Cassandra Voices

Category: Literature

  • Fiction: Train Station

    Awarded one of the Tidiest Towns in the nation, the place was profoundly inept and utterly corrupt. Indeed disturbing, because winning the competition was proof positive that the town represented how things operated in the entire country. In terms of organisation, it was the stuff of nightmare. Everything had to go through countless committees, and the people you’d want absolutely nothing to do with were the kind who joined the committees.

    When he did think about them, White merely pictured those broken plastic corrugated sheets which had been haphazardly assembled to form a makeshift roof over the old train station. Effectively it was the first view any observant person would have upon arrival. What did this tell you about the country? Here was the town voted, again by countless committees, as being the Tidiest Town in Ireland, and yet the minute you got off the train, you looked up at the train station itself, at these gaping holes in the shattered corrugated plastic sheeting. It was pathetic, thought White, as it revealed the corrupt nature of an entire island. The whole nation, by voting in this way, or rather the Committees who had voted for the town, by recommending that the town should receive the highest accolade in the land, were actually complicit in praising the most mediocre of towns. Mediocrity was their aim. It was as if, for White, these loose panels of plastic, which during winter would let in buckets of rain, while every year the town’s commuters sheltered under the awful structure, getting wet in the process, had become symbolic of the country’s lack of rigour. Its shambolic state.

    He understood why large sections of people in the North wanted nothing to do with the place. Because the level of ineptitude and corruption was shocking. There it was. Visible for all to see, pondered White, who stood under the atrocity. I mean corrugated plastic sheeting! Who in their right mind was going to use such a material to protect the town’s citizens and visitors from the elements? It was the first of many signs that discreetly whispered, These people don’t really care about anyone in the first place. And, if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. That was it, wasn’t it? The “Ah sure, it’ll do!” attitude his neighbour Stan was always banging on about whenever he spoke of the place. Stanley was rarely in country, spending the majority of his time working as a consultant around the world. About what, White didn’t actually know. It was kind of a mystery, but Stan made it very clear to White how much he hated the place and a lot of his fellow Irishmen.

    The open hole in the sheeting spread out in a star formation. It was frayed into bits. Where it was not broken, it was black with dirt, moss and other under growth. As if nobody had actually thought about cleaning it up, not to mention fixing it by replacing it with, at the very least, new sheets.

    “Ah, sure it will do!”

    “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Stan would say. “Bunch of fucking morons!”

    Every word was spoken with that crisp nearly perfect enunciation that Stan possessed.  It would be the closing punch line in these sessions after having looked at and examined the problem from every possible angle. White had never before brought up the lamentable condition of the roof of the town train station with him before. You see, unlike White, Stan wasn’t a commuter. They inhabited very different worlds. Whereas White was grounded firmly in the everyday world that he saw around him, in other words that of the town, and the city beyond, where he worked, and which was only thirty minutes south by commuter train, Stan’s world was one of airports and hotels. Corporate zones. Stan was very corporate. He exuded the spirit and parlance of international corporatism. White was more about the local.

    Stan was unaware as to the everyday workings in a town where they both lived, and that never ceased to amaze White. While he looked at Stan with incredulity at times, about his innocence, Stan would throw White some pretty incredulous looks when in turn, his lack of savvy on certain matters at an international level was too obvious to ignore. Merging their knowledge of the micro and the macro, together, the two men were, in a sense, whole.

    But they discussed countless other issues together. No, the broken corrugated plastic sheeting hanging over the heads of commuters on the platform outside of the town’s train station was a topic from which he had spared Stanley. Smiling now, White, regarded the drab excuse for a roofing feature. The sheer gombeenism. The degree of decay on a shameless exhibition to all and sundry had to be seen to be believed.

    White put it down to Ireland’s post-colonial heritage. Casting a condescending glance at some of the town’s inhabitants as he did. For instance, if you looked at the actual railway station itself, apart from the roofing, it was a fine old building, as many of the old train stations were, having been designed and built by the former occupying power. There you had it then. The very infrastructure had been inherited. Nothing, not the laws of the land, nor the great buildings that housed their government and courts (bar one) had all just been taken over. That was a century and three generations ago. White’s own grandfather had fought in that war. The War of Independence, they called it. What a joke. They were no more independent of their so-called old enemy as the man in the moon.

    White looked at his watch. The train would be coming soon. He walked with a quick pace further down the platform. He wanted to get away from the broken corrugated plastic roofing. Another joke. And there were so many of them too. Sick jokes, that is.

    Once inside the train, White’s mood improved slightly. At least he had a seat. That was another thing. There were so few trains now that he noticed more and more people would have to stand, and starting with the commuters from the town just after his own. Imagine that, every day, five days a week, getting on the train with your commuter ticket that you had paid for and you would never have, or only rarely, the opportunity to sit down! That was more of it, the chronic sense that nobody really gave a shit about anyone or anything anymore. There was no sense of community. No civic pride. Why would there be? What had they done? In over a hundred years, what had they actually done to the country since their newfound freedom?

    While White sat there looking around him, the recorded voice came over on the intercom system. It announced the next town in Irish. Nobody spoke the language, or hardly anybody, and yet that was even more of it. The con. Our government printed every document out twice, first in Irish, which was the official language of the country, and then in English which was a language everyone actually spoke. Why they insisted on imposing the language in this way was all part of it. Keeping up Appearances. A great little nation, the Republic of Ireland, for keeping up appearances. Truth be told, White couldn’t stomach it. This Ireland created by all of its little committees. You couldn’t fart without some fucker complaining to a committee.

    He remembered reading somewhere that all revolutions were destined to fail. It was inevitable. Once a revolution had taken place, corruption set in from the word go. This was human nature. There would always be some kind of favouritism. And the types of people who got involved politically, no matter where you were, were always one and the same. Barring, of course, the very rare exception. Chancers who, for the most part, were merely looking out for number one. It was the same the world over. Why should Ireland be any better, or any worse.

    While the train slowed, pulling into the next town, White watched the disappointed faces of new commuters who boarded the train. And who had, as usual, missed the opportunity of sitting down. When he was much younger, White would no doubt have given up his seat to one of them. Women in particular, as that’s the way he’d been brought up. But not now. This was the age of equality. White looked hard at some of the women who were now standing up around him. Resigned faces staring out a window at the Irish sea. How did they like this brave new world? Sometimes, very rarely mind you, some guy would grow embarrassed and offer up his seat to one of them, but it was rare now. Pathetic. And all part of it. Everybody hermetically sealed in their own little bubble. Nobody speaking to anyone else. Addicted to their phones. Passive, they listened to radio propoganda or some endless podcast, or perhaps even watched a feature film. Not a sinner reading a real book.

    That was another myth, a nation of great readers! Ha! Cunts. Not one of them had read a book by James Joyce. His wife, an Italian who had studied both law and literature at university, worked in a busy solicitor’s office in the city centre. The ignorance of the people there had been appalling. Joyce was revered as essential reading, and yet here, in the cuntry of his birth, (a country from which he notoriously sought exile) hardly anyone at all had ever read him. Anything intellectual was immediately disdained. A myth? No, that was indeed the reality here.

    Joyce made White’s mind jump to an idiot who lived in the same town. He had met him under the plastic corrugated roofing on the train station one sunny morning. For some reason Joyce had come up in their brief discussion.

    “My opinion is as good as anyone else’s, isn’t it?” He had asked White.

    White just laughed, knowing that by the man’s own admission he’d hardly read him at all, and yet he felt compelled to ask such a ridiculous question. Not only that, but he genuinely believed it too. It simply beggared belief how stupid some people could be.  But as Stanley’s almost obnoxious North American drawl came crashing in. Every word was perfectly enunciated, to double the effect.

    “Bunch of fucking morons.”

    Just hearing somebody voice the truth out loud made White feel better. Smiling now from ear to ear, he decided that what made us human was the pleasure of sharing.

  • Poetry: Christoph Hargreaves-Allen

    KUNG FOOL
    •••••••••••••••

    So you think you’re the Master?
    Meet the Master of Disaster:
    Bring your whole crew!
    I’ll just steal all your shoes.

    I’ll shoot the boot with cold Krug.
    Wised up? Tooled up?
    Tribed up? Bribed up?
    Congratulations. You wanna medal too?
    Bring the Joker & I’ll see you with a Fool.

    Flying daggers. Kung Foolish matters.
    Maddest of the hatters. The Heinz, it splatters.
    I raise hell like Kane. I belong to no name.
    While you convert, all I do is subvert.
    I win every time ‘cos I don’t spend a dime.

    Don’t give a fuck about bread and I don’t count heads.
    Think you’re sleek? Meet my pet.
    He’s scaly as fuck, and his name’s Cryptique.
    He’s half rat crossed with snake and, boy, he likes to eat meat.

    Follow my moves, you’ll learn a thing or two.
    You won’t learn three cos I don’t rock the trinity.

    Every third step I make, I make to fake.
    My views are pure illusions, my cares just grand delusions.
    I’m here to fuck with you – and your whole crew too.
    Group think ain’t my thing.

    I belong to no one; I believe in nothing.
    I’m the void to your ‘droid.
    My favourite word is ‘destroyed’.
    Apple? Google?
    I prefer Bimbo and noodles.

    I already notched your plays, yesterday.
    You can’t step to me, you can’t get to me.
    I’m nothing but a trickster. I exist to magimix ya.
    Take your algo’s and blow.
    Shove ’em where the wind don’t go.

    So you think that you’re a hacker?
    You reckon you’re a tracker?
    Say hullo to the
    Grand Felonious Hijacker.
    Pirate from the seas,
    I eat up land like fried cheese.

    I already left this planet.
    Only returned to throw a spanner in it.
    I chill with snakes and street skeez’s.
    I suck up ozone like Febreze.

    I sleep in ironed sheets,
    Keep my mind firmer than concrete.
    I guess I’m some sorta wizard?
    A devil, yes. And a monitor lizard.

    All I do is react, that’s how I counteract.
    I preplay your grooves.
    I break vinyl in two
    When I’m a nasty mood.

    Hold your Aces, keep the whole pack.
    I fold green tables just to kick back.
    No, I don’t always play.
    I live to remove obstacles in my way.

    My homeboy is Godzilla.
    My mentality’s guerilla.
    I’m free like a condor.
    Once I start, I want it all.

    There’s no logic to my game,
    I just like to go insane.
    I choose madness over method,
    From time to time.

    I like to get hunch backed,
    Never had to throw a punch back.
    All I care about is winning.
    My day job’s all about sinning.
    Victory?
    It’s priced into my rhymes.

    Featured Image: Orson Welles as Citizen Kane (1941)

  • The Daymaker

    For my Aunt Josie.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very hour. I took care of her “Like an angel,” she would say, and I would never cry within her sight, nor anywhere in earshot, so that, at her funeral, and she died on the eve of her fortieth birthday, my eyes felt like eternal springs.

    Earlier this morning, after Dr. Dziurdzy had just signed my Weekend Pass, I strode a mile to the mall where I buy blue roses, and a bouquet in hand, descended the stairs of the Hamilton Mountain. From there, I pressed on, a pied, all the way to The Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. I only stopped at Sassoon’s Cafe, just before the James Street Bridge – to make Mamma a card.

    Across from me, in the form of a marble statue of herself signed by Michelangelo, sat St Dhymphna. Typically, whenever we’ve completed an exchange, and it is time for us to part, she lingers with me a while, in one form or another, once even, as the lily-like scent of her long flaxen hair, perhaps to stave my loneliness.

    It was so sweltering in Sassoon’s café that I swear I saw some sweat-beads glisten on St. Dymphna’s smooth marble brow. A barista fanned herself with the menu, placing before me my café au lait. She sighed over her shoulder at the young man sitting stiffly in one of the booths, wearing a camouflaged hat. I surmised him to be “ the soldier” St. Dymphna had mentioned to anticipate, “the soldier who resembles your father in that photo of him in the viridian shirt – the one where he barely resembles himself.”

    Like other frequenters of Sassoon’s Café, the soldier was in mid-conversation; but what bothered the barista was that the seat he faced was empty.  In his white t-shirt, gray dress pants, and black Wallabees, he placed before him, on the table for two, an open notebook and what appeared to be an emerald-green fountain pen.  The soldier wore a week-old beard so handsomely I wondered if that was his intention; I wondered if it was a look he was going for, or if he simply did not shave that often. Beyond the notebook, and farthest from him, lay his laptop, closed and recharging.

    “Send one platoon west, and one platoon south; over,” he ordered, after which, for about ten seconds, he seemed to listen attentively to a response, carefully, his eyes barely blinking, but dilated; then, he continued his orders. The barista, with hands contrived on hips, took three steps, robotically stopped, then glared down at the soldier. With calculated firmness, she coldly stated:

    “Excuse me, Sir. I’m afraid, I’m going to have to…Ask you to leave”

    A loaded silence reigned in the room.

    “Why, exactly?” asked the soldier.

    “Why do I have to go?”

    Again the barista glared down at him.

    “Why?” he demanded of her for the third time, after some intense silence.

    “There’ve been complaints. More than one. About your…behaviour.”

    “My behaviour?”

    “Yes, Sir.”

    In the silence of Sassoon’s, that soldier and I simultaneously stood up. We were moving slower than two war-weary battle-horses who had once galloped wild. Lifeless as ping-pong balls, all eyes in Sassoon’s Cafe bounced between the soldier and me.

    “My name is Avi Baxter,” said the soldier with warmth, to the entire room.

    “I’m sorry, Sir. But you have to go.” continued the barista. “My manager makes the calls.”

    “Where’s the manager?” asked Avi.

    The barista nodded toward the kitchen’s swinging door, and from behind it the manager could be heard yelling.

    “I’ve called the police!”

    I’d been leaning on a pillar, but now facing Avi, I stood at attention.

    “My name is Carlo, Carlo Di Carra,” I said to Avi, alone. And turning toward the barista, “Leave him alone. He’s done nothing wrong.”

    “Do you have a Thursday edition of the Hamilton Spectator?” asked Avi, peering hard at the newspaper piles. “I’m in no condition to defend myself, cause I’m in and out, so…”

    The barista didn’t answer, but I darted toward the bunch of newspapers to locate the Thursday edition.

    “Avi, here it is.”

    “Thank you, Carlo.

    Anticipating the police, for a few moments I looked outside the window. When I turned around, Avi’s pupils were dilated again. In a tone as solemn as it was dolorous, he whispered a few words I couldn’t understand.

    “Avi,” I said. “Avi?’ I repeated, but he didn’t respond.

    I looked outside and back at Avi, whose eyes were now serene.

    “Could you please open the newspaper to A2?” Avi asked.

    “Yes, of course.”

    Opening the newspaper, there before me was a large picture of Avi in military fatigues. I showed the article around, from table to table, ensuring everyone could see the published picture of the very veteran among us. Avi stepped toward me.

    “Could you please read the article out loud? Cause, like I said, I’m in and out these days. I’d be forever grateful to you, Good Samaritan.”

    There was no time to answer, since the police were on their way. So I launched straight into the article:

    “The headline reads: The Language of Madness: A Conversation with Avi Lyon Baxter. Written by Kimberly Stone.”

    “Over coffee, I asked acclaimed Hamilton poet, Avi Lyon Baxter, 27, questions regarding literature, politics, and family, but it was when I asked him about the effects of warfare, that Baxter seemed most engaged, most ardent, and most poignant. ‘The years of warfare triggered what my doctor calls schizoaffective disorder, which runs in my family. I also suffer from PTSD.’ Baxter has been hospitalized for his conditions several times; during his admissions, he became acquainted with what he calls ‘the culture of the patients,’ and also ‘the struggle of the patients.’”

    I stopped for a moment and looked up at Avi. He’d slipped into another trance.

    “Through our conversation, a polarity arose. That of language as a saviour for those suffering from severe mental illnesses, like in Baxter’s case, and language as a dehumanizing force that is inflicted, often unknowingly, on the psychotically ill. ‘Too often, those who consider themselves politically correct loosely use words like psycho, nutjob, and crazy. Now, hear me: I think freedom of speech should reign supreme. I am against language policing, since I believe it divides people, as it is designed to do. Yet, at the same time, I have a huge problem with the hypocrisy.’”

    “The hypocrisy is that of how the so-called politically correct treat various groups in routine language, and the discrepancies in political correctness. While they treat many demographics with sensitivity, like people of the LGBT community for instance, the language of mental illness and, Baxter notes, specifically psychotic disorders, continues to colour their conversational speech. ‘If policing language, shouldn’t that extend sensitivity to anyone who needs it, not just to those dictated by a biased media?”

    “While I wouldn’t recommend injecting offensive terms into one’s vocabulary to correct the imbalance, those who do choose to be mindful of political correctness might consider how they cherry-pick which terms to be mindful of, and the message they’re sending to those left out of their apparently progressive dialogue.”

    “Baxter says the effect is that many of those who suffer from psychotic disorders ‘feel like people treat them as sub-humans.’ Especially in the context of individuals whose own minds are often frightening places for them, having others in society express to them, through their word choice, that their condition does not warrant sensitivity, is further dehumanizing.”

    “‘There’s no safe space for them,’ laments Baxter. ‘If you have been granted equality you have not received it. If you want equality, you must take it. True equality is something taken, never given.’”

    Here I paused and peered into the faces of the café customers and out the window. No police.

    “Why should we care? Well, because the connection between mental illness and creativity is not just one founded on an outlet for suffering. There is also an innate relationship between mental illness and creative genius, and this combination has historically brought great works of art, and important inventions of many kinds, into the world. The image of the brooding or unhinged artist has merit beyond the stereotype.”

    “Baxter explains, ‘there is an infinitesimally fine line between madness and genius since, recently, scientists have proven that the two share a similar genetic makeup, called Neuregulin 1. We revere and adore Van Gogh, Nash, Plath, Schumann, Beethoven, Cobain, Hemingway, Pound, Nelligan, Blake, and other great minds affected by mood disorders or schizophrenia. We love our mad geniuses. We’re eager to take their gifts, but we most often reject the very illness that spawned the gift, and thereby reject the person.’”

    A lump rose in my throat and I wanted to cry, but resisted my instinct. I searched everyone’s eyes, none of which were holding back tears, none of which shone with the dimmest twinkle.

    Confronted with an aura of indifference in the room, Ari’s eyes welled up before closing as he took a deep breath. I too took a deep breath. But when my head bowed the way an iris’s bloom will, when weighed down by too many dew drops, my eyes were open and staring at the image of Ari, printed on the page.

    “Those with the combined traits of creativity and psychiatric instability who can harness and channel them into careers are the fortunate ones, who were able to take challenging life states, and make from them a thing of beauty to share with the world. However, these are, more than likely, the people you avoid on the street, or snicker at on the bus, as they grapple with untreated psychotic symptoms.”

    “Baxter’s critically hailed debut book of poems, The Flowers of My Battles, became a bestseller in both Canada and the United States. The book won both the Governor General Award For Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is currently nominated for a Trillium Award, the gala of which will be held this fall. In The Walrus magazine, critic and poet Dylan Yardly called Baxter’s debut ‘the greatest poetry debut of the past 25 years. Baxter is perhaps the most commanding and relevant war poet since Wilfred Owen.’ Last year he was awarded the Medal of Sacrifice, for his brave fighting during the War in Afghanistan.”

    “Though often debilitated, Baxter has established a career that allows him to share his insight, and lend his voice to others struggling with mental illness, so many of whom are silenced rather than celebrated.”

    I savoured that article to the extent I could, while all around me, a palpable aura of indifference persisted. When I checked on Baxter, he was beyond reach. Pupils dilated and tears streaming down his cheeks. That’s when, through the window, I spotted two police cruisers pull up and park.

    By the time both officers entered Sassoon’s, Saint Dymphna’s presence, manifested in the form of a marble statue had, alas, vanished. Avi was consumed by one of his hallucinations. And as for me, I encountered the kind of anxiety a blue iris must, when its growth flourishes from the protection of a private garden, to project out onto the unsympathetic surface of a well-traveled urban sidewalk. Mind you, unaccompanied by any other backyard blue irises and at the mercy of the masses.

    Or was it more that loneliness two horses might feel when, without warning, their riders steer them away from each other. Often so fast that neither has a chance to neigh good-bye.  Avi and I stood side by side. Solid as two pillars. Sympatico as high-school students passing doobies around a fire-pit party.

    “And, furthermore, I bet you’ve been completely off your meds?” continued the first officer, who wore short sleeves.

    “Now listen, Avi.” began the second officer, who wore long sleeves, “I sympathize with you, for real. I’m saddened as hell by your tears. And I get why having to leave this café may be troublesome for you, but it is time to go now. One way or another.”

    The officers made eye-contact. As did Avi and I. On Baxter’s table, a book lay open to pages 33 and 34. It was The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke, and next to it was Disabled, by Wilfred Owen.

    “Do you really want us using force to get you out of this place?” asked the first officer.

    “Do you really want to rip away the integrity of a veteran?” I interjected.

    “I’m warning you, Boy. Shut it!” exclaimed the first officer. “Are you gonna leave this place peacefully, on your own, or do you want to be taken out of here violently, by two cops? Which would most certainly be bad for your integrity, too.” the first officer demanded of Avi.

    “We don’t want to have to call C.O.A.S.T. on you. You’re well aware that C.O.A.S.T. will cuff you. And drag you straight to St. Joe’s for psychological assessment. Oh, and then, they’ll

    send you for a grand ole stay at the Mountain Sanatorium.” pressed the second officer.

    “What is C.O.A.S.T.?” I had to inquire.

    “It’s a…Well, it’s a special police unit that comes around collecting the crazies. You know, psychopaths and such. So they can go to the hospital for …For treatment or whatever the fuck.” hissed the second officer to me, so Avi couldn’t hear. Anyway, Avi had zoned out again.

    “Uh…but what does C.O.A.S.T. stand for?” I asked.

    “Crisis Outreach And Support Team,” officer one said with a smirk.

    At that, Avi’s head drooped like a raindrop burdened daisy blooming on a starless, moonless night. Moments later, Avi raised his head. He gathered his materials and gripping his satchel, pivoted like a ship points to a lighthouse to lock eyes with me.

    The two of us paused in a dilapidated and vacant parkette, where we were surrounded by spiralling lilies shedding their wealth of pure white petals in the morning sunlight.

    “What’s your name, again?” Avi asked.

    “Carlo Di Carra,” I replied.

    “How old are you, Son?”

    “Nineteen.”

    A warm wind wafted.

    “Carlo, I feel a strange paroxysm of utmost thankfulness toward you, and utmost loathsomeness toward them.” That said, he spat into a nearby patch of grass, “You showed me more support in ten minutes than most people have shown me in ten years, and so: SALUTE! Salute to you! Salute to the mercy you shared with me! Salute to you, the Stranger’s angel!” Then, forthwith, his eyes dilated into a thousand-mile stare, while he commenced. “No, Sergeant, I am not a coward. I’m just human. There are civilians in that building. I cannot open fire as you have just ordered, Sir.”

    Then…

    “No! No! Stop pointing that at me, Sergeant! Please, Sir! Okay! Okay! Okay!” Avi screamed. Then he started aiming his invisible machine gun, whose trigger he repeatedly pulled, until finally, he emerged from his fugue.

    “Anyway Carlo, as I was saying, SALUTE to you, Salute to you and your blood of love!”

    After Carlo finished his exclamatory salutations, he paused, then started: “My will to electrify the Patients Movement is hella stronger now that I’ve endured what happened today .Thank God for this shock I feel. Which will, I hope, continue to numb me from the memory of what we witnessed in Sassoon’s Café. I must affix and delight in the numbness that a proper shock provides. Wretchedly, must I revel in an inner glade which exists between my… self, and what has occurred. Yes, the dictatorship of the psychiatric patient will be commandeered so much sooner now.  Do you, by chance, believe in God?”

    Yes, very much so.”

    “And do you believe Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah?”

    “Yes. I do.”

    “Ok. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, swear that you will never repeat anything I’m saying here. Promise me. In his name.”

    “I swear, in the name of Jesus Christ, that I will not repeat anything you are saying here.  I promise. In His name.”

    “Say this: May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North”

    “May I go straight to Hell if I repeat anything Avi Lyon Baxter tells me in this lilied parkette near James Street North.”

    Avi sighed.

    “In the name of my own vengeance to a world that treats me as a sub-species. In the name of what I think is right and essential. In the name of any and all oppressed psychotics, the Psychiatric System will be dismantled and rebuilt. From within and without. There will be both predetermined and spontaneous uprisings at St Joe’s, and there will be simultaneous intifadas coordinated inside the world’s most prominent psychiatric institutions. In all three arenas, our revolution will detonate simultaneously and worldwide!”

    “Then the revolution, or shall we refer to it as The Rev? At any rate, under its own steam, the movement will spread to other sanatoriums like pollen does. In a vigorous wind. To neighbouring towns. All insurgents bound by sheer conviction to The Rev. To a common list of demands. Rights refrained, again and again, by ambassadors representing the revolution. And in these aforementioned, simultaneous, pre-plotted intifadas, guerrilla patients will take fellow guerrilla patients, hostage, consensually of course. Both hostage and hostage-taker will shadow each other into dual defense from our enemy. And, the revolutionaries, from Port-Au-Prince to Toronto, will be disciplined to shoot our enemies: security guards, soldiers, and officers. Below the waist.”

    “My cugino, Armando, a made guy who lives in Palermo, will arm our rebels. And may very well agree to advance us, in solidarity, whatever we need. See, he’s been hospitalized. Numerous times. For schizophrenia. He can fathom our marginalization.”

    “So you’re half-Italian. On your mother’s side, I’m assuming?”

    “Yes,” Avi replied. “Listen, Carl…”

    “It’s Carlo.”

    “Carlo, please. Don’t interrupt my precarious stream of consciousness. It’s the sole palisade between me and that trauma-induced platoon following me even as we speak.”

    “I’m so sorry, Avi. Forgive me.”

    Avi nodded his head, even smiling slightly.  It had been a relatively long respite since he’d fallen into a fugue.

    “I can’t wait to blow up the bubble rooms! To terrify the snakes of The System. Homicidal doctors signing off on premature discharges. Knowing full well they’ll end their lives thereafter! Rapist nurses fondling their way out of the night-room rounds. All of whom we will kidnap and try in a court presided over by psychotics!

    Our ransom for the prisoners will be a list of demands, including but not limited to:

    1) Swift implementation of a law worded as follows: That to be granted a psychiatric license, doctors must score in the top percentile on a standardized emotional intelligence test.

    2) Food service and accomodation to be modernized and upgraded so as to adhere to hospitality standards.

    3) Establishment of a fund dedicated to the disbursal of victim reparations, and immediate handover of similar criminals currently working under the evil administration, regardless of rank.

    4) Definitive discharges for select patients, such as political prisoners, for example.

    5) Smoking priviliges and designated areas for doing so to be reinstated.

    6) Redistribution of psychiatric authority, via the Vortex Accords initiated by me last summer.

    7) Pass executive orders composed by me on my bus ride to Montreal last year.

    “To be elaborated. Just so long as that list of demands can wrap my soul’s wide wound, like a bandage, the way forward seems somewhat possible. I’ll not, like a mummy, lie petrified inside the tomb that is my basement bedroom. If even a few of the uprisings succeed, the world would suddenly know the patients’ collective power, now wouldn’t they? Who would ever fuck with us again, if we executed what I’ve just proposed? Yes, us. Do you think I cannot see that you are struggling with your own psychosis? Who would still suppose the diagnosed insane are wholly powerless? We will assume our equality, which is the only way we can truly receive it. And the world, even the blasted, double-edged mass media, will finally see that we will no longer tolerate being abused, raped, and used by our own so-called ‘caretakers.” Shamed, despite the fact that it is we who open the doors of invention for humanity.”

    One glance at Avi’s eyes, twinkling as they were with zeal, and I saw his essential place in the universe.

    “I see a Million Man March of the mad!” Avi exclaimed. “And, as for the aforementioned Patient’s Revolution, I will recruit guerrilla-patients from the many online psych ward whisper networks. Plus, I’ll recruit my friends from Mad Pride, who know it is impossible for a person to be proud of one’s self, when not only openly, directly and indirectly, being discriminated against, but also scorned, mocked, hated, abused, mistrusted, beaten, and murdered.”

    Avi jolted, his mind seemingly struck by sheet lightning of afflatus, which is better than being struck by the vipers of his traumas. Again, he shook off the fog that dogged him to refocus anew.

    “You see, Carlo, not only will the psych world be faced with the patient’s revolution, but so will anyone outside the system. Who treats us as a subspecies. Who thinks we are not worth as much as the so-called sane. And that means a whole lot of motherfucking people. And they will answer to us. To the insurgents.

    “Reports of rape, assault, degradation, and other forms of ill treatment occurring in the Sanatorium never reach the minds of the masses. More and more mental health activists are therefore going underground. Radicalizing into revolutionaries. It is time for the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “I’ll seek out like-minded patients. O Carlo! O Patients! Hear my voice! We must leap from our closets, lest too many of us die by our own world-guided hand, to explode upon the world that jeers us! Like, who really cares about patient rights and their little lives? How many

    souls are suffering downtown in the streets, alleys, and alcoves; poor, dilapidated, ‘vile bodies’ for whom no one weeps.”

    “And so, now with intifada’s force, at last, at last, at last, the ‘Ship of fools,’ will dock at the Bay of Honour and Equality. At last, at last, at last, the ‘ship of fools,’ captained by revolving ‘crazies,’ will barge between the large and empty yachts of the fogless harbour, to crash ashore this society that has exiled us. At last, at last, at last, this listing and trimming of the ship will end and, for the first time, we will stand stable upon sturdy earth. This will be our Santa Clara!”

    “The hospital will soon be ours! A guerrilla unit of eighty patients! The world will know the patients’ powers! Viva la revolución de los pacientes!” Avi yawped, so the whole parkette could hear, though no one, besides us, was there. “Viva-a-a-a-a!” Avi bellowed, the echo of his voice blasting beyond the boundaries of the parkette.”

    Remember, you promised never to repeat anything I’ve said. Will you keep your promise?”

    “I will keep my promise because none of this can ever happen.”

    “What the hell are you saying, on?”

    “Don’t you see? If you do what you have planned, you will only FURTHER the divide, the apartheid, between those presumed sane and those diagnosed insane.  Avi, you will sow hatred in the hearts of the “Insane,” and shame in the minds of the “sane”.  Your idea is an understandable but regrettable one.”

    “Oh really? Well what the fuck are you going to do about it, Carlo?”

    “I want you to make a deal with me. A pact.”

    “What the fuck are you talking about?”

    “We are going to make a deal.”

    “A deal?”

    “Yeah. Look, I’ll, I’ll…“

    “You’ll?”

    “Ari, I’ll take away your illness if you promise not to carry out the Patients’ Revolution.”

    “What?” asked an almost ferocious Avi.

    Taking great strides, he headed for the gates of the parkette. That is until I caught up to him, and stopped Avi from leaving. I convinced him to return within the parkette, where we had been talking, among the still spiraling lilies.

    “Please explain to me what the hell you mean by proposing this pact. Like, what the fuck are you talking about, Son?”

    I sighed.

    “Listen, Avi. Inside that eerie bedlam by the bluffs, you could clean that place with all its tears, I struggle to fathom who I am. Rest assured, I’m going somewhere. So, anyway, check this out. I was born on Christmas Day, my mother on the Summer Solstice.  My Father was born on an Easter Sunday morning.  My father’s name, numerically, equals 137; my mother’s name, numerically, equals 137. I was raised on San Francisco Avenue, in the San neighbourhood, near the West Mountain Brow, where the streets are named after saints. The 33 Sanatorium bus still winds through these streets. It can be heard from my childhood home, at number 1101.”

    “Throughout my life, countless people have testified that I either; saved their souls, their minds, or their corporeal lives. In my boyhood, I endured a connective tissue disorder that ensured the onset of Pectus Excavatum, which means the malformation of cartilages, near my sternum. By age thirteen, this condition eventuated the grotesque caving in of my chest. An audible gasping for each breath deepened with every passing day. Gradationally, I was asphyxiating.

    And this body’s hideousness couldn’t have been more excruciating to my mind. Dashing what was left of my self-image, it spent my self-worth. To such an extent, that since I nearly never spoke, my nickname in high school became ‘The Mute.’”

    “For five years, not once did I smile, dragging myself through the days like a half blind horse too old to be drawing anything but air. At age eighteen, I underwent The Nuss Procedure. That being an experimental operation, to possibly truss the excavatum into convexity. A one-foot-long, one-inch-thick, bowed steel bar, was forced through my right side, then inside my pulmonary cavity, converting asphyxiation to easy breathing, concavity to convexity, disfiguration to beauty. After a week of recovery, I was released from the hospital just in time to celebrate my nineteenth birthday. Where my right side was penetrated, the Nuss Procedure left a 3-inch-scar. One still very visible.”

    Raising the hem of my shirt, I showed Avi the scar on my side.

    “Earlier this year I heard what identified itself as being ‘The Voice of the Father from the Three Personned God.’ He said…Well, what he said was this; that I would be henceforth transmuting into a secret being, whose identity I too, alas, would not know until my absolute transfiguration. Sublime and vivacious, this voice disclosed that I’d soon be in the hospital healing patients. It said that seraphim would shield me from demons. That soon, as I should be, I’d sermonize to the patients unfettered. And that I’d never have to worry about corporeal repercussions for voicing the Truth. For voicing His Vision. My family hospitalized me when I insisted this had been a direct correspondence with God.”

    On this note, I paused, taking a couple of breaths.

    “It was actually the morning of that massive storm, and just after one of my hour-long sermons, that the coda of The Voice was transmitted through me to the patients. We took shelter from the elements beneath a red-roofed smoking pavilion. It had been downpouring from tenebrous clouds for an hour and a half. Amid seemingly inexhaustible lightning which struck its riled electric vipers in such a way as to block our path. In these conditions we, who were out on passes, were waiting for the wind-whipped rain to cease, so that we could return to our respective wards.”

    “Which is when we were startled to see two demoniacs burst upon us, in blurs of wide spasmodic movements preternaturally generated by the notable force of the Devil. Screaming immeasurably discordant baritones, the rabid youths raged and rived the restless crowd, both asserting their Latin as petrifying as it was precise. At last, they alighted on the pavilion’s long picnic table. Forthwith, I shot toward the two youths, each foaming and seizing till apparently exhausted from the merciless exertion perpetuated by the power of the Devil himself.”

    “Firm, but calm, I lay my left hand on the one youth’s head, and my right hand on the other. O Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of us all, and the Son of the Living God, flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! Flee from these two boys at once! I tore my crucifix from my neck then, and with the force of the Holy Spirit inside me, pressed it into each of their chests, imprinting it over their hearts.”

    “Just then, two shower-weary mountain vultures perched upon a nearby statue of some lofty lobotomist from the early 20th Century. At once, I cast, like two eternally long shadows, both demons, into the mountain vultures. The scavengers gyred higher and higher before zigzagging away to vanish over the cliff.”

    “However, overtaken by a whirlwind of rain, the gyre reunited in a dance puppeteered by ever greater gales, till both mountain vultures were at last, simultaneously slammed headlong into the cliff’s vertiginous summit. Lingering in the moments left of their lives, their miserable necks and bones were as blasted and shattered as is humankind.”

    “The two youths lay exhausted and unconscious on the picnic table. Lightning still struck everywhere around our pavilion. Even striking the stone body of the lobotomist. The lampposts were so tipped, it was as if  we were starring in an early expressionist movie. And whirlwinds whisked uprooted saplings heavenward, only to drop them back to the earth. Alas, the patients were ripped about, one to unconsciousness. A wind whipped woman wearing white screamed, ‘Make it stop!’”

    “That’s when, driven by the Holy Spirit, I leapt out into the gales, the rain and all that lightning, to lift my arms like a ladder, into the chaos of a spewing sky. O Lord in Heaven, hear this prayer. Please Dear God, put to death this pitiless storm! And within 3 minutes, the colossal storm concluded. Lightning lessened, gale calmed to wind and in the end, became but a breeze.”

    “Some of the patients panted, while others sprinted from the pavilion to the Sanatorium doors. Staggered as they were, I shadowed the patients swiftly striding ahead for what took about thirty seconds, after which we found ourselves bone dry. Only a drizzle resumed, during our dash back to the sanatorium doors. The rumour spread that I had dried a downpour, dismantled the wind, and annihilated lightning.”

    “The following day, some patients accosted me. ‘Might I heal their minds of illness? Would I lay my hands upon their heads?’ They had come to believe I possessed powers, that I was a channel, a vessel if you will, of the Lord. His mercy. And His words. ‘I will,’ was the only answer, as then I remembered what the Voice told me before my hospital admission.”

    “Laying my hands upon their heads, many reported they were healed; I was quite efficacious in exorcism, and at healing depressives and drug addicts. Some said they believed themselves healed, but only when my hands were upon them. More and more patients approached me expressing a vehement desire to be healed.”

    “I was released, readmitted, released, and readmitted again, eventually seeing a need to disremember the plausible miracles under my belt, along with deep wonderment about my identity, all of which exhausted the high spirit inside me. In a world where soulfulness is scrubbed from people like mildew, miracles are seen as absurd to all.”

    “So, on the evening of Holy Thursday Evening this year, after having wept for Christ, in particular I’d envisioned Judas’ betrayal and Jesus’ arrest, having seen Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. My prayer to The Lord pleaded, ‘I do not know who or what I am. Can you please tell me? Give me a clear sign, even though my transfiguration is incomplete? After praying, I fell asleep.And on Good Friday I awoke to a piercing pain in my right side. It was coming from the place where the Nuss Procedure was performed. Where I still have the scar.”

    “As if I’d been stabbed, the throb in my right side was so severe, that I screamed out to the patients who slept in my room, amid miserable throes. Via electro-magnetic vibrations, a seraphim paid me a visit, to stress that by Monday Morning, my stigmata would fade and disappear. At which time the piercing in my side ceased.”

    “Avi, isn’t it true that you have been less ‘in and out,’ and more focused, than you were when we met at the café?”

    He didn’t respond. Instead, he started whistling Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor with his eyes closed, his face not tense as it was when we were in the café.

    “I believe you, Carlo. And yes, I have been more present and more focused than when we met at the café. What’s happening?”

    “Listen, together you and I will start the Psychiatric Reformation, and apart, will never resort to revolution. Listen, you are slowly healing.  But this will speed up the process.”

    “I lay my cupped hands on Avi’s head, then prayed: “O Jesus of Nazareth! O my Redeemer! O Prince of Peace! O violet eyelight-beamer! I feel your sea-sky horizoned lips softly kiss my spirit! O Almighty Taskmaster, please whisper this away. Sing Avi’s madness to death. Tame his traumas until they die in anonymity as do the loneliest of winds at sea. As do the holiest of saints. As do those white and black Popes of the Vatican, reflected like a solar eclipse inside a yellow puddle of urine.  O Lord, I’d die for you as you have for me, so please. Please free this beauteous man, Avi Lyon Baxter. Free him from his tormenting traumas, O free him of his tormenting illness.  Please, please heal him.”

    I removed my hands from Avi’s head. Avi threw himself onto the grass where in the diaphanous dew, he wept. For a moment which then passed, he knelt and his head bowed.”

    “Why are you crying, Avi?” I finally asked.

    “I’m healed,” he whispered.

    Then, suddenly, he jolted to his feet as though amid a street fight for his life.

    “I’m healed! I’m healed, do you hear me, Bello!” he blasted, “I don’t hear voices anymore! The only voice outside me that I hear is my own echo, and the only voice inside me that I hear is my own! Carlo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o Di-i-i-i-i-i-i Car-r-r-r-r-a! No, no wait! Santo-o-o-o-o-o-o-! Santo Carlo Di Carra! I like the sound of that!” Avi smiled widely in the warm wind.

    ***

    CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! CooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo! call the mourning doves. Kneeling at Mamma’s grave, and before arranging the flowers, first I spread the babies’ breath I bought to festoon her tombstone. Over the past year, I’ve gotten attached to the cemetery’s resident doves. Their call is a sound that soothes my soul. I coo right along with them and in doing so, fail to fight back the fierce tears flowing. Droplets that are falling down. All over those brand-new blue roses.

    ***

    Like a couturier’s thread through the eye of a needle, I entered the revolving doors of the Sanatorium. High on it’s hill, I was out on our ward’s terrace, when I painted a watercolour called “One Blue Rose.” I posted a high pixel photograph of the $1,500 dollar painting, to the website of an online art gallery. It wasn’t five minutes before I received a notice on my phone, that a former buyer of mine had purchased the piece.

    Mamma relished a rose of any colour. But blue roses most of all. Because they were her mother’s favourite. Grandma Maria adored blue roses because she was an amateur inventor. In her mind, blue roses were humanity’s most ravishing invention.

    Mamma died today, last year, at this very minute.  Through the diamond patterned bars of the terrace cage, I pray to her and sob. My head droops downward like the bough of a Weeping Willow. One that has endured an ice storm.

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    We Lie
    after Holly McNish

    My one remaining friend,
    now I’ve plugged out my Mum,
    is in my pretend life
    because he’s willing to not notice
    what I metaphorically call
    things. Like the fact that I carry about with me,
    smiling up out of my man-bag,
    a two day dead pike
    that looks like it died
    of a personality disorder;
    had its oily head beaten in by someone
    who could take no more
    of it blathering on
    in a fake south London accent
    about how it was finking of voting
    Lib Dem, and that it heard
    the lyrics on Adele’s post-divorce album
    are surprisingly upbeat.

    My friend is still my friend
    ‘cos unlike all the ex-people
    I had to drop concrete blocks on
    he’s able to let on
    my succession of pet dead pikes
    don’t smell because his nose
    has grown so used to
    dead pike at this stage
    he’d miss it if it wasn’t
    there to block out
    the even smellier
    dead things that live
    at the bottom of my man-bag,
    the leather existence of which
    you must be prepared to deny
    even when questioned by psychiatrists,
    if you want to be my friend.

  • Poetry: Quincy Lehr

    THE YELTSIN-CLINTON ERA, CENTRAL TIME ZONE

    The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.

    —Francis Fukuyama

    I saw her at the end of history,
    a manic pixie dream-girl in black hat,
    a smile of adolescent irony
    hanging like an imported cigarette,
    a denizen of corners. As she sat
    off to the side, I stared. The smell of sweat,
    Doritos, and the Oklahoma air,
    sweet and allergenic, hit my nose.
    I didn’t sneeze and held a pensive pose.

    A Walmart of a decade, grunge CDs
    about to hit the bargain bin, left stranded
    like hapless Soviet cosmonauts. The breeze
    reminded us that time, like space, still moved.
    The Wall was down, the Eagle long since landed,
    and we were told that nothing could be improved,
    that this was the teleology, the sum
    of humankind’s equation—cue our laughter
    at a life spent in the morning after.

    Never trust a hippie; punk was dead,
    and there she was in her Doc Marten boots,
    chin-length bangs and a partly shaven head,
    and me with clothes and hair in mostly black
    (the latter, though, showing some brown roots).
    With nothing up ahead, we both looked back
    and somehow saw each other as we did.
    It’s no way to travel, but neither was the way
    mapped for us. Another summer day.

    another night. The party was a bore,
    though everyone was there, and every room
    echoed with conversations. You could score
    a few hours in your head if so inclined—
    an afternoon special tale of woe and doom,
    erasers in the center of your mind,
    or just a gakked-out evening passing time
    with tabs of LSD or skunk-schwag weed,
    mushrooms, alcohol, or trucker speed.

    Brown hair and gray-green eyes, high-cheekboned face,
    insomniac intelligence—a joke
    she told herself running in a race
    between the shimmers of her glance and lips.
    I sneered, though fuck knows why, and lit a smoke,
    arrogant from lungs to fingertips,
    the dumbest smart guy in the room, but still
    she followed me outside. Cue the blurred
    memories of teenaged passions stirred.

    Gas was cheap. I used to drive all night
    looking for crowds I knew would be at home.
    Nothing was going on. Cosmic spite?
    A scene commodified and then discarded
    like cardboard boxes, plastic, styrofoam
    the day after Christmas? I wasn’t broken-hearted,
    so much as empty as a city street
    on Sunday night with everything closed down,
    counting the days till I got out of town.

    Ambition needs a narrative, an arc
    —rising action, climax, denouement—
    and what we had was groping in the dark
    along with books we partly understood,
    discussed across a coffee and croissant
    some mornings. Good enough, if not quite good.
    Understanding is the bonus point,
    experience itself the pass and fail,
    the revolution, Jonah and the whale.

    I got the girl, or for a while at least.
    Mazel tov. Yippee yi cy yay.
    Behold the bread and theorize the yeast,
    but know that when you eat it, that’s the end.
    Ride into the sunset. What the hey.
    History wasn’t over, that pretend
    conceit was soon demolished. We were, too.
    I wouldn’t say I miss her. The debris
    remains beneath, and archeology

    reveals the substrates, relics of a life
    rebuilt on top of ruins. As I drive
    through a different city, kids and wife
    await me as the radio plays a song
    I barely liked but heard back then, alive
    but not like this, when summers seemed so long,
    when love was hard, and love was what we had.
    I change the station, hum a melody
    that sings out past the end of history.

    GEN X STORIES

    He used to be the bass guitarist for the classic hardcore band Die Capitalist Pig!!! and was on their seminal album, We All Fucked Your Girlfriend, Even the Bass Player. Now he lives in Altadena, teaches memoir-writing at USC, and voted for Elizabeth Warren after considering Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigeig. He also just blocked you for saying, quite truthfully, that the Clash weren’t actually that good.

    —

    When she was a girl, she had a Cabbage Patch Doll named after Sally Ride. In high school, she wasted two weeks of everyone’s time because her English teacher alluded to the character of Shylock as an anti-Semitic trope, and she decided he was an anti-Semite. Even though most of the teaching staff and administration hated her afterwards, her essay on the matter got her into Bard. Now she works for a non-profit that specializes in teaching homeless children how to play Dixieland jazz. She also just blocked you because you called Tulsi Gabbard “thicc” to see what would happen.

    —

    He came out of the closet as soon as it became clear that he wouldn’t get written out of the will if he did. He owns three restaurants: Billy Bob’s Shake-n-Bake (the one he inherited from his parents that actually makes money), a faux-dive called The Pink Flamingo (after the line in the Soft Cell song), and a Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant called The Meiji Risorgimento. He once beat a lawsuit from a disgruntled employee by successfully arguing that calling people “bitches” is part of his culture. He also just blocked you after you posted a link to an article about sweatshops making Beyoncé’s clothing line.

    —

    She was the Assistant Vice Treasurer in high school and was voted “Most Likely to Narc on a Friend.” She majored in art history at Vassar, did a law degree at Michigan, and married a regional manager for Chuck E. Cheese, who bought her an art gallery in order to have painters fuck her so he doesn’t have to. She runs for local office as a Democrat as a hobby, losing by fifty more votes each time. She also just blocked you for calling her “the Amy Klobuchar of Ventura County.”

    —

    He spent high school listening to Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse and trying unsuccessfully to kick you in the genitals. Once, after taking several tabs of LSD, he joined the army and ended up doing a tour in Iraq. He got an honorable discharge, gained 300 pounds, and is the leading Facebook expert on how war crimes are actually good. He also just blocked you because… could have been anything, really.

    —

    She was Native American in that Elizabeth Warren way, in that the only way you could know was if she told you—a lot—and you still had to take her word for it. Now, she lives in the worst suburb in your home state and produces children, revenue for chain restaurants, vaguely white nationalist online tirades, and second-hand lung cancer. She also just blocked you over the chain restaurants that she likes more than you do, of all the goddamn things.

    —

    When he was a boy, he wanted to be president as soon as he ceased wanting to be a leopard or a cobra. After a school career spent listening to Classical music and doing an impression of an unusually ambitious Teddy Ruxspin, he settled for being a corporate attorney. His hobbies include playing the piano, collecting rare liqueurs from the former Soviet bloc, and tweeting about the #Resistance. He also just blocked you when you called his would-be Bond villain boss an asshole.

    —

    She was always going to be a star and was not without a certain waifish charm, by which I mean she had a fondness for flowing dresses and singing in her thin, reedy voice to a tentatively strummed guitar until people hated her. Now she owns a cafe that she bought to save the open mic from the previous owner who thought it sucked. She also just blocked you when she remembered you called Tori Amos “white girl suicide music” twenty-five years ago.

    —

    When he was a teenager, he was so violently and obsessively homophobic that everyone assumed he was secretly gay. Turns out he isn’t gay. He’s just a massively bigoted asshole. He also just blocked you because he was only in your timeline in the first place due to a misunderstanding.

    —

    She used to have hours of dialogue memorized from every season of Northern Exposure, even the one after Rob Morrow left. She was also heard to remark that she wished the world could be more like Edward Scissorhands. Now she makes Christian-themed videos for children on YouTube that feature her playing the glockenspiel. She also just blocked you for posting a parody of a Creed video.

    —

    When someone told his class in high school that his generation would work harder than their parents for less remuneration and less job security, it gave him a boner, and he knew exactly why. Now he has exactly the job you think he would, precisely the ugly McMansion you think he’d live in, the kids with the exact godawful names you’d think they’d have, and the exact car with the precise bad gas mileage everyone suspected. He also just blocked you because he thought you were making fun of him when you cracked a joke about people who like Charlie Sheen.

    —

    She does a reasonably good impression of being Michel Foucault’s illegitimate daughter with Judith Butler. Her signature moves are using the word “radical” to modify every noun referring to her academic work and looking violently ill every time someone said “dialectics.” She’s an adjunct professor at five schools, is shopping around seven articles and nine book manuscripts. She also just blocked you for being a socialist.

    —

    His first big concert was Garth Brooks in 1990, and his belt buckles and pickup trucks have gotten bigger ever since. He has an MBA from the state university, lives in a four-bedroom home with unforgivably high ceilings, and manages a sporting goods store that mostly sells guns and fishing rods to fat people. He also just blocked you for being a coastal elite.

    —

    She would have been beautiful had she spent less time on her appearance. These days, she sells houses to investors who think a Cheesecake Factory is the acme of gentrification. She’s a church-council psycho who posts pictures of food she feels guilty about eating and which she blames for her ex-husband leaving her. She also just blocked you because you said her nickname in high school was “The Black Mamba.”

    —

    He was the sort of guy you figured would end up designing elf-themed emojis, hosting a gardening show on a local NPR affiliate, becoming a serial killer, or some combination of the three. Instead, he has chartreuse dreadlocks, goes by DJ Kompound Fraxyoor, and is the seventh-most-popular purveyor of EDM on the Belgian club circuit. He also just blocked you for not realizing that “you have to be on ecstasy for it to sound good” was intended as a compliment.

    —

    In the eighth grade, she cried for two hours after she got mud on her Guess jeans during a wilderness excursion. Her first husband was a cop and her current husband is a white-collar criminal who’s an actuary on the side. She loves both her boys, who despite being seven and thirteen are already Large Adult Sons. She also just blocked you because you said that cheese was racist ironically, and she took it literally.

    —

    He’s forty-five years old and still wears leather. Being the father of two children has had no discernible effect on his level of swearing. He’s a middle-class Ivy League leftist who distrusts people who went to elite schools. He’s an alternative rock snob who finds most first-wave punk rock unlistenable and goth rock funny. His hobbies are reading, writing, caffeine, vituperation, and hate. He hasn’t blocked you, but sometimes you wish he would.

     

    Featured Image: Illustration shows a scene in the “Grand National Congressional Theatre” at the conclusion of the performance of “Fair Promise Combination No. 47 – Great Reform Bill – Act I Tarif Reform – Act II Civil Service Reform – Act III Internal Revenue Reform”. The audience is pelting the cast with cats, eggs, onions, turnips, and other vegetables and fruits. Among those on stage are David Davis, Thomas W. Ferry, George M. Robeson, Jay A. Hubbell, Frank Hiscock, Horace F. Page, William Mahone.
    Title from item.
    Illus. from Puck, v. 12, no. 312, (1883 February 28), centerfold.
    Copyright 1883 by Keppler & Schwarzmann.

     

  • Peter O’Neill’s Henry Street Arcade

    Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O’ Neill’s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of Beckett and Baudelaire (to whom the flaneur label is most regularly attached), O’ Neill puts his own unique slant on Dublin, and he is not alone.

    Henry Street Arcade is a bilingual edition, with O’ Neill’s poems in English appearing alongside their French translations by French novelist and poet Yan Kouton. This is an indicator that O’ Neill is a poet who must, out of necessity, operate always between dualities.

    Henry Street Arcade forms the end of his Dublin Trilogy, a triumvirate of poem sequences centred around Dublin, which include The Dark Pool and Dublin Gothic. The collection’s title comes from the name of a commercial passage located just off O’ Connell Street, built in the style of a Parisian arcade. A loose sequence of a single day in Dublin is gradually formed, in the title which directly addresses the arcade, O’ Neill asserts:

    It evokes the cave which according to Vico,
    In Scienza nuova, Plato singles out as the origin
    Of civilisation.

    Like Baudelaire and Joyce before him, O’ Neill’s aesthetic lies in transplanting ancient, iconic mythologies into a contemporary setting, underscoring its timelessness with regards to the human condition. In his case, it is a freewheeling mix of classical and literary understandings, now set to the backdrop of Dublin’s streets and architectural mismatches, that frames his poetry. He gives us a city in a state of uncertain but unstoppable transition, one in which the ideals of Ireland’s revolutionary past seem to hold little relevance to the social ills that continue to plague the very city – itself in the grip of lethal capitalistic freefall – in which they were first enacted. This constant collision between mundane, everyday reality and the author’s eye for both myth and observational capacity lends it a finely-tuned tension.

    In ‘Portrait of a Woman on a Train’, he writes: “Her handbag/Hangs from the gentle scaffold of her arm/The murderous black leather having been tattooed/With bolts of burnished gold, also bearing/The holy runes of some designer’s name. What inside does the urban Pandora bring?’

    O’ Neill almost seems to revel in this dualism. His own philosophy can perhaps be surmised with a line from the poem ‘Portrait of a Woman’: ‘Beauty must always be contrasted with banality.” His continual pairing of the two also becomes a way of interrogating whether making sense of the city is even a worthwhile endeavour.

    As an ultramodern metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and multicultural receptivity, the social blights of homelessness, poverty, addiction and waste also remain on full display. Even a crushed coffee cup: ‘The premium of price per individual coffee/Reflecting back the macro environment of the/Property world which the cafe finds itself in.’ – is indicative of a society in extreme disrepair.

    A later poem, ‘Heraclitus’, describes: On the high street, in broad daylight, Bordello chic is promoted in plain view. And for all to see – though they pass by unseeing! Our age is one of casualised distraction – the ubiquity of screens, whether from phones, laptops, tablets in the majority of peoples’ lives, necessary for both business and pleasure – conference calls and dating sites, social media as well as the commercial necessity for businesses to have and maintain an ‘online presence’.

    Running through Henry Street Arcade is a desire for a sense of mystery – arguably essential to the poetic imagination – to be returned to an age, as O’ Neill describes it, ‘of blinding all-seeing, all knowing/All encompassing… nothing!’ He urges the reader to ‘Reappraise/The splendour of the shades and the shadows.’ This is not a call to return to a state of benightedness – it is a call to acknowledge that there is still a place for beauty in a world that seems to be increasingly accelerating.

    By Peter O’ Neill trans. Yan Koutan. Editions Du Pont de L’Europe, 95p, €12.00 ISBN: 978-2-36851-573-0

  • Automated Spirits

    They’ve been protesting now for three weeks outside the closed factory. I have to walk past them every day on my way into town. I know they think I’ve betrayed them by not joining them, but I can’t relate to my former coworkers’ problems. Our natures are just inalienably opposed. I can’t bring myself to sympathise with them. If I did go and join them, and pick up one of their many endearingly naïve picket signs, “Deceived by Hadley’s “Taoiseach! You Let Us Down!” or “We Fight for All Workers,” I would just be consolidating their delusions and the myths of national flagship industries, of corporate responsibility, of fair-play, and of my ex-colleagues´ strategy of hopeful, dignified indignation. As I pass by them, on the opposite side of the road, Glen, our old forklift operator, shouts over to me from the picket line.

    “Chris! Chris! It´s well for you, isn’t it? When you don’t have responsibilities! When you have no mortgage to pay! Or kids to be fed and watered and put through school!”

    I just nod to him, wave, and shout back, “Fair play, Glen! Keep up the good work.” This I can say fluently. My stutter, strangely enough, doesn’t come out when I shout. Or when I sing.

    But this isn’t what I really want to shout back to Glen. What I want to shout back, and would have shouted back too, if it wasn’t so long to get out of my mouth, is “Well Glen, as the venerable Father Fintan Stack once said, ‘I had my fun, and that´s all that matters.’” But why bother? Why antagonize him further? Best to keep it civil.

    During their first week of protesting they had all been chanting in unison,

    “We will not be! We will not be moved!”

    “We will not be! We will not be moved!”

    These days, still out in front of the closed factory gates, they just walk around and around in a circle in silence, as though part of a funeral procession. Their numbers have thinned. I´ve noticed that car horns aren’t beeped as much in support anymore. And I’m sure they’ve noticed this too. The townspeople have wearied of their presence. The protestors are a negative image now, like an open wasteground, or an illegal dumping site. An unsightly collection of pitiful human refuse. They are an eyesore on the main road into, and out of, what was once a prosperous and proud Tidy Town.

    Soon the protesting will die down, come to a final halt, and be dismantled. Soon the protest will be scrapped and recycled. The death of everything is but the patience of time. Besides, their opponent can never waver or weary. Their protest and their signs cannot appeal to it. Their opponent isn’t even human. Their opponent is the sovereign bottom line.

    On my way home from the pub at the end of the night, smelling of stout and carrying a bag of takeaway cans and a bag of steaming salt-and-vinegary chipper chips, I pass by the factory again. It’s quiet now, peaceful. No trace of hardship or injustice, no men or women with heads lowered, wandering around in circles. Nothing to suggest that anything at all is wrong. No trace of the consequences. No distortion of reality. Just a quiet factory in the steady orange glow of the streetlights. I open a can of stout and stand there for some time, leaning up against a lamppost, munching on my chips, euphoric with the stillness, with the utter perfection of the night.

    I see myself standing up on a soapbox, above my former coworkers, a megaphone in hand. Before me, a gathering of admiring, battle-weary, yet expectant faces. “Brothers and sisters. Comrades and friends. I come here. Not to speak in place of you. But to speak in favour of you. And to give you. You who cannot be heard. And you. You who don´t ever listen. These precious, fragrant winds. Machine brothers. Machine sisters. Consider the lily in the field…” I could see it and hear it all so clearly. It would be riveting.

    Of course, I’d be different, my entire life would be different, if I didn´t have a speech impediment. As it is though, I´m not going to win over an audience and hold them in raptures with “Bbbbbbbbb ‘rothers and sssssssssss….sssssssss….ssssssss ‘isters. Cu-cu-cu-cu-cu comrades…” Having a stutter sucks. Still though, it has made me a lot more sensitive to other people’s faults, to human frailties. It’s certainly given me character. Definitely made me more compassionate. Positively Christ-like in fact. Without it, I know I would have turned out to be a right insufferable, arrogant little prick. Definitely would have become a politician.

    I take a sup from my can and look at the factory, emptied of investment now, devoid of all human intention and feeling. I should write something about the factory closure for the local paper. Something about the thrilling desolation, and the sense of liberation, which comes with our being disabused of a collective fantasy. End it on an upbeat note too. Of difficult, but definitive, new beginnings. I drain my can of stout, crush it, and throw it away, satisfied that I have hit upon an idea. Thoughts to keep me company at least, on my long walk home.

    My walk home, back to the cottage and to Sarah, is seven miles outside of town. The last two miles are treacherous. Bending, narrow country roads, with neither a footpath on either side nor streetlights to light one´s way. Some nights, if I’m lucky, I might get the improbable beam of a high, full moon to guide me. It could be argued, I suppose, that those of us who walk these dangerous roads at night while drunk are looking for, or willing, “An accident” to occur. Looking for an easy out. A blameless way to die. Sometimes, if its particularly still, I hear the thundering hooves of a team of wild, riderless horses galloping through the dark of the fields. Mostly, I just keep my eyes up on the old leaning telephone poles, on their cruciform tops, appreciating how they advance toward me and retreat behind me. How they punctuate the distance at reassuring and satisfying intervals. I do this most nights, until I get back home.

    Sarah, my girlfriend, works in Bridgestone´s Restaurant and Wine Bar, the only upmarket wine bar of its kind in town. She also sleepwalks. A poet of sorts too, in her own unique and effortless way, she is certainly a medium for some stunning oracular speech. My ritual, when I get back home to our cottage, is usually to make sure that nothing sharp or breakable has been left out. I make sure to hide her house keys and her car keys and make sure that the cutlery drawer is still locked, that the key for it is still in its hiding place. After this is done, I light a fire in the stove in our living room, leave the living-room door open, and stay up drinking the rest of my cans while listening to music or watching some YouTube videos on my phone. I keep one earbud in, leaving the other ear free and sensitized to the stiller atmosphere of the cottage, attentive to any stirrings, sudden creaks, or of Sarah speaking. And I wait, hoping that this might be a night that she’ll get up out of bed and begin her round of ghostly somnambulation.

    Sure enough, at around three-fifteen, just as I´m dozing, I hear our bedroom door creak open. I get up off the couch and go and look out from the living room to see Sarah, in her pyjamas, with one bare foot and the other foot in a slipper, come hobbling out of our bedroom. The sound of her slipper drags on the tiles as she limps toward me.

    “There are twelve devils.” she says.

    “Where?”

    “Twelve devils.”

    “Where are the twelve devils, Sarah?”

    “They’re drowning.”

    “Where are they drowning?”

    “In the lake.”

    “In a lake? Which one?”

    “Yes. In a lake. Twelve devils drowning…in the lake inside our car.”

     

    About two months before the factory closed down, Kevin Walsh, from Human Resources, sent an email around asking all employees to write a page about who we were, where we came from, what we did before, what our roles were in the factory, what kind of relationship we had with our employer and what our aspirations were for the future. This was a new initiative that he was launching, he wrote, to help personalise his working relations. Now, I don’t think it would be too unkind to say that a lot of my coworkers only picked up a pen or a pencil to do a crossword or an arrow-word puzzle, or when in the bookie’s or at the Lotto stand. A number of them certainly weren’t comfortable with the idea of self-reflection, or of a company´s prying behind their curtains and into the musty folds of their soul. So, as one might expect, the request was met with either bafflement or coarse, contained opposition. There was groaning and complaining about it over the morning-break tea and coffee. At lunch, in the canteen, people muttered about it into their plates of subsidized mashed potatoes, beans and chips.

    In the smoking shed, Glen kicked over the ashtray bin and scattered six months’ worth of rotten cigarette butts all over the ground, so incensed he was at being asked to write something about himself.

    “Did you ever hear of such utter bollocks, Man?”

    Confusion, if not mild despair, was worn into some people’s faces, as they left the factory on the eve of when the one-page self-report was due in. Premonitions of a gloomy evening spent at home, at the kitchen table where, after dinner had been cleared away, the blank screen of a Word document, or a blank page taken for a child’s copybook would stare back at them, blankly.

    I, on the other hand, began straight away. I jotted down a quick plan on a torn piece of cardboard, giving each section a heading and five bullet points to be developed. Before I knew it the cardboard was covered in fluid and erratic arrows directing and redirecting me back and forth between the verso and recto sides where notes and elaborations and quick ideas spread and proliferated. There was an announcement on the PA for workers to hand in or email their written piece to HR first thing in the morning. I finished what stocktaking I had left and then retired to the farthest aisles, at the back of the warehouse, to continue my writing. When I got tired, I snuck in behind some boxes and took a nap on an emptied pallet and used my arms as a pillow. I awoke, like clockwork, three minutes before my shift was due to end, feeling refreshed and deeply satisfied with the day’s work I had done.

     

    Two days later I was sitting in Kevin´s office.

    Pale, tall and thin, Kevin was wearing a white shirt and the white and maroon club-tie of the local hurling team. His presence, from behind his desk, seemed faint and insubstantial. Maybe because Kevin had been copied from a crumpled schematic in Holy God´s pocket and had been sent down amongst us to take up posts like this all around the world. Kevin. Kevin-Kevin. Kevin-Kevin-Kevin-Kevin. An iteration of the quintessential, helpless, carbon-based bureaucrat. But this only endeared him to me further.

    “Chris, I don’t know what to say to you. I mean…what is this?”

    He was holding my page in his hands, looking over it again. He needed some time to take it in so I looked at his plastic fern plant, the mandatory grey filing cabinets, the obsequious, anally retentive neatness of his desk and, on the left wall, the black-framed picture of four men, silhouetted, in a row boat, rowing into the sunset on a mirror-still lake. The word TEAMWORK written in big white letters underneath. Through the cheap white blinds over Kevin’s shoulders, I could see that it looked dull outside. Dull, wet, cold and grey. The type of day that you can feel the rats inside you shivering and baring their teeth.

    Kevin cleared his throat, gave me a worried look, and started to read.

    “Chris Gallagher was born in Sligo General Hospital in 1985, and grew up in Cape Canaveral and The Bermuda Triangle. In 2003 he began a B.A in Fine Art in Toulouse. After graduating he toured Europe in a hard-rock cover-band called “Spider Hands and the Phantom Fingers.” Dissatisfied with life on the road, he returned to Ireland in 2010 and enrolled on a structured PhD course in Trinity College Dublin where he wrote his doctoral dissertation, “Towards The Radical Relief of a Post-Marxian Flatulent Hermeneutic: On the Utopian Impulses in “The Benefit of Farting Explained” by Jonathan Swift.” However, he abandoned a professorship after having fallen in love with a country girl, and they moved here to Ballymadfun, for the purpose of finding work. Chris applied for the position of Box Manager in a sober state, with a clean and clear conscience. He felt called to do this work by dullness, Jove and Fate. His tasks in Hadley’s Ltd. include looking at boxes, touching them, lifting them and setting them down, tagging them with stickers, loading them on to a palette lift, and shifting them into different places around the factory floor. On any given day you can find Chris moving boxes, cleaning the toilets, sweeping the floor, napping behind boxes, staring into space, feeding the little Capuchin monkey Maintenance have hidden in their cloak room, counting peanuts in the canteen, painting tiny frescos on the ceiling of the men’s toilets, reading poetry, conducting 4:32 by John Cage on the factory roof for an audience of culturally starved crows and seagulls, fantasizing about eternal life, of the myriad possibilities and worlds that may be awaiting him after death, and wondering what it means to love a girl who sleepwalks. Chris would like to thank you for giving him some money in exchange for some of his time, and is grateful that you have kept your smiles in your pockets while exploiting him thusly. Chris has absolutely no plans for the future as he can barely comprehend his present, because he is absolutely terrified of looking into his past. Many thanks and with the warmest of abject regards, Chris.”

    Kevin stopped reading and put the paper down flat on his desk in front of him. He positioned it carefully, making sure that the page was symmetrical, level and right. Foolishly, I started to wonder if maybe he liked the piece. A compliment surely, for showing initiative and industry where most, I was certain, had barely scratched the page, would not be entirely out of order. Kevin leant forward in his chair.

    “Chris,” he said, “do Declan and Ian have a monkey down in Maintenance?”

    “No,” I said smiling, “they du-du-…No, they don’t.”

    “Chris, is any of this, I mean, is anything that you’ve saying here…”

    I could see he was struggling, so I made an educated guess.

    “Some of it is true,” I said. “And su-su-su-sssss´ome of it is fufufufufufalse.”

    “But why did you, I mean, did you not understand…”

    “I did understand. It’s ju-just how I fufufufu-felt. It’s what I wwwwanted to say.”

    Kevin sat back in his chair and looked at me. He was going to say something but stopped himself. Through the walls I could hear machine-noise coming from the factory floor. Music without emotion is the rhythm of machines. Over Kevin´s shoulder, I watched and listened to the rain tapping persistently on windowpane, and smiled.

     

    I was asked to leave the following week. Not for what I wrote. My position, I was informed, had become redundant. I didn’t mind though. I spent my first week in bed, catching up on sleep and dreaming what I felt like were incredibly significant dreams. I started to keep a dream diary. I hadn’t dreamt so vividly in years. My second week I began to take walks down by the river where I watched unemployed men, and retirees, fishing by the bridge. I went to the cinema during the day. On my third week, I went to the pub more often, to drink on my own and to write in my notebook. The last thing I wrote in my notebook was, “If you sit on your laurels for too long, they’ll turn into cyanide and poison you.”

    Strangely enough, it was later that very evening Sarah came home from work with two bits of exciting news. The first was that the Bridgestone had received the Carmella Fitzpatrick Great Places to Eat Award. They would be getting a star put outside on their wall and the staff were going to have their picture taken for the local paper. The staff had also elected Sarah to be the one to be interviewed by the local reporter for a small features piece on the Bridgestone. Then she told me that she had overheard two customers, a middle-aged man and woman, who’d been sitting at the bar, talking about something called The McGuire Programme. Via her eavesdropping, Sarah had gathered from the man that he’d had a stutter all his life, but doing the McGuire Programme had utterly transformed him. He’d learned a technique called costal breathing, and he could now speak with confidence in public, as long as he employed that technique. Sarah had looked it up online. The next intensive course was being held in Galway, at the end of May. Three months away. I told her I´d think about it.

    In the meantime, I still wait up at night and follow Sarah around our cottage as she goes sleepwalking from room to room. There is an incredible stillness and poise about her sometimes, as she moves about in her pyjamas or stands, frozen-like, in the kitchen, with her head cocked to one side as though she were listening to the kettle, or to some ancient frequency deep inside of her. The idea of touching Sarah, in that possessed state, always fills me with a special kind of dread. Last night I watched her as she tried to open the cutlery drawer.

    “What are you doing, Sarah?”

    “I need a knife.”

    “Why do you need a knife, Sarah?”

    “There’s one devil left.”

    “A devil? Where is the devil, Sarah?”

    “He’s standing behind me.”

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    The Most Risk-Taking Poet In Ireland

    My split infinitives clearly the work of a man
    who dries his clothes recklessly,
    sometimes not emptying the lint tray
    two cycles in a row.

    At the height of my experiments with formal verse
    I once drove a Ford Focus
    at a tantalising twenty nine kilometres per hour
    when the legal limit was thirty.

    During my decadent prose-poem phase
    I tiptoed past a locked apartment door,
    behind which, I’m pretty sure,
    there was an orgy going on.

    Under the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
    I once took one more Paracetamol
    than I should have.

    In a rare outbreak of concrete poetry,
    I yesterday regrouted the shower tiles myself.

    Trying to mimic Rimbaud vanishing in Abyssinia,
    back when I was young and even more foolish
    than this, I once accidentally went
    to Dorset.

    My contribution to metaphor
    in the twenty first century
    is at least as important
    as the cat yawning.

    Risk, for me, is going
    to a different garden centre
    at least once every five years.

  • Beautiful Things

    I see everything as if it were under a magnifying glass, so clear that it hurts. My thoughts race to and fro. Ideas drop as ingredients would, into the mix. Into a boiling cauldron. Then as popcorn does, they fly out, across the counter, and all over the floor. Trying to contain this is futile. That buzzing sound they emit is driving me mad. Add to this my impatience and an indecisive nature.

    I’m painfully aware of what’s entailed in attempting to follow through with a single idea. The details of which are tedious and delay any potential progress. But after a glass or two… it all becomes manageable. I cease to worry about the details and start imagining my success. After a bottle or two, I even think that I might find someone who could collect the bricks that are my ideas and with them, build me a palace.

    Waiting for something to happen is unbearable. So, to relax, I have another drink. Preferably two. I really need to drink a lot to drown any unwelcome thoughts. If anyone is going to bring up any obstacles, I will lose my temper. I don’t need that. I need clever people to carry out my plans, but clever people tend to have their own ideas, and don’t want to be bothered with mine. It’s so frustrating… but the wine is going down well. Floating on cushy clouds, I’m feeling no pain. There is nothing that needs to be done. Finally, I can fall asleep.

    When I wake up in the morning, whatever the weather is, I’m fine. Weather doesn’t get me down. It’s people who do. If my wife doesn’t greet me with a smile, I get upset. But of course, she had a rough evening, listening to me getting angry because it takes so long to get anything done. So, the smile isn’t there. Everything is clear again, crystal clear. It’s excruciating and I’m beginning to think that a nice glass of something would be nice. But, it’s not even noon.

    I can’t stand the fact that she isn’t on my side. If she continues to sulk, I won’t be able to think. I get emotional and my brain becomes mush. She doesn’t realize what she is doing to me. Suppose I’ll have to apologize. That’s it. I’ll apologize. I don’t know what I said last night, but it must have been bad.

    She says it’s ok. But I’m not ok with ok. I want my wife to radiate goodwill. I want her to listen to my ideas and take over. Put them into practice. At least write them down.

    It’s hard to find people who will turn your ideas into reality. Very hard. Because people are so stupid. They lack vision.

    Many of my friends have such successful businesses. I know that I can be even more successful than they. I’ve more brainpower in my little finger than most of them. Their success, well, it’s like a slap in the face. Soon it will be time for lunch and I can’t wait to have a drink. My friends might ask my advice. That would help to wipe away any doubts I have about myself.

    My wife is exceedingly clever in one way and quite stupid in another. She says that you don’t need to be clever to make money. She’s of the opinion that if you want money badly enough you will get it. That said, you’ll have to work and build up a business. That means more details. Lots and lots of dots and knots. I need money, but hate to work. The idea that I would have to start from the bottom up sounds ludicrous to me. Start at the bottom? Me? The idea could drive me to drink.

    I’m busy most mornings. Making important decisions. Don’t bother me with unpaid bills. Distractions like that will only derail my chances at success. The urgent decision right now is where to have lunch today. I call my friends to see where they are going. If it’s not to my liking, I suggest another place. Once this is sorted out, I can relax and give my wife a list of things to do. She will sort her own lunch. I’m not worried about that. My lunch is business. You never know what will crop up.

    If you aren’t successful, who are you? You’re a nobody. And that scares the hell out of me. I’ve had some financial success. But not on the scale I aspire to. You’ve got to keep your cards close to your chest. This way at least your friends see you as a success. I often remind my wife to keep her trap shut. I’m not a bully. But I feel the need to repeat it, because I’m never sure if she’s understood me. She says I drive the point home so hard, that it comes out the other side.

    I don’t like it when I see her talking to someone, and I can’t hear what she’s saying. What is she saying? She’s giving something away. So naïve, and laughing a little too enthusiastically. She should maintain her composure and behave like a lady.

    That man she’s talking to is touching her arm. This is outrageous! I’ll have to do something about it. I feel as if it’s not her, but me he is touching in his patronizing way. He is laughing at me. He’s saying “See how easy it is to touch your wife? And she likes it.” No! He won’t get away with this. I’ll put a stop to it now.

    I walk over and pull his hand away. She shoots me a look of dismay when I say it’s time to go home. She isn’t happy and I’m positively furious. What’s wrong with her? Can’t she see that she’s let me down? I don’t need this.

    I have a lot on my mind.

    So, I give her a piece of my mind.

    “You’re drunk!” she says.

    How dare she. Doesn’t she realize what she is doing to me? This is why I’m in the hole I’m in.

    “Just because someone touched my arm as we were chatting? It’s normal. People do it all the time.”

    “People? We aren’t just any people. A lady doesn’t behave like that.

    “Well, if being a lady means no one can touch my arm, then I don’t want to be a lady.”

    This is hopeless. I now see. And I despair. She points out that I’m paranoid. That I read something into it which wasn’t there.

    “I wasn’t flirting”, she says.

    “Anyway, he’s your friend. If you question his intentions, then don’t be his friend.”

    What really kills me is that he’s a nobody! Absolutely nobody. It would be different if he was successful. Then that would be a compliment. When a somebody finds your wife attractive, well, that’s a whole different ball game.

    My wife thinks success isn’t all about money. Maybe she’s wise, but I couldn’t live like that. I spend money. To impress people. So, I need it. It’s not necessary to accumulate it. I just want to walk about unhindered. Yet, no matter how much money I manage to come into, it slips through my fingers. When I have money, it triggers a frenzy of shopping. My wife goes bananas trying to stop me. But there’s no stopping me. I’m like a criminal. On the run.

    In fairness, I love beautiful things. Things of quality. She doesn’t understand that it’s an investment. I did well in the past but would she give me credit?   Nowadays, I’m not bothered to sell my acquisitions. I have a position to maintain. It’s too demeaning to haggle over the price. After a few drinks, if I’m trying to sell something, I get the price wrong. And once you get it wrong, there’s no righting it. Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps subliminally, I didn’t want to sell it in the first place. People may let you down, but beautiful things are always there for you.

    I don’t see why my wife won’t look after my debts. It’s not a bottomless pit. She suggested I speak to Monsieur So-and-So. Plead with him to wait a little bit longer to be paid. So-and-So doesn’t bother calling me anymore, because I don’t bother answering when he does. But he’s begun to call her. There’s no point talking to him. Have you ever seen his eyes? They’re small and cold. Like two bullets sticking out of their sockets.

    “Nonsense,” she says. “He is a kind and understanding man. Just give him a reasonable explanation and a time frame for paying him back.”

    But I haven’t the slightest idea when I’ll be able to pay him back. If I make more money, there will be things I’ll want to buy. If I can’t look forward to getting something new, life just isn’t worth living.

    A kind person would just forget that I owe him anything. If someone owes me and can’t pay, I don’t push.

    “Don’t be silly,” she says. “You’ve got to pay your debts and vice versa.”

    What baffles me is why I can’t get away with murder … when so many other people do.

    Feature Image: ©Daniele Idini

  • Poetry: Billy O Hanluain

    Gold Fish

    I envy the gold fish
    the dignity of his fits
    and spasms mid the
    glass shards of his
    smashed aquarium,
    the water that was his
    air, evaporating, floor
    board sucked around
    him, gills screaming,
    cold blood pierced by
    the furnace of room
    temperature, epileptic
    defiance as oxygen
    congeals his world.

    The brittle bowl that
    held my world has been
    drained of chance and
    flooded with numbers.
    The days are stale and
    plain, the months are
    undercooked, the year
    unseasoned. But I have
    no gilled valour. I do not
    scream among my shards
    or gasp for air and tremble.
    I walk like a patient, long term
    on the ward, round the well worn
    radius of park and asphalt and wait
    and wait, binge watching banalities,
    downloading instructions for how
    to pant on.

     

    Rare Aul Pompei

    Town was at its eeriest today.
    A rare aul times Pompeii. Its streets
    broad and narrow, frozen by the
    shuttered and unlit lava of lock
    down. A hollowed out commercial
    carcass. Sleet spitting gulls circling
    the wreckage like white painted
    vultures. It appeared to me, like
    a join the dots puzzle in a macabre
    children’s book. The outline of some
    familiar things visible, the numbers
    though were like memories I struggled
    to evoke, as when I swim against the high
    tide of waking, trying to remember a
    dream. The numbers were a maze of
    dull dots, the pencil of my mind’s drawing,
    faltering and I was forgetting how to count,
    hardly knowing where I was. All the familiar
    turning to fog as I got lost in an echo’s frail
    memory of the sound that first bore it.

     

    One Year Anniversary

    I walk through the shuttered reminders of my life before.
    An abandoned theatre, the play I acted in is long over,
    the poster curling on the tobacco stained walls of a
    a boarded up, once
    Flowing Tide.

    The unbrowsed books on Dawson St peer out at a
    camp site of shame; tents pitched in the doorways
    of travel agents that sell trips of a life time to locations
    that shimmer azure blue like lotto day dreams. A bronzed
    honeymoon couple jet ski over the sodden reef of a
    a sleeping bag that has a dormer extension of rain pulped
    Amazon stamped cardboard.

    The shops tremble, empty, like DT sweat sheets, withdrawal
    symptoms from the sugar rush of compulsive shopping. Stephen’s
    Green Shopping Centre is a stale wedding cake whose icing has fallen to the
    ground, like vast sheets of nuptial glaciers, so you can see the putrid fruit,
    held inside by a frayed, once loved silver band.

    The place is emptied, like sink poured Tesco wine,
    the broken promise to never drink again.
    The whole place is a broken promise.
    Window displays of garish coloured children’s
    clothes turn and stare at me with uneaten
    crumbling cupcake eyes.

    The mannequins are mute Midwich
    orphans, stranded on the low tide shore of stunted
    commerce, their plastic, cash starved eyes look right
    through me.

    It is a drained aquarium full of writhing, rusting gold fish,
    a carol whistled out of season, a joke that nobody
    has laughed at for a year, lurching, searching for a
    punchline to belt up his trousers with.

    Outside morsels of memory
    from the time before
    are being torn at by
    gulls whose pen sharp
    beaks scrawl the grey
    parchment sky with manifestos
    of a new clawed and feathered
    city, not mine but theirs.

    The headlines in Bus Stop Newsagents read:

    “Search for Teen Torso”

    I have come too far in one year
    I turn away and try to remember
    the way home.

    Featured Image: © Daniele Idini