Lit-zine
JU
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...
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...