgiveness and attempted new-wave soft-core feminist self-celebration young American
actresses are inspiring a new generation of young woman to speak openly in a more in-depth level about everything that usually happens to themselves or some girl they know"-From "The Post-New Male Gaze: Interpreting Critiques of Stereotypically Feminized Pop Culture in Westley Barnes's "Notes on a Rant: The "Took Me Up To Dublin Where It's Famous" Notebook
:2013)

This is the new white noise.

White Irish Male Critiques perceived socially-announced problems of White Irish Female over White Technology on a white morning in a grey city.

A grey city which subliminally stinks of shame and left-over guilt and of spending too much money on tecno-toys and new-improved nullifying debauchery and even rent during a significantly rough stretch of fiscal years. After a lot of years of white nonsense, really.

But this is where I took myself, and this is what happens once you take yourself here and this is where its famous for it.
Dublin,
Once Monto-based FUNDERLAND for the rich and royal turned over-waxie infested tenement slum district and second city of an industrialised economy waiting for the rest of the world to pay its way.
Dublin,
capital of green and squeaky saviours of the third-world who made some money and forgot about everyone else they used to know back home. Mr Poverty, Mr Humbleness, Mr Sense of Catholic Shame.
Until the rents got too high and they had to move home again.
Dublin,
no matters what it achieves, always putting itself down.

But I can adapt.
I've lived in Rathmines and Portobello before living in either was a
really hip decision to make.
I can find somewhere else before its gets gentrified
(after I find some job that's not worth complaining about
or I eventually leap into becoming to middle-class
to complain about it.)
enough that its a headache living there, too many men wearing the same winter
jackets. Too many packed restaurants and your local actually preparing the tables
in the run-up to the Rugby game on Saturday.
The less of all that, the better for me.

I used to day dream about all of the above, honestly, but I
somehow managed to regain my innocence by living through it.

As for the girl who discovered self-realisation on her (through her?) IPHONE?
She'll be alright. If that's how she starts wading through the floodwaters of relating
herself to the world, misunderstood syllables, name-fails and all, this time in twenty
years, she'll be laughing. Don't worry yourselves, she'll adapt with the times.
Sure, Dublin's famous for it.

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.

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.

There is only this marina and then there is the sea.
Nothing else is.
An apt enough analogy
for a myth dissolving town.

Shaded by storefronts half-expecting someone to arrive,
The hood- stripped wind
Gusts up solitary, empty alleyways
With only stroppy clatter boards to continue the conversation.

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.