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Things That Sometimes

Happen

John Doyle

 

1975 Evening Press 

on

Pub

Counter

Hours and Days

(Old Greenfield Time)

John Doyle is 39 and from County Kildare, Ireland. He was educated in N.U.I.M. where he received a B,A, and M.A. in English and Anthropology. Also fond of writing in Irish and Catalan, his modus operandi is "there's more to Ireland than Yeats and Heaney..."

 

You contact him by email...

johndoyle395@gmail.com

Music from Wes Montgomery

peelings from Orion 

itching from infinite space

 

lightbulbs burning

skidmarks haunt stop signs 

as empty ghost trains. 

 

Diary notes

children are too loud

how many questions does a 

 

boy have to ask

repeating repetitions repetitively

dirges of voice heavier than the wind.

 

Spinning barstools,

bi-polar men, that is not to suggest

depression, merely they occupy no other slants.

 

There's a 5pm check-in time for river-stink deaths

ticking clipboards, signing chits

a number of gulls flicker in unison of breath

 

here is what they say:

Jazz

stars

infinity

electricity

fire

water

the dance of children

begotten

not a mark of drifting men

the water

the space between here, fat-lipped worded now

time again for raving stomachs

all sliced open by pink-face butcher's wrists

 

Listen to those gold coins ching...

Pinched Iodine sky

sink my knees in ivy-walls

brisk walks shallow to this wade

spotlighted on children's hopscotch charts

 

bickering cats surge, in mange taxidermy under 

milky-cubed moon, 

an erstwhile prey mocking,

slivers of its sound registered under slamming doors

 

the girls and boys of the cult

clambering bikes in narrow lanes

screech to a halt at wind-puppeteer oaks

Euro-style housing, clothed in Scooby Doo 

 

script magic, sucks breath from

billowing Earthly lungs 

a neon purple of ice-lollies we knew in 1983

wrapped around their bulging concrete thighs.

 

This morning dead coalmen 

reversed their trucks around

an avalanche of Molotov rocks pouring

from death's denim and leather souls

Dick Warner in The Evening Press

wrung time's grip 

from fishermen's lives.

 

Boats trickle up this path

trotting dogs in tandem

lift grass after their piss

 

the tugging tones 

of dredgers harking

diesel smells where Offaly becomes Kildare.

 

Dogs investigate other dogs

marching into town

Dick Warner's pint getting warm, a barman 

 

un-curtains quayside windows

dust, like lost papers, merely scented

from the lips of words, cold, imprinted... 

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