Cassandra Voices

Tag: Poetry

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    This Is Not a Well Made Poem

    The well made poem puts on its dicky bow,
    walks to the top of the hill,
    and has what it calls an epiphany.

    The well made poem sees every side of the argument,
    except those proscribed by the BBC.

    The well made poem has between
    twelve and twenty five lines,
    all roughly the same length.

    The well made poem worries
    about Afghanistan (and before that
    Vietnam) only when the situation there
    might lead to the whole idea
    of the well made poem
    being vaporised
    by a device left at the side of the road.

    The well made poem plans to bury
    GK Chesterton, William Wordsworth, Sir John Betjeman
    and, eventually, Sir Andrew Motion
    under its sparkling new patio.

    The well made poem never mentions
    the puppy processing factory
    it knows you own, or your preference
    for televised inter gender wrestling.

    The well made poem believes
    nuclear weapons are necessary
    to keep poems like it safe
    from all the rough language
    gathered ungovernable at the border
    forever threatening to invade it.


    Feature Image: “Baker Shot”, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test by the United States at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

  • Poetry: Peter Challis

     

    Encumeada

    It was the very last shot on the roll
    Before the film disappeared into the spool –
    You, sitting on the terrace, on a three-legged stool.

    That night, you felt too tired, you said
    For a glass of vinho verde, and headed to bed

    At half-past eight. We had spent the days
    In the laurel-girded hills, trekking the levadas

    Clinging, for dear life, to a mountain edge
    Until you had come to rest on that hotel ledge –

    Serene, in jeans and a flower-print tee.
    Next day, we went to Boca da Corrida by taxi
    So you could ascend, one last time, to the sky.

     

    Grace

    If you wander down Platform Four, it’s still there:
    The Waiting Room. But Grace can’t be seen anywhere –
    Grace, the Queen of the Ladies Waiting Room.

    Who polished the tall arched windows and doors?
    Who waxed the oak benches and parquet floors?
    Grace, the Queen of the Ladies Waiting Room.

    Who stacked the long vases with sword lilies and mums?
    Who filled the sills with soapwort and sweet williams?
    Grace, the Queen of the Ladies Waiting Room.

    Who tended the men before, on their way to War?
    With barms, tea and blankets, on Platform Four?
    Grace, and four hundred more, in the Ladies Waiting Room.

    The four hundred are recalled – at the eleventh hour
    But who remembers Grace, and her flower-filled bower?
    Who will put a white carnation for Grace
    In the Ladies Waiting Room?

     

    What can be created, can be destroyed

    In Wordsworth’s time, they surveyed the land,
    Men in stove-pipe hats and coats with tails,
    To plot a way to Bowness, and beyond –
    And ply the green between with iron rails.

    From all around, they came, to speculate
    As company shares begat more, still more –
    And rails were laid right next to Bassenthwaite
    Bringing Durham coal to smelt the lakeland ore.

    By Larkin’s day, they came with balance sheets,
    Men in grey trench coats and bowler hats,
    And pronounced the railway could not compete –
    With their consultant’s report and doctored stats.

    In panelled rooms, behind spectacled smiles,
    They approve yet more motorway miles –
    See, now they’ve tarmacked Bassenthwaite’s shore
    So we can drive right up to Wordsworth’s door.

     

    Division

    At ten, our year was divided in two, A and B
    and then, A was divided again, and we,
    our half of A (a quarter of the year)
    practised verbal reasoning for the remainder
    of our time at primary school, till we sat
    the eleven-plus exam, and half of those that
    sat the exam went to the grammar school
    and the rest to secondary modern school,
    so that our group at grammar was one eighth
    of our year at ten. At grammar, we were split again
    into A, B and C, and one-third of us
    were in A, which was one-twenty-fourth of us
    who were all together at ten. At sixteen,
    we were joined by some people from secondary modern,
    including my friend. He said he was one
    of those told he had failed at eleven –
    a ball that didn’t bounce, one of those written
    off. I was one of those that bounced,
    but by eighteen I was well and truly trounced
    by my friend, who went to study history at university
    (while I went to work at the Pennine Hygienic Laundry).

     

    Two Limeys in a Carolina town

    As the afternoon heat gave way to evening’s humid pall
    We headed cross-town to the Hummingbird motel
    Following the streets through the sprawling grid
    Walk, Don’t Walk; cross Main, First, Second, Third
    And past the all-night liquor store, where a no-tooth man
    Says, hey you, honkies (bony hand proffers a bottle of gin)
    We return a grin, and then a light – blue, blue, blue –
    Whirligigged, as two cops stepped into view
    Wanted to know what we were doin’ in this vicinity
    Realised we were two limeys, didn’t know the city
    Where one ‘hood ended, and another ‘hood began
    How urban foxes scented the streets where they ran
    Said you walk there, you don’t walk here (had a word
    In our ear), then drove us right up to the Hummingbird.

     

    Portage

    The Indians tramped the eight miles,
    a crow-fly line from the squalling waters
    of the Cuyahoga, to the eponymous
    Tuscarawas – boats on their shoulders.

    That eight-mile tramp along the portage path
    joined four worlds: Erie to the north,
    and the Great Lakes; the Ohio
    below – and the Gulf, deeper south.

    We landed in the Indians’ wake,
    came to the portage path to study –
    to learn how the trail became a canal,
    became a road – multiplied – grew to be a city.

    Two years on, we took once more to the sky,
    carried our researches across the ocean,
    then on our backs, to a town, down home –
    to rest there, with us, or perhaps be born again.

     

    Feature Image: Wordsworth House on Main St, Cockermouth, Cumbria, U.K.

  • Poetry: Stefano Schiavocampo

    Dawn highlights the East

    while becoming towards it
    the tide patterns paper tigers
    on the wet silent sand
    oblivious of the night short-lived
    naked in a pristine bath
    Magherabeg glistens with gold;
    straight after a single breath
    a far-flung rest of the wind
    the waves slow to an interlude
    extended by awe, by the vision
    of today’s displaying.
    (the journey within the light
    of the day we followed, peaked
    at midday for a blinding gaze
    at the fields of Ireland, thriving)
    Passed a hundred lakes
    we reach the line of an edge
    at Aughrusbeg, silver pledge
    welcoming pot of mussels
    and a lamb under the sand
    tendered by hot round stones 

    Feasting by the rippling shore
    mouthes to thank the gods for
    a shot of whisky, a shot of vinegar
    and the songs shouted to sea,
    with the eyes at rest on the last red view
    of today displayed.

  • Poetry: Marc Di Saverio

    ODE TO THE MOUNTAIN BROW
    (dedicated to Richard Greene)

    Cliff-topped at dawn in a euphoria so high
    I Paradise-verily see your wan white Pisa-
    Towering street-lights well-tipping utmost fealty
    to me, one I electrify back toward
    you with this Ode I compose under cadaver-
    soullessly blackening clouds — street-lights well-tipping
    with dew-new currency of gray-brown fogs and truth-
    pellucid allusions to Expressionist movies I adore.
    Now, forthwith, I live throughout those movies while I
    stroll throughout you till I disremember
    your entendres and see I’m new-born-baby tender, stepping
    through actuality, through you, not a film-
    set, O Mountain Brow, where I’ll never be panorama-
    spoiling, nor granted-takingly peripheralizing
    you, while I’m here with others; to others I sing
    your graces and discuss your day, that I may sing my
    soul-eternal ardour for you – for your verve in a time
    of dying – so you may over-hear and feel
    esteemed, welcome, invited, O Mountain Brow, where I sing
    the Scenic mansions you visit in forms of flower-
    blended balmy breezes. I whisperingly sing to
    your peach-blooms flashback-fast-bursting in the stilling
    air. Pilgrimaging you amid the crimsoning
    Staghorn Sumacs swaying, I see: you mean
    measurelessly more to me than city-views for
    which most others come to you…Vultures,
    after cliff-side-congregations – seemingly
    free-wheeling feelingly — beat their wings in time
    to the water-fall’s phantom-eerie hiccuping, to which
    anyone may calibrate. O Mountain
    Brow, remember those nights, at the Flat Rock, with the San
    Boys who hallucinated hundreds of faces
    on your Orcus-shadowy crags. How many
    first kisses transpire at this look-out — beyond the Ravine-
    bounds — where-on I behold the high-wind-blown-stone-for-a-second-
    seeming roses, O Mountain Brow, whose Scenic
    Drive is never littered as much as other parts
    of Hamilton — sometimes Elysium-seemingly
    clean? O Mountain Brow, the greying Italian bocce-
    ballers playing in the twilight sometimes
    soften their footfalls, as though they have concluded
    you feel, as you do. O Mountain Brow, I even proposed
    to a yes-exclaiming girl upon your north-most Ravine-
    opposing bench, one time, O Mountain Brow,
    where I kneel in prayer upon the purple-bluing pond-
    shore sands, O Mountain Brow, where your back-to-life-
    welcoming-warm wind once spoke to me through evening
    rustles of the oak-leaves’: “life-long-seeming
    kisses will electrify the lilies of
    the cliff until they shiver in the fervour
    you’ll soon feel in this same place.” O Mountain Brow,
    let us share this daybreak before other
    Mountain Browers come…crag-magnetized since boyhood,
    I so wish to share this dawn with you, alone.

    ___________________________

     

    A SONNET TO THE TRINITY

    O Violet-Eye-Light-Beaming Trinity,
    O how Your Bride of Saints so speed the butterfly-
    turning of souls toward You; O how our slavery —
    O Star-Far-Eye-Near One — twilights our children to infinity-
    incalculably embracing their bondage — to proclaiming
    they are free, when, all-the-astral-projection-immeasurable
    while, they are slaves who will not free themselves —
    slaves who’ll wish to rename constellations;
    slaves who’ll wish for numbering to replace naming;
    slaves who’ll wish to replace freedom with shaming;
    slaves who’ll wish for their own cancellations;
    therefore, O Redeemer, in your name I am reclaiming
    myself for these slaves’ reclaimants; in your name I’d die as You’ve
    in mine; help me die like a lion when time to prove!

    ________________

     

    JUDGMENT DAY

    When ray-right-rain-fair Judgment Day does break;
    when, upon a purple carpet of cloud-bursts — the moon setting —
    the Maker nears His aurora Throne in the wake
    of Saint-Cecile-conducted Seraphim trumpeting
    His every quintessential motion; When He does
    sit on air and deem our every thought and action,
    whose names among ours will be sung from the slim Book of Life?
    How morning star-core-white-and-burning is your faith in the Son?
    When the violet-eye-light-beaming Redeemer does
    return, on whom among us will He shine his rife
    rays? When you wake soon or sleep unto your
    deaths — will you suffice for the Paradise of our Creator?
    when Shadows will be cast but no sun will beam,
    will you ascend in lonely Lord-light gleaming supreme?

    _________________

     

    A TRANSLATION OF EMILE NELLIGAN’S ‘WINTER SENTIMENTS’

    So now I drink the liquors of your eyes!
    Don’t soil yourself while gazing at the masses!
    A blast from Norway turns the fields to steel!
    May hearts turn warm when the cold wind passes!
    Like soldiers mourning level sands at Thebes
    so let us always court our rancours
    and, despising life, with its sophistic song,
    Let Death lead us to Orcus, where we belong.
    You’ll visit like an icy spectre; we won’t be old,
    but already so weary of living we will fold;
    O Death, take us out on such an afternoon
    when I’m etherized by my lover’s guitars,
    whose dreamy motifs and ambient bars
    keep time to our ennui on the waltz to the end!

    __________________

     

    WHILE BEGGING UNDER FEBRUARY STARS

    While begging under February stars
    that I might be my closest to the beggars
    and scatter my soul through the forecasted storm
    and brave them on toward the laze and warm
    of spring, a stinging wind ascended and engraved
    in my ear the whimper of a girl I had saved
    from her own hand, inside her freshman dorm;
    then nursed, at once, from her childhood wars.
    She whispered, “please reverse the weather in my
    eyes,” empty as two open sunless graves,
    which simply realigned the little troth
    I’d sided for the sewing of my wounds
    back to the Father and the snow then falling
    on the woman in my arms, no longer calling.

  • 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)

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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