Crying pistols at dawn down the dual carriageway
Finger heavy with a jewel conferred marriageways
Your strange ways vex me and these are strange days
Blocks of sun-stealing flats where the bowler used to be
Bowling for every birthday, arcade games when we’re sixteen
Two quid pops at House of the Dead, to reload point gun offscreen
Now hawkhead CCTV your private life on a cabinet screen
Outside I’m clean and smiling but my defiled church inside choired by screams
Think yourself cream of your crop, queen of the plot, that I see your ways in every rorschach blot
That I see you in my unseen like futures brittle as lures of fiends.
Kurtz’s snail rides a razorblade, its whetted underside hard as fused rock
Meanwhile my cage is locked, bouncing a ball, mulling it all, like Steve McQueen
Unlikely we’ll see any great escape, my life is your greatest estate, efficacious asset
My God, my guard I could sock him to what end? Double-masted or single-poled, boats careen
You cannot sit in wait for signs, you cannot outwait marriage, you cannot escape career
I feel almost as if I am carried, one last tour of my once great north, since harried
You deliver your words like a harrier dropping its payload, in swift and out the wind carries you
Other times your beauty entices shock, shock of curls like genetic spaghetti, your words gold confetti gild the razed land between us
Rare green eyes like Bastet’s prized, like emerald pried from tombs to haunt the halls of far-off shires.
You are a furnace. You are hard to move, hot, made of metal, built for atomisation
Your cruelty becomes automated, you override suggestions then repeat them back to me
Your cruelty a vast and self-sated factory, exactly the right smack for me
I am in decline like verbs, we are players of kerbs on a car-mad road in the suburbs
When a bold man rides his razorblade, he is sharpened and death he mocks
When I gingerly mount my butterknife, its teeth cut off my cock
You are the mean of nothing, neither plain nor pastoral, yet you are plain mean
You might be playing me, often you blame me, flaming each other, obscene
Words a docker would vouch shock at, like rocked boxers we grow fiercer
My childhood zooms past the windowscreen, could do with a lick windolene
Burst bugs, I try be water and with every wheelturn I lean
You’re a ship’s captain at keel, your crew brought to heel
When I hear the front door closing behind you I steel
Fortified defiant your tongue peals, the usual spiel, how you feel about every single thing that ever happened.
Billboard we used to throw milkshakes at, bill another I’m bored
Going Solo neither Roald Dahl nor Harrison Ford
Lots of little lanes, no attacker could catch me here
It feels crux of me, the books of me in the rocks painted Crokes colours
Our Tuatha the feared specimens denizens of gallant Glenalbyn
Behind the banks and chipper bins, beside a cinema no one’s in
Been here never done that, tell them I died but not standing pat
Friend’s dad Pat worked for RTE, never broke peace, nursed silent griefs white-bearded
Road I was raised on three tiered, arms like forks full of houses and folks
The hill Richie first skated down, no chestnut tree because they widened the road
We’re so good that we used not have a postcode, County Dublin, Stillorgan’s old.
My stilled organs roll haunting the old spots, glue our only guns, Bacardi our only shots
Only hard man here popped a bluey, only time we sweat is with the flu
Mysterious blue’s clues the sky writes for you, block them out with new Oakleys
Oatlands oakleaves much please and thank you and well printed annual review
Fast police response times despite low rate of crime, never any evidence of decline
Petunias in every flowerbed, pecuniary every handshake, blithe every word that’s said
Draw the blinds, Honey, unseemly watchers frequent this seeming idyll
On-move curtain twitchers, making twitch streams of your evening dinner
People who you meet are all well wishers but unseen they are deep fissures
To dark ends, more vicious than Grendel’s fen friends, these area fixtures
Always turn out penny pinchers or sordid kid fiddlers, diddlers in pressed suits
Bohemian grove owl hoot, our blue velvet is black soot, under rug push it with foot.
The road below our road used to flood but now it doesn’t
A dozen doped up deadheads in John’s, Iberian style buildings douse their cries
Even the rocks here are black as rooks, a big black dog a big black shuck
You are alive tonight, foreverdear
Rare tenderness outlured that fright hides, such nights often elide us
Sliding back into habits, backsliding and stabbacking, back into the driveway and going back in
It’s the slights hidden inside the silence, the unspoken violence of your triumphal procession
Love’s economics tide plunging stocks, the stocks of your love hide my light, invite passers to chide me
What you confide serves you, what you hide conserves you.
I made to move slowly, wading through a mire of thick preserve
I lounge about, some forgotten hippo in your private animal reserve
When we reverse I am not adverse to time itself breaking backwards as if racked
We have shacked up, it’s crap and dilapidated, fungus invaded, love’s taxing
You think the cost of a taxi smacks you, you price you’ll pay for love is everything
Ringing bells ringed finger is cage chink.
We agree on little stuff, fret throughout the biggies
Exhausted by my tenacity you fall back on your ciggies
You can cast aspersions in my direction but you’ll never alter my direction, nor make your altar a place I genuflect in
You are my Guinevere, at my wrist nearer be to my ear
Couldn’t trust you, throw you further, at my rear
I check we’re not deep in the Undead Burg, sensing I’m going hollow
Ten estus won’t right me, YOU DIED scrolls up
You kindle my brittle bonfire with bottled water, inhale the smoke I gutter
Five feet down, dead for a ducat, paces of vile earth, places of vile urge arouse
Odd inclinations, stations of a darkling’s easter time insurrection
You lift a rock and find a louse, I lift the world and I allow: I am resurrection.
Without you I sing out of tune, my plume is pruned
I select you, some section of poetry I elect you with
I can be erect with you, sex with you precious and delectable
You never existed, only words I inflicted on myself
Injected with your affections, infected afflicted my elation craves your distant bastion
Bastard child of your elusive ice kindness
Convections rise my better parts, confined by convention I suffer a life’s detention
In a moment such things I mention thence again to loving you
Fenced by my ungloved love of you, I adore our fencing
A door to a room where you flense my flesh, fletch my rootless pate, cleanse me
A glitching image below a faulty fixture, mixture of feeling is true love’s elixir
Licks her like a honey-wrapped spoon, puzzled by the path of the moon.
Alchemisland 
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