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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
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 … Read more