Inner City Oldtime

Our own tongue throat stranger

And failing to nourish will or may perish

We pause, wishing to answer betters in Irish

Cannot know a lost language

Vanishes, we answer in English

Less than swill of which our Liffey consists.


What is Irishness

What is native wit?

Slack jaws guffawing

Slenting houses built from haunted bricks

Wheezing with upright’s effort

Struggling to stand upright

At the parade ground

Injured soldier overjingoistic, too old, told no twice

Falls, loud crack, back a big bruise smackmiddle

Tom Brown blackened back fast to grate.


They called it the Great War, I agree it was great

My antient need for death sated

Enfield-wielding human cheesegrater

Touchdown when I take the field, sick goal celebrations

I’m like a Dacian with a dayjob, violence a vocation

Fist drop me have me bopping walking like bambi won’t stop

Have to clock me clean and put me sleeping or we’re still boxing

I’m Joxer but I’m not going to Stuttgart

Philly shell and good guard, finishing what you start

I don’t care if you call the Gards

Hope your garb is flame retardant

Unassuming champion, you shouldn’t have started on

Drive my car right into your back garden

I’ve got guts like Jack the Ripper

Your ma’s inside reading a bodice ripper

Pinching a nipple you nipped on as nipper.


I am lamed for a time and never tamed

Who anyway is keeping time

I am always back fast to greatness

I slip through a grate, sewer’s famous satanist

Sewage my fastness, vast effluent pools I loom in seeking jewels

Above the land’s lie the land’s lay the land is fucked from peak to bay

Eyries sky-scraping, boring cloudbellies, on which settle eaglic anpiels.


I’m peeling back a plastic cell to get my medicine and get well, war’s hell

For some but I was humbled by death closebrushing

Must have Prussian blood rushing in my veins

Day we went over the top, rain over the salient

Missile-made alien, alas raid in vain

Most my battalion slain, but gosh I was enflamed

As not in decades, in glory blaze’d with bayonet raised

Wolf in me bayed, has not thence rested once

Slumber flees nightly, I watch flylike spyplanes skycycling

You should have seen it, guns numerous as Russians

Janus front, guns jamless to east and west

Men abreast me depressed into fleshy sedge by eleven inch shells

Soldiers shelved by whizzing sheet metal, it sounds and looks like hell.

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