By choice
A lifetime reading Ulysses
Still utterly clueless, please
James Joyce
Dim my agenbite of inwit, we are dimwits
To your deft pen, limn rift trip a dram sipper
Nora bottom red be a slipper, Barnacle farty arse
Stitched up like a Kipper
His secrets, sutured fissure gone with the name of Jack the Ripper.
He dictated Finnegan’s Wake, having lost his sight
Couldn’t see his own portrait
He was, for Ireland, too forthright
Yet this nation’s self-penned birthright
That our bright young things are all writers
The kids will be alright.
Stately and plump you got to before hitting a reading slump
Chapter three is the real infodump, kicks lumps out of scholars
Angers men in collars, Joyce paints in unseen colours
Snotgreen seas of his dreams
Marino casino martello see his ghostly beams like Hamlet’s father near where bream swim
Mr Bloom’s hatbrim, might wear a masonic pin, mason’s apron helps them
He enrages the Citizen, they love the child of Bethlehem but not the tribe of Ham and Shem, them
Lot over there.
Once forgiven I sin again
Sleep, wake like Finnegan
Knick knack on his shinegan
Shillelagh for his pilgrimage, new éadaí for his liverage
Leverets cleverer than predators low lance below heather, leverage from heaven
Against all-pervading death sentence.
I type out great books wearing a facsimile of Joyce’s death mask
Concentrating like Leopold did on the Grecian statue’s ass
Molesworth Street Lodge dodge over to the museum with a pocketful of lemon soap
A book of smut inside your coat, inner organs beasts fowls below the jowls coat the throat
Obsessed with what should be done in a toilet, never ever think about Blazes Boylan
Molly my golly she’s a brolly in the rain, dolly and jolly and footprints along Dollymount Strand
Dreams of jungle cats, crack of rifles, burning thatch and green caps
Eastern Phoenician aspects, Gerty McDowell lift up your towel while I trouser me hands
Stephen Dedalus drunk at the Monto, coins in coffers, drawers drawn curtains, nighttown’s whores adore the pure
Mina Purefoy due baby boy pure joy tug of war so life may endure
Injurious the sport of redcoats, no retort unrewarded
He is an advertising man, that old scam
Old scamp warm at heart opens the wallet not just because he has to
Jew perhaps but Dubliner too, you and the other, the other and you
The other in you, the hemispheres, the dual
The duel, the jewel, the tyrannical rule we rose against
Florid language foliate fountain pen writes a forest, florist short a florin
Wrote his own city through a foreigner, he felt himself a foreigner, thank the Jesuits his former foreman formative years fermenting in their faithful argument.
Language of flowers, root of powers, rose hour
Mary sailorlover north of sea above Mortello Tower
Fevered and fearing loss of sight, site of his birth, loss of sight in one eye
Joyce becomes his cyclops, early-tricked Polyphemus
Joyce cacophonous, his coffin lid drops and out he pops to traipse around Glasnevin
Knocks on the doors of the patriots’ tombs, the healed in the lazaret come forth from the gloom
On one day of the year
Bloomsday.
Alchemisland 
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