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.