Alchemisland

Mournful, needing more food to function

We have not known fun 

We have known every inch of the sun 

How it falls like a truncheon 

When you’re trudging hungrily 

Scrounging together enough 

For a meagre luncheon

That’s never enough

Stuffy in layers of jumpers

Keep them on because 

I haven’t showered in months 

Besides, my arms are lined with cuts 

Blood-encrusted holes from junk shooting

A full morning’s begging 

Hardly earned a shekel

Innocent, red with freckle 

Coughing, slow death infected

Born wrecked, to foul dejection 

The Spire’s erection here

Is that irony I’m detecting 

Dublin, city of injections 

The dead lecture the living

About their sinning 

Many of them have misgivings 

Is that sewage we have put 

Where the kids are swimming? 

A world more scornful

A life lived outdoors 

Facing closed doors 

Faces turned away

Eyes closed, for shared shame

As if debasement was contagious

To see is to feel a shared blame 

What is suffering 

But all of our failure

Peeping through windows, imagining warmth

Street lore whispered orphan to orphan 

Those poor kids, those unfortunates

Devise more fitting Gods to worship 

Beings of torture 

Themselves abandoned

They imagined absent Gods

No flags flapping 

No glad marching across the stone flags of His lost fortress