Alchemisland

When I was a kid, we used to jump into a bush

We called it the bouncy bush, passing give a push

To a pal

I get eczema when I stress itches like thrush

Skin blotches up one shade off ketchup 

I scrape away layers like Shliemann’s dynamite until the raw sheens

The treasures of Troy, the very seams of me seem to me delicate indeed

Delicatessen window treats stitched up inside me, he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls

I move slow and purposeful like Billy in the Bowl, but I’ll be gutsy if I have to

Don’t forget that Bang Bang shoots the buses

My flexed muscles could not be called a bump

My sex muscles more substantial than a lump

My elbow wears a cap of dirty snow, last night’s sudocrem

My jocks are streaked like a window crying out for windolene

This one Jolene is stealing another one’s man

My dad drives neither a taxi nor a white van

Me mad, me ma spare, us round the bend

He never mouths love but he acts it

He is half me above the axis

His work rate is my praxis

He always wear black slacks, never relaxes

When something bothers he never acts it

He is sharp as an axehead, often fusses and drives buses

He always took a Wednesday off, his only free day out on a two seater bike

Denis and Mike in Blackrock spiking off it in the rain

He never put a lock on it once, for hours we breezed around Kilmacud 

Through the green where squirrels live, down through Stillorgan Wood

He always stops to help and will tell a lie toward the greater good, my old man

He loves plants, is demanding in the same way that I am

He used to smoke forty silk cut a day until he changed his ways

Fifty doesn’t look a day over it, he will always keep his pace

Dislikes heights, China and what he terms useless shite

When he cleans up, Panda are eating right

Knows right and wrong are pliant and situational

Did what must be done and that’s what fed you all

Never a foe to federals, he is gentle general, a gardener genial is his overalls

His genes fed us all, never saw him wear jeans, his wife Jean I do mam call

Before school I would go to him in bed with a book in my hand

He would tell me of the easterlings, of the lays of Beleriand

For a lark his arm would skyward like a rising arm barrier outside a car park

Like a gilly blade through custard it would lower slowly

Lowing and yet more lowly still, until it near came down upon me

I would brace like newly woken Sisyphus against it, push back and repeat

We read books about wizards, you called her Her-mee-oh-knee

I wonder if half a man I’d be, without the things you showed me.

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When I was a kid we used to jump into a bush

Now I am a man pray to bump into some kush

Used to get shit bags off Harry O’Shea, no shock kicked out of his mocks

For laughing lots with Frawley, fanta pop rim boiling from the hash block

At lunch they used to chain smoke joints in the lane, they said oh eight after everything

Going back plundered after lunch, in an absolute jock shove the hash down your jocks

Tell the teacher your book is in the locker and hide in the toilet like an artful dodger

Zepp shirt riddled with hot rock holes, suspended again so knock in

In the bedroom you’re playing halo the smoke wreaths like a Djinn

Ballinteer grim, from broadford to olaf’s all walls man it’s walled in

Money scant on the ground, your skin is like ham slices it’s paper thin

Rock down to the shop for skins and a bottle of pop for a pop 

The bobbin that nets up your mop is perfect

A bush by the motorway let’s set up shop

Once on a plane bound for the land of Danes reached to his sock

And produced a small baggy of cocaine, more insane

That he didn’t even know about it, then his snout rode rails like a train

A guy I know who was a mad teenage klepto ended up killing two over dough

Same name as their swollen fingered king, in jail now reaping what he sowed

It would be an exaggeration to say crime was a fixture in my life, though

I have always at the anarch’s arrival tucked tail and outro.