If you see anything, shout halloa
We dragged a Toyota Corolla from the creek
Dredged it but no body
We’ll spend the night combing
The area like shell collectors
A lot to mull over, pulling out old case files
Dust on the boxes, recalling old names, Giles
Rasdie a local had been always grasping at the hem
Of patient charity, a raspberry blower of the first rank then
He turned vicious
Our community shrank at this violence appalling
At first the town’s denizens though it some rude prank
Some rank gesture, maybe a message against the banks
And their widespread malpractice
The local medical practice performed an autopsy
Doc’s head topsy turvy, not seen one like this since Chawke got shot
At the Goat Bar and Grill in the day’s middle
Rushed at the lunch rush, his brush
With death didn’t exactly make him flush
With the lush milk of human kindness, mush
To any stubborn mutt; it didn’t do much
At all, the food is still appalling
I remember being in school hall when it happened
I was dead frightened someone might pop a cap at
The school and decease me.
Mist as might crown the mull of Kintyre
The entire field inspired to disappear
Dissipating as Sol appears hurling Ornstein’s violent golden spears
We’re in teams, the gridded field in tiers we sweep
Hoping almost a grizzly sight will greet us, let them shed tears
Greeting for dead kids, spending miserable years
Teasing oneself with suicide
Something in this case, something about it has pierced us all
There is a piece of us all in Rachel McCall from number four Carmanhall
Road apartments
One boundary is the Carmelite Sanctuary on Upper Kilmacud Road
The other is Lakelands Field, little did we know
A car had been driven to the Dodder, any note
Anyone left to indicate why they did what they had done eloped
With the river’s surge
Hours yet left to search
Purging every pebble, pushing every angle, pedal to metal
She is sixteen now but most remember her eleven
Elven and giddy, innocent of all seven
Deadly sins, her untallied wins
Whispered to the winds
It is rare to find them alive after hour twenty five
We’re approaching the sixty fifth, any hint’d be a gift
A glint of a strip of fabric, even the whiff
Of something rotten would be more heartening than this exhausting
Nothing.
Hours beating brush like bushmen, pushing back ferncover, gorse and briar
Tiredness pushes in and we grope through it, pop two Anadin and feel dopey
Friar Tuck a five minute break, whilst sat on a rock overlooking a brook
I saw tracks in the soft clay of the bluffs, black tattoos on ground white as dove
Breast, stretching all the way to the water’s edge
I took two puffs of my Benson gold and struck it cold on the stone
Moved myself quickly, quick as my old bones would ferry me, old bony ferryman from the Styx
Sticks rake at my eyes, pick at my hair, throng me like sign holders upon a picket crosser
Thick darkness, thick dust thrown up as I half-slide down the bluffs
Filthy coat to cuffs, I stop short of busting into the river
I spy with my little eye a pile of something bustling with flies on the opposite side
I glide like Christ along the hide of the water, small stones keep dry my size nines.
I will see what I expect to see
I lean on tree that’s next to me
Pleasing moss wet as tears gives softly
Soft Cell how I pull on gloves not to taint the scene
Cell light on paint the stream green as a faun’s dream.
Glad I wore a second pullover
Better to be a detective than stationed doing random pull overs
In the hope that the elusive phantom proves dullard and gives himself over
At a roadside inspection
We have to push the public back despite instructions
This is Prussian! We won’t have it, the rebels rush us but the dust up
Is short
Roadside picnic
Crime and Punishment
It makes sense to Russians
Sending citizen X to the gulag
In the boot of the car we found a bag
Belonging to a student Ciaran Taggart from Balbriggan
The car was last seen parked on Baggot Street
We found inside the bag a notebook
He had written over one scribble bukkake tsunami
Vile poses on the characters seen on Toonami
The word came back from the lab
This is the lad
His dad can’t believe it, he doesn’t believe it
Tell us he’ll batter us if we don’t ourra heor
Rachel’s parents are a different story, lovely couple from Gorey
Visited by mediaeval gore, abhorrent and uncalled for
They swore they will not let love die with Rachel
Each Sunday in the pews, the broken faithful.
Ciaran’s Da grew up in Mulhuddart
His mother was murdered by his older brother
His cousins touched him, smothered
Him with false love, he became accustomed
To abuse, his bosom was a thing of atomic rage
When he came of age, he was not slow about splaying
His own son’s anus, a thorned circle of merciless rapes
His son’s mind the side of a bomb raid, he bum raided
Like an Etruscan tomb, to evade
His father’s advances, who would choke him like Vader,
He made a new life for himself, he was going to school
He wasn’t the fool his Father took him for, soon he was making out
With a girl called Rachel, she was totally amazing
Raised his consciousness and station, he felt elation
In her presence
Soon he found her profound goodness shamed him
He shaved her head, raped and slit her throat. Craving
Death afterwards he had jumped from Bray Head, caved in
His head on the DART tracks, brass tacks
If they’d found him alive, they’d have attacked
Him so brutally and tactically, he’d have been practically
Dead
A mass for the souls of the dead
In her mam’s mind decades past the month’s mind
The patch of rind left on the peeled father, rather be dead mind
Would be a kindness to know my time
Was soon, the fruit of my lover’s womb
Gone to the tomb and the worm
Gothic scene indeed in Dean Street church, the Dean and Deacons
Doctors of divinity, directors of Trinity
The State Pathologist Dr John Harbison with a raven suit on
Ancient Greeks hid their faces from ghosts by rubbing soot on
A good send off overall
Not Finnegan’s Wake at all.
Rachel who once sat on our knees
You were a child gleeful
You will hearten heaven’s gleoman
All our townland’s bedesmen speak rosaries for you
We consign thee
To the earth, the roots of trees thy cradle now
Child we cradled we coffin now
No more weeping, swollen-eyed dry coughing
Her hands laid on her tummy as if in quiet prayer grasp a pansy
Pale as the dead from palsy, the space between dates on her grave paltry
Pitiful when so many horrible people live close to a century
Her sentry is now a statue in the cemetery
The mother prays to God, send for me
The Father thinks nothing, defensively
In devastation, they look almost pensieve
Beautiful grief if it was not offensive to think it
Uniting destruction, destruction almighty
The structure is ruptured
Practised at anguish
The demanding language of accepted condolence
Conforming to grief’s marketing demands
Shaking hands with all and sundry, Dudley do rights delivering lasagna
Putting out my Panda for me, bricks on bins when verandas stormy
Decades of penance though they are the ones punished
Happiness penury, penned off from joy, pushed
To utter misery.
Alchemisland 
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