Dublin Days

Down Winetavern street beside what should be wood Quay 

The people’s will defied, the land reused the finds destroyed

What should have been Ireland’s golden mile, twice what York is

Is now the grim set of civic offices near to Cork Street

Between the mummified cat and rat and the needle exchange 

Where you can sit down at lunchtime and get hassled for change

Been donkeys years since cornmarket saw a corn king

We had a softbearded Norse King minting coinage, based in Christchurch

The high church the low crypt 

More brothels and creepers than a Teddy Boy’s dresser

Thrift around here means sharing syringes

The laneways are dirty, the high flats are dingy

The veins are collapsing and so is the economy

Love the bones a me smoke bones with me them bones need calcium 

Daze and days halcyon, getting on it early

Cars, blurs, coming, can’t see em

Points I can’t concede them like the league’s best keeper

Only dingers I do these days I use me Luas card leaper 

Only fools and horses there’s only rides and mingers

Only tools and corpses, there’s plenty lovely gingers

You can hit the cobblestone and hear a lovely Irish singer 

You can hit the cobblestones after an Irish right hand swinger

I smoke joints the whole shift

Ten hits the whole bift

Green shit she rolls it.


Lads who’ve never worked calling themselves grafters

Crashing college afters, vomiting on a Grafton corner

Feet pounding shook the rafters

She had more back than rashers 

The dole is your da 

Bring your best gal out for a roll from Spar, if you like deli know a good centra

In the city’s centre the hell mouth’s entrance

Do you know what I mean periods every sentence

The sentences are light, the lovely gear is dark

Nick a tourist’s bag then rifle through it in the park.


Dirty, old and sports a ford but it’s not Salford

Love a month’s vacation but can’t afford it

I hit flint off to get a fire on,

I am the not the phantom I’m the tyrant

I rugby around your rhymes demonic pile on

Uppercut he Landsdowne, shite scribes I style on

My stylus is sweaty, held like a pilum ‘tween forefinger and thumb

Pilate’s signature on a Judas sheet, ghosts in the centre on Jervis Street

Here the prices never drop, she’s not a bird mate she’s me moth

Like teens in Wezz clumsy hands are dropped

Half the shops are Starbucks, the shutters on the secondhand bookshop closed like a knight’s visor

This place is unrecognisable after its encounter with the tiger

No druids in Ireland anymore, just six cold cans of rank cider

Every pig in suit is a financial advisor

Every chav shop in pull&bear a spicer

Every lad getting stewed, stoned as Loughcrew 

It’s highway Ireland, lads, knock it right through.


Knock on the door, a knock on the head of a proper headthebaw

A knock in the bed, Knock airport’s construction commenced

Without one sheet of planning permission, an area he fenced off

Cleansed with blessings turned into a runway, man on a mission

That James Horan out of Mayo, let me hear you say way-oh, way-oh

You lot are hauling bricks to Babel, madding crowd to rabble

I’m making stone chips, my swung mallet like a judge’s gavel.

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