Alchemisland

By choice

A lifetime reading Ulysses

Still utterly clueless, please

James Joyce

Dim ayenbite of inwyt, 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

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 you hit a reading slump

Chapter three real infodump, kicks lumps out of scholars

Angers the 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 the bream swim

Mr Bloom’s hatbrim, he might just wear a masonic hatpin, mason’s apron for all he helps them

He enrages the Citizen, they love the child of Bethlehem but not the tribes of Ham and Shem, them

Lot over there.

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Once forgiven I sin again

Sleep, wake like Finnegan

Knick knack on his shinegan

Shillelagh for his pilgrimage, new éadaí for his liverage

Leverets clever than predators low lance below the heather, leverage from heaven

Against the 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 museum with a pocketful of lemon soap

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, cracking rifles, burning thatch and green caps

Eastern Phoenician aspects, Gerty McDowell lift up your towel while I trouser me hands

Stephen Dedalus drunk in the Monto, coins in coffers, drawers and drawn curtains, nighttown’s whores adore the pure

Mina Purefoy due to baby boy pure joy tug of war so life may endure

Injurious the sport of redcoats, no retort unrewarded.

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Bloom an advertising man, that old scam

Old scamp warm at heart opens his wallet not just because he has to

Jew perhaps but Dubliner too, you and the Other, the Other and you

The Other in you, hemispheres dual

The duel, the jewel, tyrannical rule we rose against

Florid language foliate fountain pen writes a forest, florist short a floren

Wrote his own city through a foreigner, he felt himself a foreigner

Thank Jesuits, his former foremen, formative years formenting in faithful argument 

Flower language, root of powers, a rose hour

Mary sailorlover bordello be de brine north of sea above a Martello Tower

Fevered fearing loss of sight, site of birth, loss of sight in one eye

Joyce becomes cyclops, early-tricked Polyphemus

Joyce cacophonous his coffin lid drops, out he pops to traipse around Glasnevin

Knocks on doors of patriots’ tombs, healed come forth from lazarets, from gloom

On one day each year

Bloomsday.