I’m a blind man and until Jason’s argonauts cast nets was highted mad saying, “Harpies stole my bread.”
Red as yesterday’s paper, red as toothclaw
Red as a cutter’s right-hand knifehand kinch the knifeblade dismayed mulling over rough beast Yeats’ Buck Bethlehem Mulligan’s word beastly
Red as raptor’s bloodstained dewclaws
Red as Somme soil, red as midnight oil
Red as prey-scraping eagle talons
Red as harboured hate latents save for talent.
Lately imbalanced, unsettled humors bouncing grief to glee
One scale side rises higher
Baker pricing in pounds his heaviest pies
What compassion I carried forth from predecessors is damaged, from me strangled
I find life distinctly unmanageable
I feel like someone marooned from a distant planet
Everything fails with a painful precision, as if someone planned it.
I am one of two last living pandas, ageing feeling guilty about not passing on my genes
In every show I watch people my age, wholly unlike me, worry about pregnancies
I worry about rapid seizure of mind’s assets by sadness’ erasure
That I will one day wake to subtle darkness when they extinguish every brazier; my fantasia will end.
Reading articles about missile strikes
Sea levels rising to dangerous degrees
Soon, commencement of long-due penance
A rending, rendering rent-taking
Dublin will be as a Venice
Zealots rant atop boxes like tennis umpires
Speaking loudly of prime sin Silence,
“Who here washed-hands Pilate,
Who a vital rebel rival to this satanic Empire whose arrival the Bible foretold?”
Little more than prattling prelates on soapboxs
Yet words impression not lessened
By either his stench or lined elephant-eyelid complexion.
Heinous stenches will rise
Liffey spied halfway up Heineken building low tide
Spides spiteful riding whip-gentled piebalds through suburban drives a sight no more seen
Low rises spied with eels inside
Statues reposed pridefully among passing shoals
Lockout hands raised to summon strikes: great appear great, knees rise
No more are Dublin’s streets choked with Deliveroo bikes
But no joke navigating past those new floating Deliveroo boats
Blossom petals wig conveyor belt water, floating like spoiled votes
Or a hidebound boat, wee báidín, bound for Rathlin four thousand years ago
Atlantean temples beneath green water, Dublin’s daughters and sons of Roisín.
Alchemisland 
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