{"id":11380,"date":"2021-05-18T11:41:34","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T10:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=11380"},"modified":"2021-05-18T11:41:34","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T10:41:34","slug":"poetry-billy-o-hanluain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/05\/18\/poetry-billy-o-hanluain\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry: Billy O Hanluain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gold Fish<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I envy the gold fish
\nthe dignity of his fits
\nand spasms mid the
\nglass shards of his
\nsmashed aquarium,
\nthe water that was his
\nair, evaporating, floor
\nboard sucked around
\nhim, gills screaming,
\ncold blood pierced by
\nthe furnace of room
\ntemperature, epileptic
\ndefiance as oxygen
\ncongeals his world.<\/p>\n

The brittle bowl that
\nheld my world has been
\ndrained of chance and
\nflooded with numbers.
\nThe days are stale and
\nplain, the months are
\nundercooked, the year
\nunseasoned. But I have
\nno gilled valour. I do not
\nscream among my shards
\nor gasp for air and tremble.
\nI walk like a patient, long term
\non the ward, round the well worn
\nradius of park and asphalt and wait
\nand wait, binge watching banalities,
\ndownloading instructions for how
\nto pant on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rare Aul Pompei<\/strong><\/p>\n

Town was at its eeriest today.
\nA rare aul times Pompeii. Its streets
\nbroad and narrow, frozen by the
\nshuttered and unlit lava of lock
\ndown. A hollowed out commercial
\ncarcass. Sleet spitting gulls circling
\nthe wreckage like white painted
\nvultures. It appeared to me, like
\na join the dots puzzle in a macabre
\nchildren’s book. The outline of some
\nfamiliar things visible, the numbers
\nthough were like memories I struggled
\nto evoke, as when I swim against the high
\ntide of waking, trying to remember a
\ndream. The numbers were a maze of
\ndull dots, the pencil of my mind’s drawing,
\nfaltering and I was forgetting how to count,
\nhardly knowing where I was. All the familiar
\nturning to fog as I got lost in an echo’s frail
\nmemory of the sound that first bore it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One Year Anniversary<\/strong><\/p>\n

I walk through the shuttered reminders of my life before.
\nAn abandoned theatre, the play I acted in is long over,
\nthe poster curling on the tobacco stained walls of a
\na boarded up, once
\nFlowing Tide.<\/p>\n

The unbrowsed books on Dawson St peer out at a
\ncamp site of shame; tents pitched in the doorways
\nof travel agents that sell trips of a life time to locations
\nthat shimmer azure blue like lotto day dreams. A bronzed
\nhoneymoon couple jet ski over the sodden reef of a
\na sleeping bag that has a dormer extension of rain pulped
\nAmazon stamped cardboard.<\/p>\n

The shops tremble, empty, like DT sweat sheets, withdrawal
\nsymptoms from the sugar rush of compulsive shopping. Stephen’s
\nGreen Shopping Centre is a stale wedding cake whose icing has fallen to the
\nground, like vast sheets of nuptial glaciers, so you can see the putrid fruit,
\nheld inside by a frayed, once loved silver band.<\/p>\n

The place is emptied, like sink poured Tesco wine,
\nthe broken promise to never drink again.
\nThe whole place is a broken promise.
\nWindow displays of garish coloured children’s
\nclothes turn and stare at me with uneaten
\ncrumbling cupcake eyes.<\/p>\n

The mannequins are mute Midwich
\norphans, stranded on the low tide shore of stunted
\ncommerce, their plastic, cash starved eyes look right
\nthrough me.<\/p>\n

It is a drained aquarium full of writhing, rusting gold fish,
\na carol whistled out of season, a joke that nobody
\nhas laughed at for a year, lurching, searching for a
\npunchline to belt up his trousers with.<\/p>\n

Outside morsels of memory
\nfrom the time before
\nare being torn at by
\ngulls whose pen sharp
\nbeaks scrawl the grey
\nparchment sky with manifestos
\nof a new clawed and feathered
\ncity, not mine but theirs.<\/p>\n

The headlines in Bus Stop Newsagents read:<\/p>\n

“Search for Teen Torso”<\/p>\n

I have come too far in one year
\nI turn away and try to remember
\nthe way home.<\/p>\n

Featured Image: \u00a9 Daniele Idini<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":11500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[665,975,976,977,981,2700,3974,7340,7341,7361],"class_list":["post-11380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-art-under-lockdown","tag-billy","tag-billy-o-hanluain","tag-billy-o-hanluain-cassandra-voices","tag-billy-o-hanluain-poetry","tag-dublin-lockdown-poetry","tag-hanluain","tag-poetic-response-to-lockdown","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-under-lockdown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}