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In the good old days
Before rock and roll
******
The velvet underground
*******
Sid vicious
And assorted bad men
And bad women,
In the good old days

No man and never a woman
Would profess their alienation from society
As society was a god society
And if you were alienated from society
You were in effect alienated from god
Which made you a sinner
An outcast
A candidate for purgatory, hell or if unborn or unbaptised,
Limbo.

Thus a man or woman
Would confess their sins
On the first Friday of each month
In the local church to the priest
Who knew them intimately
Despite the darkness
And the little grilled window
And the closeness of voice to ear

And on the first Saturday
All of society
Would be full again
Of forgiven sinners
And the good old days
Would continue

There are of course flaws in this.
In the new days
You can be alienated
From yourself
Your wife
Your mother
Your father
Your sister
Your whole **** ******* of people you know
You don't know

And you listen
To sid vicious
Nirvana
Rammstein
The voices in your head
The dreams of your nightmares
The girls of the canal bank leafy walks
The boys throwing cars at each other in the boreens
The men
The women
The whole gee bang sheebang hee bangs

There are flaws in this

And what you project is no longer god
And so no man or woman is god

Cranky tin pan alleyway of a universe
Cluttered with suffering silence once more
As no one knows the unknown language
Of the unknowable when all you can
Know if the echo chamber of the mind and soul and two pence
Mind we rig up with lights and flashing noise
Known as the modern
Keeps mouthing nonsense on top of nonsense
Without due regard to that ******* boat
That brought us here,

Echos of hades, charon, siren siren siren siren

This morning I watched as crows
Grabbed black pudding left out by my girls
On a small wooden bench

And over the hand made wall of dry stone
A thousand bodies kept each other warm
In that other place, no place, some place, where place, what place,
Marked by lichen crusted stone crosses and then some,

Discord they cawed, discord, discord, as they swooped
And watched with eyes sliding magnetically open and closed
Revealing milky white spectral analysis
Of this small earth ball of mucky matter
Which on closer inspection
Reveals much space between
And the nothing inbetween which makes us more of what we are
Much more so than believing we are flesh or bone or even water

The nothing in between, between, the start of and end of the sentence
That begins I am insert whatever the **** twixt the blanks,
And no amount of miraculous sonerous beautous melodifications
About blooming effing flower petals nor soulful dirges
Can be the blank in the between

Is it a scream, a whooping holler, a mouth rounded beneath
Roundier eyes miracling a confrontation with all of space
And
Maria Callas does not end on that note, ever.

I told the crows to *******. I ate the pudding. It is only fair.
My feathers are darker and more spectacular

Though my girls
Whooped and hollered
As I flew away

A space in space.
Ryan O'Leary May 9
.     Some fell by the wayside,

      many uttered upon thorns.


      Others, too self censored,

       withered away in silence.


  Olde dogs for vociferous roads,

hushed puppies, for the boreens!

— The End —