The Moth and the Candle

Mortal gods

2010-05-05T10:47:00.010+01:00

Brendan Behan. Writer. Drinker. Raconteur. Republican. Ex-convict. Bon Vivant. Irish. Dubliner. What is left over after pouring him into all those categories? How much of the man, of the person could there be to breathe free of the constraints he walked and talked himself into and which were placed upon him? My father was a doctor from north county Dublin. He was the son of a doctor and grew up in a solidly middle class background albeit living a peripatetic life as his father moved from post to post before finally ending up in a practice in the seaside village of Clontarf on the north shore of Dublin Bay. (For more click on the title) ) Growing up in 1940’s and 50’s Dublin did not involve the misery, depredation and violence that characterised much of the childhood of literary figures who have used the past to exorcise their demons and mine a literary stratum that played, perhaps not deliberately, upon notions of Irishness that depended more on stereotypes and the stage than was rooted in mundane reality. This is not intended to deny their stories. Far from it. Theirs is as much a part of the story of Ireland as anyone’s, perhaps even more so. No, this is intended to see what we as readers expect from stories of Ireland and the Irish. In that sense I suppose it is a posing a question: where does Irishness come from? Where do our identities come from? Our heads? Our bodies? The material conditions of our existence? Or somewhere else?

It is in the context of these questions that I was reminded of a story my father would occasionally tell. My father’s name was Emmet although he used the name Luke in his capacity as a doctor. The reason for this was never clear although I sometimes suspected that my father liked the duality and the inevitable confusion the use of the two names would cause among banks, insurance companies, lawyers and the like, people he enjoyed confounding. He had what I once heard a great-aunt of mine describe as an ‘imp of mischief’ in him although that imp was all too frequently drowned out by the tide of personal and mental problems that wore on his psyche in much the same way that water erodes rock. My father tried very hard to be a rock, a force stronger than the forces that he struggled with but in water versus rock there is only ever one victor. Still he was a man with a keen, if austere sense of humour. He could and did tell stories about his friends and acquaintances which even those who had never met the individuals involved would find funny. One story in particular was a favourite of his. It was not, however and unusually, a very funny story even though he and my mother would giggle at it each and every time it was told. One of the reasons for the levity was the swearing contained within it, a concept which was almost wholly alien to our household as neither my father and mother ever cursed in front of either my sister or myself and we never dreamed of transgressing this sacred and unspoken rule.

While listening to a Dominic Behan record one day my father told us a story which we would hear several times over the course of our family lives. It was about Dominic’s more infamous and celebrated brother, Brendan. Brendan’s fame went hand in hand with the notoriety of his conviction for political violence and it was his various stints in reform schools and prisons that were to form the spine of his literary inspiration. His fame as a writer grew as his work gained acceptance on the London and New York stages. He was feted by radio and television journalists for his insight and skill. Yet he was, as he felt himself to be, an ordinary ‘Dub’, a scion of the inner city working classes. As such the public house was Brendan’s real stage, the place where a king like him, famous feted and monied, held court for the hangers-on and the loyal the curious and the jealous. It was said that before he would go out drinking, Brendan would consume a bottle of whiskey as a warm-up for the evening. Although these stories may be apocryphal there is no doubting that the man was a prodigious drinker. Alcohol occupies an odd and evanescent place in Irish culture. One of the reasons for men like Brendan Behan’s lasting place in Irish, and Dublin, memories was that his heavy drinking merely reflected the society in which he lived. His was not the hell-raising exception to the rule, a loveable rogue at work. His was the rule. The only thing that differentiated him from other Irish men of the time was his ability to handle the amount of drink he took.

- I was out one night o meet the lads after college for a few pints. It was me, Conor Burke, Paddy Keating and Declan Walsh. We usually went drinking in the Toby Jug or maybe Neary’s but this night we were in The Bailey for some reason. Anyway we met up at the corner of Stephen’s Green and made our way down to St. Anne’s street. We went in and sat down at an empty table and I went up to the bar to order. At the bar there was a group of men talking and joking loudly with a big heavyset guy in the middle of the group holding all their attention. I didn’t pay them any mind at first as I was trying to catch the barman’s eye to order the drinks but when after I ordered I looked over and I realised that the big guy in the middle of the crowd was Brendan Behan. This was a big deal because he really was very famous at that time and I was a big fan of his so I smiled over at him and nodded hello. He must have thought I was smiling at someone else because he turned slightly to look behind him. Anyway before I could say anything the barman arrived with the pints and I handed over the cash.

- I rushed back to the table you see and as I handed out the drinks I said to the boys ‘don’t look now but you see that group of fellas at the bar? See the big guy with his back turned to us now?
- Yeah?
- Well that’s Brendan Behan!
- No it’s not.
- It is, I’m telling you! I was about ten feet away from him when I ordered the pints, it is definitely him!

- Well the lads didn’t believe me and when I argued and stood my ground Conor Burke, who was a lovely fella but had a bit of a temper on him, said ‘would you ever eff off Frank’ I said I would prove it. So I said I’d bring one of the pints back and say it was flat or something. Anyway I went up to the bar and caught the barman’s eye. He wasn’t exactly impressed when I told him the beer was flat but I didn’t care it wasn’t a regular haunt of ours and besides I was only interested in having a few words with Brendan Behan. So the barman went off muttering under his breath about ‘bloody students’ and I rocked back and forth on my heels to look over the heads of the group he was with. I was quite tall for that time, most people wouldn’t have been as tall as me so he spotted me after a while. I nodded and smiled again and this time he looked right at me and frowned. He opened his mouth to say something but one of the men he was with must have made a joke or something because they all erupted in gales of laughter and he looked away. When the laughter died down a bit I moved forward to say something to him but as I stood beside the group, my mind went blank. I just stood there, couldn’t think of anything to say. The lads said afterwards that I stood there with my mouth open but I think they were just spoofing to make me look an even bigger eejit. But I didn’t know what to say and this time the group Behan was with had noticed me as well and were all staring at me so when the barman came back, fresh pint in his hand and sour look on his face, I panicked and scuttled off back to the table.

- The lads were all very impressed when I got back...well not with me but the fact that Brendan Behan was out drinking in the same bar as us. Pretty soon we were all chattering away like a bunch of schoolgirls, laughing and joking and carrying on. The lot of us kept glancing over at the group at the bar and raising our glasses in salute. After I stared over at him and smiled and nodded for what was the umpteenth time a miracle happened. He shouldered his way past his friends and made for our table. This god of literary Ireland, this true blue celebrity, this friend of movie stars was on his way over to talk to us. Well we all fell silent. He got to our table and the breath caught in the back of my throat as I met one of my heroes and he said the immortal words that I will remember to the day I die....’what the fucking hell are youse looking at?’

This story never failed to make us laugh and we would practice the punchline in our best snarly Dub accents between us. Yet it wasn’t the joke or the swearing or even the presence of one of Ireland’s literary greats that captured our minds and resonated with us. It was the recreation of part of our father’s past, his history which so fascinated us. We would ask to hear more stories about their earlier lives in a bid to make a connection between the person past and the parent present. That connection was a difficult one to fathom at times as the person of the parent always seems to be inherently tainted with the relations necessary for the parent child bond to exist. But in meeting Brendan Behan we could see, truly see, the person of our Dad, young, jarred, awestruck and rueful. There were other stories of course, other jokes and tales that added to the weft and weave of our parents’ mythology but that meeting said a great deal about Dublin in the 1950’s, about their place in it and about him and even as young kids we knew it. The place of our birth, thecity of the past and the men behind the myths were even more intriguing for the fact that they could be brought to life through the collective memories of my mother and father.

The deserted city

2010-04-20T15:58:00.001+01:00

Streets of the empty line the maps
Portraying the city as lived-in
Walk down them with difficulty in the throng
The press of bodies lacking souls
Will block your path, hamper your journey
Leaving them clear of humanity

The buildings and monuments, consumed by their glory
Built by arrogance and greed, last longer than men
These buildings are monuments to functionalism
To the now ended search for pluperfect perfection
We have left the city in its original form
And transformed its edges into something new
Great operations of capital, transplanting communities
To scatter the problems far and wide

Little bits and pieces of items of use
Lie around and about in minor heaps
Evidence of some habitation, now neglect
For the fabric as seen of the urban milieu

Long lines of the asphalt nervous system
Streak away from a centre of nerves and stone
Kept alive by an energy electrical, vital
Pulsating in and it is the new light

Keeping the structure going has now superseded
The original purpose of the structure itself
Brick upon brick, circuit after circuit
More glass and metal and cold, grey stone
Surrounds us, overawes us, puts us down
And the morbidly ironic fact of the matter is
We created it...but we don’t live there anymore

Opposing light

2010-04-20T15:57:00.000+01:00

Light flows in smooth, straight lines
It illuminates the mind for a single moment
Reflecting the false immortality of the young
Darkness is but the absence of light
Evil is the flip side of the coin
Where light and darkness are of the same side
This opposing light is omnipresent
But is readily ignored by those steeped in arrogance

The creation of such light is mortal
The mind is the fount of both goodness and evil
Heaven and Hell are merely names for said, created by men
Man is the ultimate instigator and the ultimate nemesis
In religion man finds comfort, in life……evil
The realisation is not apparent

Crave light

2010-04-20T15:56:00.000+01:00

Huddled together, crushing for warmth
The group shivers and twists in anticipation
For a while no one speaks
Until one voice rings clear
‘It is the end, the end of all
And the beginning of nothing
Gather round and let us tell tales of the death of nations’

The fire dances and sheds sparks
As the speaker becomes more and more engrossed
And the audience cease to understand
Shadows cast by the flames
Create a play to accompany the words
Agitation increases, the penumbra story quickens
Climax is nearing

The speaker ends the story
The audience sit back, awed but unsatisfied
The rubble and ruins that surround them
Stretch for miles and miles
Across country and continent
Their presence is still not explained

Perhaps it is better left to generations to come
Maybe they can spin the story
So that the web becomes less tangled
They who have seen the earth move
Who have seen the end of romance
Cannot separate the two
Both the Death and the Dance

But for those by the fire
The curtain is already drawing
One by one they fall
Into the sleep that doesn’t end
For what reason they’ll never know
And no one will ever care
No more generations to come
And thus, without them, the song will not be sung

A complete heresy

2010-04-20T15:55:00.002+01:00

The sounds and smells of ten thousand war machines
Invade my solitary head an pervade all my dreams
I can see a million faces I have never before seen
And hear from a million throats, a million wretched screams
From a people the world ignored and never before cared
Against whom they will now unite to kill and to scare
Cold eyes, firm handshakes and a general conviction
Silk dresses, sharp suits and the smell of ambition
Force through large fists legitimacy and morality
All mixed up and confused by those who don’t want you to see
The naked hatred and dull grey greed of what little souls
Control this realm of stupidity and marvels that has grown old
They can be seen and heard everyday on television and radio
Uttering their cant with a sincerity they do not know
Forcing you to believe each word that they say
Placing your sons and daughters in unholy harm’s way
They don the dead mantle of representative democracy
And hold aloft a dark light so the world cannot see
They will argue to the end which they will have brought about
And will be there at the last, when the final candle is snuffed out

The Lines

2010-04-20T15:55:00.001+01:00

Following the last as the one before
Travelling in a well-worn direction
Movement without thinking
The practised motions of the weary
Clear and unnoticed in the harsh light
The vastly differing faces of each person
Blend into the distinguishable of the moment
Without being the discernible of the long term
Each has a million stories which will not be told
And the time that one takes to ponder on one
Allows only the briefest of inferences to be made
I only focus on the beautiful women
As I am a shallow, callow young male
My journey is never ending and non-stop
By my own leave and my own volition
I engage in eye contact with every attractive female
What they think is anyone’s guess
Some are seemingly not displeased
Others demonstrably uninterested
But none initiate the contact
They are the respondents
To my…what? Desperation? Interest?
Perhaps they look too but only occasionally, subtly
Without the burning desire of the male
They still want and need
Perhaps theirs is a smoother journey
Enkompassing a greater trajectory
Whilst we fumble about in the gutters of life
Scrabbling around from one point to the next
They will sit at the end of the lines
And laugh

Recognise your own utility

2010-04-20T15:54:00.001+01:00

Recognise your own utility in the hands that turn this page
Each finger daily performing a dextrous work of the dark art of geometry
Moving up, down in circles, squares, cubes and others.
Recognise the utility of the clothing that you wear
They are, at once, garment and ornament
The colours, the style, the cut, the cloth all ultimately unnecessary
Recognise the utility of the thoughts that you think
Whimsical daydreams, grand plans or recurring dark deeds
All forgotten in the blink of an eye, not one transcendent
Recognise the utility of the jewellery that you possess
Rings, watches, lockets, chains, earrings, pendants and similar
False or real, no separation occurs in the mix
Recognise the utility of the poses that we strike
The sheer, unadulterated pointlessness of male posturing
Countered, neatly, by the over-sexual, under-whelming hype of the modernist female

Your utility is the sole modern standard of your value, your worth
What you are worth, how much you are worth, the extent of your value
Depends to the largest degree upon your own utility
What a measure of man is this, the ultimate arbiter

Mental terrains

2010-04-20T15:50:00.002+01:00

Bursting pain, flashing lights and strange shapes
The senses subtracted by one
Briefly live in the place only you can create
Move between the external and the internal
Only pausing to assess each
Staying in the dark is a little death
Everyman resurgent does not need three days
Access to this dark is yours and the others to grant
What restraints there are, are the ones you bring
Purpose and structure held in a template
The outcome is held in your hands.
But control is sometimes lost to the other
The terror of the familiar and the fear of the unknown
Melding together for the other to exercise the control
The dark ultimately belongs to the other
You are the architect, it is the overlord
Each piece of the little death is not really yours
To control or own, merely to participate in
Perhaps the greatest fear then,
Is to live in the darkness of the mind

Youth

2010-04-20T15:50:00.001+01:00

There is a man with the pain of a thousand years
Listed on a face haggard with the suffering
His bones creak and squeal to a tune of laments
The shuffling sounds of tattered clothing bare
Smells of decay and neglect are his unpleasant aura
His eyes see through me to people no longer there
Standing in places changed beyond recognition
Vituperative progress has destroyed them forever
He moves with difficulty, this creature of time
Burdened by the weight of ages, Hair white, eyes rheumy
I look at a future I dread to ever happen
Of the inevitable end of this fragile flesh
Weep, aye, I weep for the years to flow before me
I see a gap-toothed grin of benign idiocy
And an outstretched palm for relief from incompetence
I hail, hail the appearance of the end of my time

History, the past and things that have happened before

2010-04-20T15:49:00.001+01:00

Before I was blind and now I can see
Before I was weak and now I am strong
Before I was foolish and now I am wise
History laid bare as a process of improvement

Things were better then than they are now
Which is, apparently, in the nature of things
Things were cheaper, better quality, better made
Less sordid, more worthwhile and they lasted
History exposed as a process of decay

Can both of these positions be reconciled?
To produce a less fragmented view of history
In our past lies the key to understanding our future
What follows on is dependent on what went before
History as structural foundation, not just process

We are not victims held in the glare of historical inevitability
Nor are we slaves to the false god of predestination
But we are creatures of time and thus of linear history
So we are part of the past as it is part of us

The afterwards

2010-04-20T15:48:00.000+01:00

Detailing a new panorama
Or spelling out an older view
Some try to write, others to think
Some listen to music, others to others
And they all do something.
Even the old drunk at the end
Reeling in spite of the stability
Darkness all around, darkness behind our eyes
The faces not recorded but noticed
Of all the hopes of ours perhaps the greatest
Is the one that comes with our greatest fear
The unknown, the uncharted and the yet to be explored
The surprises, excitement, joy and terror mingling
To make up a matrix of ignorant possibilities
To be waited for and dreamed of
Because it always comes next

Talking with the dead

2010-04-20T15:47:00.002+01:00

The blank disc spins, round and round and round
Crackling but discernible the sound pours forth
Voices, raised in anger, sorrow, joy and pain
Steeped in laughter or beset by contemplation

Each voice says something different
But in the same way
Each voice says the same thing
But in a novel fashion
They cry to your sorrow, laugh to your joy
Smile with your happiness and shout with your anger

Living in a moment
A white-hot moment of pure magic
Voice, melody, note and backbeat combine
You listen to yourself in the songs
And in the white noise of communication
The songs listen to you back

The lighted room

2010-04-20T15:47:00.001+01:00

Future lives of our own
Past deaths we have known
Shimmer in the distance
Like so much background noise

Ignore the difficulty of telling the story
To be sure we know it, here at the last
Of what is the problem , for whom shall we tell
Each lost together, brief and fleeting
This tale will only be once broadcast

I own the story as it owns me
It cannot live without me
And the service it does me is no less the same
But what use is the story except in the telling?
No matter who hears as long as it is heard

We scatter each seed of ourselves
Away, indiscriminate, thoughtless, thoughtful
I cannot tell. I can only relate
How the seeds they have fallen
Around me, about me, all over really
And thus it is, no rest for me please
I have not done enough, too much
To deserve it and leave the story
Broken and unfinished

A fully shattered narrative is, I suppose
Normal and complete because we are all cut short
Half-drawn pictures, lacking perfection
Each one a whispered shout at a wall of bleak darkness
Ripples created by the brief dips in pitch
Echo away like a bat in cave
Not dying, fading gently
Until the last ones have touched us
And then they are gone

Future lives of my own
Past deaths I have known
Shimmer in the distance
Like so much background noise

The trial of a modern cowboy

2010-04-20T15:46:00.002+01:00

He was found more dead than alive
But one was there to live and to thrive
One evening of American redness setting in the West
Where new myths are born and put to the test
Settler scree and Indian detritus litter the landscape
Ragged heroes kill for pleasure and to escape
Lawmen run rackets, beat suspects to death in custody
Marshals ride roughshod, to tell the future as it is meant to be
Soft songs drift in the night air and call forth
Non-existent gods and goddesses to prove their worth
What we see are men and women only, without glory
Tangential components of someone else’s Stygian story

Bandidos string bandoliers at the ready
Palms on gun handles to keep their nerves steady
Waiting for a train or a stage to arrive
Sweat strewn, dust caked, more dead than alive
In a black coat and tall hat, he rides abroad
That last judge in whose saddlebags souls are stored
He points a bony finger and the gaucho must follow
Whose body falls to earth for it has now become hollow
Tracked across dust and sand, we are hunted down
In a short time we will all meet Hell’s hounds

But one figure may not end his time there
His eyes see further than ours in a clear stare
Past the pettiness and cruelty to something other
To a potential in this land to do more than smother
He walks alone within groups, familiar stranger
But known to very few, the last lone ranger.

A pluralistic Robin Hood who stole the rich’s wealth
By default he gives to the poor, stolen by stealth
But run down he shall be when the landscape collapses
No silver or gold will force blind eyes or lapses
And he will dangle at the end of a hempen line
To a violent end he will come, the West’s only true sign

Sing songs now of a man more dead than alive
Whose echoes are still heard across the dusty drive
Hold memories in your head of one who rose above
The mundanity of the ordinary to be held in almost love
A dangerous man who gave no quarter for none to be had
Death-drawn, spiteful violence but secretly he was sad
Shot and badly wounded, he was disregardedly dragged back
To be hung up in a town square in the last of his tracks

Goodbye then, foul hero, God and the Devil speed your exit
Riding to oblivion on a black mare but you don’t dread it
Home is to where you ride, to claim your crown
The peace you never had in the act of falling down
Hail to thee and gra’mercy
For the stories we hear, we feel and we see

The metal of memory

2010-04-20T15:46:00.001+01:00

A symbol it is of times past, gone and forgotten
A symbol of a once mighty empire now well in decline
On an everyday thing, a pillar, hah, of the community
Its inscription is of a king now foreign, of a queen
Whose descendants became the executors of an empires demise
Bore witness to the effects of the disease of freedom
The cancer of independence, or so they see it
An icon with ordinary utility, overlain with the colour of nationalism
Overlain I say and yet not obliterated by it
As one might expect. Or maybe not as this Irish psyche
Retains that insufferable ideology of the tugged forelock
The bent knee and the bowed head
The agenda of the submissive, of the weak-willed and the whipped
No need to supplant the state for the empire
To expropriate the symbols and signs of a history long dead
A history that lies hidden beneath our hands and feet
Such imperialist icons must be shown, be exposed for what they are
Hiding beneath a carpace of hope and paint
Demonstrates manifest laziness or perhaps something more sinister?
Either way neither serves the past or its people
So then, to recast the metal of memory? No
For that would bring distortion and serve the desires of the present
And destroy the needs of the past

Knowing your enemy

2010-04-20T15:45:00.001+01:00

Growing up, side by side, neighbourly
Friendships tested and evolved in a shared sense of place
Community and care, comradeship created within
I could call them my brothers and my sisters
They might be the family that I wish I had
But instead they are my friends, my neighbours
My doctor, my dentist, my grocer, my postman
All surrounding us now, then and before
Usual, ordinary, mundane and familiar
You don’t see them for they are nothing to notice

Hellos and goodbyes, casual greetings, brief meetings
No substance or basis, it seems, for hatred
It emerges, unbidden by you but not others
It emerges from the shadows and recesses
The nooks and crannies we successfully forget about
Nothing lives there but something exists nonetheless
A virus, a disease which has power in potentia
Something to be frightened of if it ever gets out

But back to our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends
They have descended, have split, have raged into war
A man gave orders and unaccountably was obeyed
The lines have been drawn and the battle is joined
Which side you are on may depend on your name,
Your skin colour, how far the next town is
Or the shape of the symbol that dangles on your chest
None of which seemed to matter a few weeks ago
But now all has changed and there is no looking back

In the darkness I host a dinner party for the dead
The guests all attend without invite or asking
All etiquette amended by the strictures of war.
The O’Neills ran the bakery down in the village
A nice couple they are, stretched out on my floor
David Feldman, my dentist, always laughing and joking
Will never, it would seem, laugh anymore
And the Obeyu family with their three lovely daughters
Have been butchered and killed and used like whores

And I lie with them, not perpetrator but victim
Our blood runs together, indistinguishable and congealing
A vivid testament to the qualities of the hidden hatred
Which warps and twists us into new shapes entirely
And leaves nothing but bitterness, sorrow and death.
But no lesson is learned, only tragedy lamented
Each action is going to be repeated again
If not here then somewhere else, with different people
Who will know and like each other, more likely than not
And one day all will change, a strong man will emerge
And the circle of friends will be shattered once more

Reliving the death of childhood

2010-04-20T15:44:00.001+01:00

Simple things simply put
Turn complicated in an instant
Previous understanding washed away
By a tide of fresh information
The familiar becomes strange
And the world becomes less clear
Off-balance and decentred
Processes occurring never before experienced
What is going with the world?
The world I thought I understood

Each time you open your eyes
The world has changed without you noticing
All things renewed in a brief, everlasting instant
One you cannot feel, hear, see or touch
But has (and does) existed nonetheless
To experience the moment for itself
Open your eyes and dream of nothing
Physical processes ignored, outside occurrences discarded
The void waits to be stepped into
The void leaves no impression
But it can mark you forever
You are left floating
If there is a ‘you’ to float
Perhaps you can hear the half whispered presences
Ghostly shapes, more felt than seen
But these are not people or the souls of dead humans
They are the half-finished shapes of your unfulfilled dreams

Liberate me

2010-04-20T15:43:00.002+01:00

Liberate me from the dross of commercial excess
From buying things I can’t afford and don’t need
Liberate me from the vacant stare of the cathode ray addict
From the poisoning of my imagination by mindless drivel

Liberate me from the desires I can’t fulfil
From the crippling prison of my inadequacies and frustrations
Liberate me from dreaming beyond my means
From the highs of the dream to the crushing depths of reality

Liberate me from the rhythms I can hear but not feel
From being an eager onlooker and not an active participant
Liberate me from the effortless ease of others
From watching smoothness win success in all social spheres

Liberate me from the gnawing pangs of self-doubt
From their corrosive effect on all my social exchanges
Liberate me from the tyranny of self-consciousness
From living my life in the heads of others

Liberate me, in short, from myself
From the harm that I do to myself and thence to others
Liberate me so that I can live
From the start of the day to the end of the night
Liberate me

Seeing the pattern

2010-04-20T15:43:00.001+01:00

We each send signals to the observer
To those who watch the actions and interactions
Of the teeming multitudes, the people of this earth
Bowed heads, furrowed brows, physical proximity
Lowered voices, thin drawn lips and scowls of fearsome intensity
All tell you something about the people you see
That is, of course, not to say that you know them
You don’t in any simple sense at all
And for the most part to them you a merely a face in the crowd

But bear with your observations for a brief moment
Will these interpreted signals tell you something of importance?
With no friends around do they care what you see?
As they will never see you again
And even if they do, will that mean something to them?
But the act of observation both changes the observed
And the observer, sometimes without either noticing
We are what we see of ourselves and of others

Cry havoc for My Lai

2010-04-20T15:41:00.001+01:00

In blood and death they came
And for blood and death they stayed
Dead eyes, fierce faces full of hunger
Troop past without seeing our lives
One side or the other, they don’t care which is ours

From the sky, through the trees, this hail came
It rained down without cease.
Violent noises, intermittent, speak of war
Clouds of smoke rise and pay homage

The homes were shattered by barrages
Of high explosives. Friends and family lie
Side by side, their blood running together
Mingling in rivulets, flowing in unison, in tribute

The cries of the dying and the screams of those less lucky
Ring through the grey air. Piteous wails from children
Who are now orphans, soon to be corpses
The laughter, sniggering, high and low giggles
Of those who control our fate. Why us?

Why anyone? But they are here now
And no pleading, no begging, no sobs of terror
Will make them go away. In fact it infuriates them
The whining of a people too scared to do anything
Except whine.

Green berets, Red berets, Tricolores or shoulder flashes
What do we care of the niceties of symbol or uniform?
We are the dying and the dead who are never left alone
Who can scream and beg and plead but it does no good

Kneeling in filth and mud, head bowed, spirit spent
Harsh questions screamed in languages I don’t understand
A gun jammed to my temple by a man
With a hatred of me in his eyes so clear, so true

Whose side am I on? Yours. Hers. His. Theirs.
Anyone’s. Very definitely not my own
But then who is? Not you. So kill me stranger
Shoot me in the head and move on.

A village left behind. Burned houses, slaughtered animals
Crops razed, villagers who tried to run scattered on the road
No one escaped, most did not even try
They are all gone but still here.

The View from The Hill

2010-04-20T15:40:00.003+01:00

The view from the hill is panoramic and awesome
It inspires and takes breath in equal measure
Standing alone, it does not feel lonely
Everything is before you, laid out at your feet
But you are just a speck, a mite for the asking
No foreshadowing giant are you, here or there
And the hill still looks down, brooding and basking
In light or in dark it will stand and will stare

Even as you think these thoughts and dwell on them further
You still stand on the brow and wonder why and where
You belong now in your new vista and order
Of the world and all of its separate beings
Gaze down on the works of the mighty and the meek
Fleeting or lasting, they all end the same
Crumbled, ignored, forgotten or blasted
The view from the hill is a view filled with pain

pleasant on a public green

2010-04-20T15:40:00.002+01:00

Hot shine shimmer in the air, squinting straight sunlight
Demasked people smiling loud and happy in the bright
Kissing couples exchange close contact and secret smiles
The lazy evening does stretch on, for miles beyond miles
Brown, burnished bricks laugh at the great collections of concrete
Layers and layers of people make them more attractive and complete
Sunglasses sifting the golden rays, perched atop grin and wink
I lie in green pastures amid urban chaos but then blink
To cover my eyes and then close them to record what I saw
Before darkened skies and grey clouds force the sun to withdraw
Swaying, swirling trees and shrubs provide the perfect soundtrack
That extra little something which before we knew we lacked
And now I stretch my limbs like a cat, careless
And let go my senses and dissipate my awareness
Pleasantly warm and mildly happy, I own the world, this thing
Pleasantly warm and mildly happy, I walk with my fellow kings

Citadel

2010-04-20T15:38:00.000+01:00

The enemy is at the gates, as always
The citadel is surrounded on all sides
Breaches in the defences occur periodically
And each time the citadel grows smaller
Grows weaker.

This is a war fought on many fronts
Too many for me to be able to count
The defences are ingenious, of great variety
But the enemy is too numerous and implacable

One day the enemy will assail on all fronts
The breaches of the Citadel walls too many
The defenders will be too few, too far few
The enemy will run through the Citadel
Like the wildfire of pain which will soon end
And, on that day, the Citadel will fall
And the enemy will have won this unwinnable war.

I never want to see that day.

Orange prize 2010 shortlist

2010-04-20T14:44:00.004+01:00

http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/show/feature/home/orange-2010-opf-shortlist

The grave

2010-04-20T14:34:00.000+01:00

Aisling fiddled with the contents of the car boot. After several moments she extracted a garden shears from the mass of canvas bags, plastic containers and the other detritus. She held the shears by their black foam handle and walked over to the headstone. High winds had plucked the flowers from their vases and scattered them despite the lumps of granite that Aisling had wedged into place . She bent over and quickly plucked the dead stems and petals from the ground, counting each one silently though she didn’t know why. As she pruned the flowers that were left into a semblance of acceptable order Eddie stood before the grave with his hands behind his back.

- The flowers look nice, he offered, especially the lilies.

He knew all told that the flowers meant very little. It was the look of the thing that mattered, that was to be kept tidy and neat but not for social propriety or through fussiness. It was done because it was the one tangible part of Cora’s memory that could be attended, that they both could participate in without dwelling on what happened. Rather this grooming of the grave was the ritual of memory that let them both, temporarily, to forget however briefly.

When she finished with the shears Aisling stepped back from the headstone. Her shoulders slumped and she leaned against Eddie. He draped an arm around her thin shoulders . Sadness flowed though them both like a blood that circulated only occasionally. Eddie felt Aisling’s chest begin to heave and wrack. This triggered off the same thing within him. Why did he have to have Aisling’s feelings to initiate his own emotions? Where was the spontaneity within him to reach out for little Cora and hold her memory tight? The male part of him mocked and felt, hid and fought imaginary demons that assailed him when he slept. Rage and frustration ran hand and hand in his nightmares as they had in his life before now and would continue to do so.

Aisling comforted herself. She didn’t even really feel anything physically when she visited Cora’s grave. Her pain was within her, a part of her being so intense that at times like this it filled her whole world and was the only horizon she could see. She twisted into Eddie and cried softly. She felt his tight grip but it was like he was holding another person. The loss that had occurred gave rise to intensely real feelings of micro-distance in which Aisling saw herself behaving and talking and acting but did not feel or think it. She was an actor on a screen coming out with her lines in rote order with just the right amount of passion and verve, all things just so meeting all the expectations she felt from previous experiences of death and so deftly looked for in the reactions of others, particularly her family.
They looked at the thin screen of grass the shoots of which were only now beginning to assert themselves over the mud they grew upon and both felt so very alone. They held each other in numbness.

- Perhaps, Aisling said, we should have the headstone inscribed. It has been six months. We should really have something on it by now.
Eddie shifted his weight.

- I think you’re right. But what should we put?

Aisling stared at the headstone and said nothing. She hadn’t even wanted Aisling’s agreement on the inscription. She wanted to say it out loud, to get it out of her, to put words around the horrible idea of writing her daughter’s epitaph. She knew she couldn’t explain it to Aisling anymore. To attempt to would upset the fragile peace that existed between them now. She knew, as she turned to him, that she was the strong one now. He looked into her face and saw her eyes change. But what change was taking place he could not tell.

Days dreaming

2010-04-20T14:29:00.005+01:00

The asphalt radiated heat, the warmth of the day being stored in the ground beneath her feet for use later on. The earth always knew what to expect of any day at all. It kept a balance between the darkness and the light which crept around the margins of all time. Emma stood at the parapet of the bridge and looked up at the clouds. The sign fixed to the granite above her head caught her eye. It read

‘From this bridge on February 23rd 1798 United Irishmen James Donnelly and Daniel Clarke were hanged for their part in the insurrection of that year.’
- I wonder who they were? She asked out loud.

No one answered. The waters of the Liffey sluggishly eased by without salute or acknowledgement of her question. She read and re-read the simple stone plaque. The words shifted under her gaze and began to melt like one of Dali’s painted clocks. She closed her eyes and a strange hushing sound was on the cusp of her hearing.

- I wonder, she said, I wonder if they thought it worth it, in the end...
The words were swept out of her mouth by the din that surrounded her. She could hear the clash of metal on stone and the roar of a crowd baying for blood, any blood at all, their mood as fickle and changeable as the weather. The smell of stale sweat and human and animal effluvia. The sharp tang of something else in the air which Emma could only work out when she saw the look of terror on the eyes of two men at the centre of the crowd that was suddenly in front of her. Leering shouts, almost sexual in their demand for climax, drowned out any words they might have uttered. But the men looked too frightened to speak. Both had clearly been beaten, one of them bent over and vomited onto his shoes, an oily rush streaked with blood and fragments of his teeth. He was pulled to his feet and roughly hustled over to the parapet. A rough noose was placed over his head. He shook and gibbered, falling to his knees and appearing to pray.

- None of that papist shit! A soldier in a scarlet coat snarled, stand on your feet if you want ti pray, he said as he struck the condemned man heavily with the butt of his rifle.

The prisoner staggered to his feet.

- Do you have any last words? The soldier asked, pulling the noose tight and checking the stay at the bottom of the bridge.

The prisoner looked around at the crowd. They started back at him. There was a stillness now. He looked one last time at the sky and then said

- For the sake of my country I wish we had won. She deserves better than those who rule her now.

He looked directly at Emma. She ran forward, screaming at the soldiers behind him. They pulled him over the parapet and as she reached her destination they let go. The act seemed to repeat itself. His body jerked and pulled at the road. The wet snap let the crowd know the rebel’s neck had been broken and in place of the normal cheer the crowd let out a collective sigh. Emma looked around. No one had tried to stop her. All the faces in the crowd blurred. She felt dizzy. She felt numb. She knew how James Donnelly and Daniel Clarke felt in their last few minutes. She could taste their fear in her mouth and feel her lungs pull in their final breaths. No more...no more...no more it called, the voice of time. They were no more. And in an instant of blinding light that bathed her soul neither was she.

The Bocage

2010-04-20T14:29:00.004+01:00

The artillery bombardment had stopped. Now the tank crews and the infantry waited for the bombers to being their runs on the enemy positions. At the sound of approaching aero engines they all ducked for cover, the infantry into foxholes the crews into their tanks. All too often the Allied pilots mistook their own positions for enemy ones and bombed their own troops. Forward positions were always in the most danger from their own side and from the Germans. Michael crouched down in his hurriedly dug foxhole, waiting for the earth to be churned by the high explosives that fell from above. He grimaced at the thought of the next few moments. Sitting still and waiting. The best way to survive was counter-intuitive or as he put it to his mate Arthur ‘Grubby’ Briggs earlier ‘it goes against all common fucking sense’. But he, and Grubby, did it because that’s what the infantry did. Those who didn’t wait didn’t survive for very long.

Grubby was from Liverpool. He had worked on the docks as a stevedore not that there had been much work in the years leading up to the war. He frequently joked that the war has saved him from doing something nasty to a stranger in a bar fight which he would trawl the pubs around the docks looking for to stave off the boredom, to work off the aggression, to put something like excitement into his life. Or what he understood as excitement. Now he got to do nasty things to strangers all the time and he got paid for it too. He loved the war, Grubby did. It made him fresh each and every time they engaged with the enemy. He loved the sourness of the sweat on the uniforms, the blood of all others filling the fields in front of him, every battle ever fought stretching out in Grubby’s mind was being fought and rep-fought each day of Grubby’s life. There was that side of him of course. Michael hadn’t liked him at first. He was too eager for killing, so eager Michael has marked him down as not being right in the head. But Grubby wasn’t deranged or psychotic. He knew exactly what his job was and he did it perfectly each time. It wasn’t even that he enjoyed killing, it was that he enjoyed fighting. Killing was just the necessary end result of the process he was born for.

After the initial landings at Sword beach, their unit has pressed on into the Arvanches along with the other. They had come across a Waffen-SS patrol unit which had just finished executing an entire family because their neighbour had informed the local SS commander that they had assisted an injured US paratrooper. The SS unit’s commander, a Leutenant Hans Dietrich, had ordered that the whole family be hung from a tree in their front garden, including the youngest, a five year old girl. The patrol had been preparing to leave when they had caught them. Grubby and Michael had volunteered to escort them back to the holding areas in the rear. As soon as their captain had been out of earshot Grubby had casually flipped the safety off his M1 and shot all twelve of them. Not all had been killed by his first bursts so Grubby walked over to Leutentant Dietrich and pulled his service Luger from its holster. As Dietrich had tried to turn himself over Grubby had shot him twice in the face. He went to each living SS man and shot them one by one. Michael had not moved once during the entire episode. As Grubby killed the last German Michael had let out a breath. He and Grubby stared at one another. For several moments neither spoke. Michael thought of speaking up, of reporting Grubby. He knew what he had done was both against regulations and morally wrong. He thought of the family dangling in the morning breeze from the old oak tree in their front garden, their bloated purple faces turned towards the skies, their legs and feet stained with urine and faeces. He thought of all this and simply nodded at Grubby. Grubby inclined his head. They pulled the bodies into a ditch and left them there. He and Michael had become Shakespeare’s blood brothers and there was no one else in the entire army that Michael would rather at his side going into battle. Michael occasionally wondered what Grubby would do when the war was over. He couldn’t see him settling down to life on Civvy street....

CRUMP...blank noise...swirls of bursting purples and reds...the world whipping from left to right and back again in vicious time...one eye...only one eye...claw claw crawl...don’t move!!...each finger...hurt...looking down...where were the two in the middle? What two? Where?...taste of...sharp...sharp taste in the mouth...stinging....blood and earth....crawl up up up up...where? crawl where? Hurt...blood...bone...nevermore...is this hell?

The last bomb had fallen less than twenty feet from their position. The Typhoon pilot that had dropped it mistook their identification flares. It was a mistake. One of many in this war, like, perhaps, the war itself. The bomb had landed on an old abandoned plough the metal from which had been turned into pieces of shrapnel. Many of the unit had been injured with several dead. One of the dead was Grubby Briggs. A piece of the plough had decapitated him. His corpse had lain in his foxhole for hours after the blast because the opposing German panzer units had used the obvious confusion to launch a counterattack to recover the positions they had lost the previous day. In the fierce fighting the casualties from the bombing had been ignored. Michael had been another casualty. He had suffered a fractured skull and a severe concussion which gave him amnesia for several months afterwards. In the battle hospital afterwards he had had to be sedated when the neither the orderlies nor the doctors could tell him who he was or where he came from beyond what was on his dog tags.

What must be foretold

2010-04-20T14:25:00.000+01:00

The balance of life was struck in moments like these, he thought. My life in any case. No one else knows how to approach them, they require a level of detail and an instant decision and prompt two emotions primarily....relief and regret. Depending on the outcome. Max saw this. He felt it. He knew he knew it, yet it didn’t seem...correct was the word. The world was just so much more complex, more daunting than this philosophy allowed. The range of options, the annihilation of one’s consciousness in the face of true freedom simply froze him. Max was paralysed by the big bad world. All was frightening but and still and still...the richness, the marvellous complexity of it made him wonder and provoked one more, nihil ultimo, emotion...hope. Hope that he clung to. Hope that he cherished that sat, a helpful toad on a great big stone in the back of his mind. Max was disbelieving. The woman of his world. She just didn’t credit him. She said cowardice played a huge role in his behaviour, that hiding behind excuses demonstrated his lack of character, the absence of that simple strength. She did not, however, condemn him for it. Everyone has a weakness, she often said, some are more obvious than others but they’re all there, somewhere. What drove her he couldn’t say and he was wary of even speculating. Max was not afraid of her or her coldly logical taunts. He found her voice, mechanical as it was, soothing paying no heed to content hearing on the pressure of vowels, diphthongs and consonants sliding over one another, roiling between her lips and tongue, oiled snakes across a shifting slippery floor.

She had brought him home. At mid morning, when there were very few of the neighbours around to witness it. She had pulled him out of the car mewling and gagging, crying out at the injustice of it all the maudlin drunk in the middle of suburbia, her embarrassment, his fate. They had struggled together, staggering over the threshold knocking over a plant pot her mother had given them one Christmas. The broken shards of pottery lay there in big sharp sheaves. He fell, of course, landing on one of them. His skin was like parchment, scraped dry and brittle by years of malnutrition. Max watched the blood drip from his arm. He gingerly licked a droplet off his wrist and made a face. When she looked down she didn’t seem angry. She didn’t even seem ashamed. All Max could see on her face was bone tiredness, an exhaustion of her soul. She was too tired to even stop caring. All she knew was the path she had always walked and was too stuck in a fog of fatigue to even know how to go about finding a new one. So she helped him up and dressed the wound on his arm. She even put him to bed and made sure he had something to drink, leaving a glass of water on the bedside table. Max would always remember the look on her face as she stood over him that morning. She was absent-mindedly stroking his hair but the expression did not match the action. She looked like she was trying to figure out who he was, like a stray dog that has wandered into the garden, she stroked his hair and simply looked...puzzled. He tried to say something to her but it was as if someone glued his mouth together, he couldn’t speak

As he was woken up by Donal Burke, their GP, he remembered that look on her face most of all. They told him they found her in Merrion Square. She used to like visiting the gardens and would sit there on her lunch breaks from her job in the insurance company on Leeson Street. She had sat down on a bench in one of the alcoves in the northwest corner of the Square and had never gotten up again. Max knew what he had to do. All time is time now passed. He wished for many things but he had never gotten any of the things he had asked for. He had always asked for himself, never for others even though he knew he should have. It would not have made any difference in the end but those favours begged, those wheedling requests and outright demands meant he had a keen sense of his own entitlement, an entitlement that was never satisfied.

When he thought of her sitting on a cold wet bench in that Georgian park where lovers and dopers and homeless and office workers and students and artists and workmen had all sat before her and how she used a place that she liked to look last upon something, at least, that she found lovely, he knew what that look on her face was. He knew why it was there. It wasn’t sorrow or resentment that created her confusion. Max knew it. It was wonder at the simple and monumental shift that her being had made in deciding that enough was finally enough. Max wept. He cried bitter tears of recrimination at himself, at life, at her leaving him like this. He knew though, that the only point at which they had understood one another was in death and after the fact. That was why he hanged himself from the fifth banister of the stairs using an old tow rope he found in the garage. Nevermore, once more, Max saw what must be foretold in the face of someone he loved but could never leave.

One beginning

2010-04-20T14:20:00.002+01:00

The parish church of St. Sepulchre Without looked even older than its three hundred years as the scaffolding went up around the exterior walls . The blocks of granite which had gone into its original construction were now covered with an iridescent green mould, harmless in itself but in these circumstances looking like a skin cancer to which the old building had finally succumbed. The windows of the church had long been boarded up and the lock on the front gate was so rusted the foreman of the demolition crew had been obliged to cut if off. St. Sepulchre Without was an ancient parish, part of the medieval city. Despite this the destruction of the parish church had provoked few objections even among the ever vigilant and vocal preservation societies which jealously guarded the physical memory of Dublin’s past. Perhaps the lack of any noteworthy architectural features in the design of St. Sepulchre Without meant that its disappearance was regarded as not being of any great significance? It seemed that no one knew nor cared to know.

Whatever the reason the demolition of what had been up until relatively recently a protected structure had gone very smoothly to this point. Legal permits had been granted, the planning process had been observed to the letter, the construction company had even gone so far as to include the local community figures in the process of deciding on the best use of the land post development, a cursory yet very useful tool in marketing the development as being ‘integrated’ within the fabric of the local community. Cynical perhaps but certainly effective. And now the diggers and JCB’s and hard men with calluses on their fingers and nailbars in their palms stood in the old graveyard. The men made jokes and blew on their hands in the icy morning wind, waiting for the order to begin. The foreman, whose name was James Carey, glanced at the slightly cracked face of his father’s watch and nodded. He began to shout orders to the crew and they responded, practised in their motions. One of the men swung himself up into the cab of small crane. From the end of the crane’s arm a large rusted wrecking ball hung limply, suspended by a series of chains. As the crane’s engine was started blackened fumes belched from its exhaust, the first of the morning, and settled over the unkempt rose bushes behind it like a gaunt mist. The crane began to swing to and fro and the ball moved in concert.
Carey looked on, gauging the distance and the height of the swing. He saw the rusted ball, pregnant with age and destruction, lurch towards the west wall of the old church and in a split flash heard a voice scream in agonised despair. He twitched and spun, clapping his hands to his ears and screamed in response. The muscles of his abdomen and chest spasmed violently, pulling at his breath giving him no time to let common sense come to bear. He heard he heard he heard...nothing. A clutch of workmen regarded him with baleful curiosity as he writhed and pawed at the ground, a bull gone insane in his death throes. When he let his hands fall to his sides they called over to ask him what the matter was. But he could not tell them. He opened his mouth to explain but nothing came out. He knelt on the damp ground in front of the church gates and tried to say his piece. He sucked hard for air, for the air to breathe let alone speak and once more the workmen asked what the matter was. He did not respond, merely shook his head and rose to his feet. His skin was the colour and consistency of putty by the end and his knees shook. He motioned to the gangers to get on with it, contriving to suggest that they were in some way remiss by paying him any attention at all. He did not explain what had happened. How could he, he didn’t understand it himself. How could he tell the hard, unblinking men that worked these crews that in the instant before the wrecking ball fell he heard the church scream in mortal pain?

As bricks fell in uneven numbers and the screaming grew louder and louder Carey began to walk around the site in little jerks and shuffles, his face a rictus mask of horror and joviality. Each time a piece of the church was torn or pulled out his body danced a little dance of darkness and hell until in one bursting rush he raced to the cab of the wrecker and hauled the operator out by main strength. He pulled at the ignition keys, scrabbling and shut the machine off. The workmen looked up, by now more irritated than curious. Carey clambered on top of the wrecker’s engine block and called to them. Each of them looked at one another and eventually they trod warily over to listen to what he had to say. Carey twirled his fingers in the air, pulling that which was not there, the crowd’s gasping adoration, out of the very air and he seemed to draw sustenance from this, the quivering and shaking of the past few moments gone, power flowing into his every muscle and sinew. He spoke of time and the past, of how spaces within settlements became sacred, of what remained of them after they were used, of how people viewed the creation of the city as a process akin to human biological development, he spoke of the city as a body deploying metaphor in his quest to get his audience to understand, he wanted them to feel like he felt, to know the bones of this place they called him, to know it in their head and in their hearts.....

He continued on in this vein for several moments. The work gang waited for him to get to the punchline but as time passed it became clear that this was not some complicated practical joke and that he wasn’t drunk and when Carey picked up a crowbar and began smashing at the controls of the wrecker’s cab, roaring about the damage it had done, it became abundantly clear that he had gone insane. Carey struggled with the hands holding him back, spitting and biting, kicking out furiously, all the while demanding that they heed his words. Eventually the Guards arrived along with an ambulance. Carey’s wife, a tall gaunt woman dressed jarringly in bold colours, was called. She didn’t know what to do with him any more than the gangers had but in the end he was forcibly sedated and was put in the back of the ambulance. All the way there he kept saying to the paramedics, that “I heard it, I heard it but I couldn’t answer the questions” although no one could work out what, if anything, he meant by it.

The lighted room

2010-03-07T12:54:00.001Z

Childhood ending

2010-03-07T12:53:00.002Z

Opium

2010-03-07T12:51:00.001Z

Smoke rising over hills of verdant beauty
Steam creeping tendrils through dense undergrowth
Hard-eyed men, muskets at the ready
Watch the transport of future oblivion move off

Sweating workers pile the cargo in high stacks
Paid next to nothing or working for free
The lowest elements in a chain of producers
Will use the product to will away their woes

In valleys near by and as far as the eye can see
A sea of bright red sways in the gentle breeze
An untapped fortune through unseen misery
But resources like this do not stand idle for long

Bright-red, the coats of the soldiers of the king
Bright-red, the colour of the pretty flower
Bright-red, the blood of those who died to control it
Bright-red, the poppy flower, mother of opium.

Breaking the mould

2010-03-07T12:50:00.001Z

Consume each archetype to which you give your name
Breathe in its characteristics, absorb its ideals
Use them each day, for understanding, for communication
A touchstone of common reference, a place of meeting
Of our ideas and hopes, our dreams and aspirations
Never realised but all reached for.
Each carpace of hope interlocks with another
Mostly briefly, nonsensically, incomprehensibly
And sometimes it is more, confusing to a depth
Beyond understanding where the people have drowned,
Suffered a death and gone on moving as before.
The models move in choreographed, careful motions
On the chessboard of our society,
Where being seen is the purpose of the game
The visual is king, ruler of all
Each model slotted into a pigeonhole of their own asking
Which do they recognise first? Their own or the others
The answer is obvious when you consider whom they reject

Old empires for new

2010-03-07T12:49:00.001Z

The once grand empire is now in retreat
An onslaught of attacks, critiques, criticisms and calumnies
Have left it punch-drunk and weary, dying on its feet
The institutions that flourished under its broad aegis
Have the smell of musty decay and neglect upon them
Their halls and corridors are filled with the slow steps of old men
No infusions of fresh blood for this dying beast
From prince to pauper, the word has trickled down
Don’t look now but they’re on their way out

All things come to pass as each circle does its turning
The fabric of St. Peter is slowly unravelling
Materialism has triumphed over institutional piety
Charisms and ministries disregarded as hocus pocus
The opiate no longer holds the power it once did.
But its strength has not been wholly attenuated
Millions still serve in devotion to its name
Have their leaders betrayed them, their beliefs and their cause
Aligning themselves with each other to ameliorate the blame?
Or have the people played a role, a part and a hand
In this elaborate charade that knows no shame?

What next for this universal ecclesiastical octopus?
A hasty retreat into a pre-prepared shell?
Or an admission of guilt as an unpleasant penitence
As they should believe, awaits them in hell.
But it is not for us to judge these men, for men they are
To announce wrong-doing or pronounce their guilt
Soldiers of Christ or abusers of the innocent
They belong to a church they claim God built
He is judge, jury and the proverbial executioner
In a jurisdiction higher than any government could claim
And so these men and their deeds go unpunished
As absolution is granted without knowing their names.

In conjunction with these events, this would seem to be the end
For an empire on which the sun could never set
Will anything at all attempt to replace it
To expropriate the views and beliefs of those beleaguered millions
To turn this useless fervour into useful industry?
No more mindless Machiavellian belief in yourselves
But a thoughtful and critical belief in ourselves.
Perhaps an attempt should be made to topple
This already swaying edifice to the ground
So that the bricks and mortar of its shaky foundations
Could be used for the factories and workshops instead
Industry, Industry, long live Industry

Talking with the dead

2010-03-07T12:45:00.002Z

The Idea

2010-03-07T12:43:00.001Z

I stand near you, in all places you can think of
I am closer to you than hate, more invidious than love
Not to be seen by peoples of this time and of this place
In the mists of the damned I walk silently without trace
Wild and unstable, arcing through the air, from mind to mind
Underneath idle thoughts I hide carefully but not to be kind
Unknown to most, hidden knowledge of the arcane
I can fuel fears and ecstasy and drive you insane
I get bridges built, inventions invented, songs sung
Justify invasions, laws written and many, many massacres done
To me then, creator of false hopes and improbable dreams
Because no matter how well you know me, all is not what it seems

Never love

2010-03-07T12:42:00.001Z

Amazing really how a single smell can send you
Back in time to a section of your life you had forgotten
Not that it was sublimated for reasons of pain
Simply that it had devolved itself from your circle of thought
But it comes back, crashing into your consciousness
Time reversed like the spools of your life on rewind
And now her face is almost in front of you
Your fingers practically resting on her soft, soft skin
On the cusp of your hearing her laughter almost clear
How long is it now since you last thought of her?

The train rattles on, not that you notice
Transfixed by these thoughts and images from your past
Brief as it was, knowing her was worthwhile
More than worthwhile, at the time it was wonderful
Full of promise and fun, good times not bad
She was someone you wanted to talk to and talk you did
Hours and hours of conversation about everything and nothing
The subject didn’t matter, the conversation did
No desire to end them, in fact desire not to
Smiling, laughing, grins and giggles
Underpinned my love

But I read too much into what was not actually there
I performed what the psychiatrists call a projection
Too much, perhaps too soon I gave and I felt
Or maybe there would never be a time for my feelings
What I thought I knew was not there to know
So finally the subject overtook the conversation
In the ranking of importance of our social affairs
What was said, it changed things, unlike before
Even small things took on increased significance
As what we had before I carefully destroyed.
So now the thing is done and some time has passed since
Enough for reflection on the errors I made
Grief has gone, regret passed and all that’s left is the question
What were they if those weren’t my halcyon days?

Banville's NYRB piece on Ian McEwan's novel Saturday

2010-03-06T20:44:00.007Z

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html

Toy soldiers

2010-03-06T14:09:00.003Z

Water ran through the bars of the drain, piling twigs and bunches of leaves at its edge. The water was a brackish muddy brown, its sediment load added to by the cloacae of the cityscape. The boy carefully shaped a tiny paper boat as he sat on the edge of the gutter. His stubby, cracked fingers painstakingly felt the bright white paper. Scrutinising the flow of the water he placed the boat down on it. The speed with which it was whisked away took the boy by surprise. Scrambling to his feet he clumsily ran after it, never taking his eyes off the little white boat.
The boat’s progress was majestic in miniature. It bobbed and weaved through the current. Its crude mast ducked from left to right, nodding in time with the beat of the water. The boy raced after it, occasionally overtaking but always keeping his eyes firmly on its progress. With a sudden jerk the boat fell into the gully of the drain. The boy stopped and stood over the drain cover, peering into the depths of the man-made hole. His boat had disappeared. The grating on the drain was old and heavy, built to last decades, its iron thick with rust and strength. As he reached down to pull it up the boy breathed as deeply as he could, as he had seen athletes do on the telly. Taking one final breath he braced his back and curled his fingers around the bars of the grating, feeling their damp cold hardness.
When his mother saw the state of is clothes, she was furious. His hands were another matter entirely. Her shrieking didn’t seem to stop as it became apparent that one of his hands was broken and that he had fractured several bones in his forearms. The doctors clucked over his injuries, initially suspecting some malevolent domestic turbulence. But their questioning left them in little doubt that this was a self-imposed mischief. What could not be found out was why. They begged and pleaded and shouted and persisted and merely asked but he said nothing. His parents were enraged, more out of fear and incomprehension than anything else. They roared at him, issuing as many threats and ultimatums as they could think of and hinted at dark punishments which they would never carry out although the boy did not know that. He said nothing though and just shook his head.
So the doctors treated him, putting casts on arms and splints on his fingers as he sat there, an immature Stoic. The pain meant little to him. His parents drove him home from the hospital in hot, angry silence. They did not understand and it hurt them. So they took it out on him.
And in his coat pocket, crumpled and stained, the boy could feel the victorious warmth emanating from the paper boat.

The famous dead

2010-03-05T16:00:00.003Z

The river glistened as it sometimes should in the sun. Little wavelets broke on its surface as the evening settled over the city. The water slopped against the mossy green walls which bounded its course and made the painters holding the small craft to their rusted iron rings creak and groan. Felix walked down the newly built boardwalk which ran parallel to Bachelor’s Walk. The planks of the boardwalk were already starting to weather even though they were only a year or two old. Café’s which had sprung up along the thoroughfares of Dublin like mushrooms after the rain offered coffee and tea and bad pastries at exorbitant prices. Felix stopped at the hatch of one of them and bought a cup of tea. He sipped it as he crossed O’Connell Bridge and watched the new glass houses, shining and bright in the last of the day’s sun gleam, touchstones of a new and brave future. Felix leaned on the parapet of the bridge and looked back at Bachelor’s Walk. It all seemed so…obvious to anyone living here now, this explosion of prosperity and colour. But there were other tales the stones of the street could tell. “Remember Bachelor’s Walk!” a catch-cry from another time, another world, uttered to commemorate three people shot dead by the then civic authorities. Or by those acting on behalf of the civic authorities. At times of insurrection and war it is so difficult to tell the difference even with the uniforms and the guns. “Remember Bachelor’s Walk”. Felix remembered even though he never had an opportunity to forget. Being English this was not really, as he saw it, a part of his history. Part of British Imperial and colonial history to be sure but not really part of his history. Agincourt, Henry VIII, the World Wars, the Suffragettes, the Beatles. These were the avatars of his history not the plangent slogans of some distant Irish memory. And yet, and yet…he remembered it still as though he was there on the day the soldiers opened fire on the crowd. He could see the blood and the terror, the sweat and the horror. Remember, remember…

Felix looked down. A voice came from within a dirty shawl, the face peering up at him older than its years.
Pleeze? It said hopefully.
Felix reached into his pocket and tipped the contents into her hands. She looked up at him and said her thanks. Her attention turned to the person behind him, their dealings done. Felix walked on slowly and when he reached the edge of the path he looked back. She was counting the money he had given her, her only collection of the evening. He had no idea how much he had given, all the money he had for all he had noticed. There was something wrong and he couldn’t tell what it was. In the midst of new wealth old poverty crept through, a reminder of times past.

Walking down Benburb street dodging dog shit and kicking crumpled cigarette packets Felix saw the streetwalkers stare. They eyed him up as a fairly weightless prospect, shabby and poorly dressed. But even crumpled notes are better than none.
Looking for any business love? One called at him.
Felix blindly shook his head, embarrassed beyond reason. He walked on, head bowed, until he saw one prostitute leaning against the pitted brickwork, flesh against stone, the city. Heaven. She looked about sixteen years old, could have been more, maybe less. Her gaze invited him but her expression didn’t change. He was struck dumb. Wordlessly she took his hand her fingers grasping his wrist. She led him to a small flat complex, a palace of graffiti and needles.
50 quid for a fuck, that’s the going rate.
Felix blanched. Felix fumbled. He had never done this before. He trembled all over, fear and lust feeling soooo good. He reached out for her jejune body but she moved sharply aside.
Money up front, she said as she held out a cash-register hand.
Can I be..be…beaten? I want to be beaten!
Felix blurted out a fantasy that wasn’t his. Where were the words coming from? Without changing her expression the girl said
That’s extra, I…
I’ll pay whatever it takes.

An hour of succulent flesh, breasts and buttocks bouncing and bumping. Dirty talking, oh fuck me Daddy, creative acts with a greased glass bottle, her hair around his face. Spread-eagled, enraged sex by consent. Pay for pleasure, pay for pain. Shivering skin from the lack of windows to block out the cold. Screaming ecstasy as nearby junkies looked on in stupefied contempt. The girl left him there, panting and sodden. As she left she spat in his face. The old pro. He whispered thank you and came for the last time.

Felix woke from his dream with a jolt. He looked down at the sheets, spots of blood looked back, two eyes from his nightmare. He should have had a wet dream, as sordid a shag as he could imagine. He looked around but of course there was no one there. Breathing slowly, his body cooled, breath even, colour pale. He had never dreamed or even fantasized about anything like this before or if he had he didn’t remember it.

Tuesday

2010-03-05T15:55:00.007Z

Tuesday is the day they come. Always. Rain, wind, snow, traffic, power failures. None of those things stopped them. They never failed. They always delivered. Sarah sat by the side of the road, dangling her feet over the edge of the wall as she waited for the truck to arrive. As she kicked her heels against the wall the old pebble-dashing came away and fell onto the tarmac. The flakes of paint scored the leather of her shoes. Her mother would be angry with her when she saw them. But that was later, further on in the day. Sarah knew one secret no one else did. She never told anyone about it, not even her Mum. If people were too silly to work it out then Sarah wasn’t going to tell them. Sarah knew this one secret: the future never really happened. Only the past occurred, over and over again. But the future was the only thing that people said was important, Sarah thought. No one cared about the past except for those old men who marched in those old bands every November and wore silly uniforms and sang songs that made them cry and puff out their chests like doddering cockatoos. They didn’t matter, they nearly were the past. They were the past, now. Not the future, not like the truck and the men who drove it and delivered the news every Tuesday. Sarah saw them in her mind, pictured the yellow stains on the driver’s hands. He always showed up smoking thin little cigarettes that made him cough wetly. Just like her uncle Danny.

He wasn’t really her uncle, more like an old friend of the family. He visited the house frequently, sometimes he brought little presents and sometimes he arrived empty-handed. When Sarah thought about her uncle Danny, something strange happened to her. Her tummy went all soft and her skin tingled. She remembered how her mother made Danny go outside to smoke every time he came over to visit. He smoked so much that he spent most of the time standing on the little patio outside the kitchen but he didn’t seem to mind. He made fun of her Mum through the window, complaining loudly about the rain and her treatment of guests but when he came back in he would give her a hug and a kiss. But Mum must not have liked him because she would push him away every time and scold him for smoking in the first place. She must have scolded him too much because after a while he stopped visiting. She couldn’t’ remember how long ago that was. It was difficult to tell in years and months, all she knew was that he stayed away.

Once the whole family had to go and visit him, when he was in hospital. She had never been to hospital before and she found it very difficult to pay attention to her uncle with all the doctors and nurses and other patients around. They returned to the hospital several times after that and each time they went Danny had gotten older. His skin looked like waxy paper and he smelled funny, like the old man that sat outside Dargans shop and asked passers by for spare change. Sarah thought it was odd because she thought everyone in a hospital was supposed to smell clean.

The last time they visited Father Paul from the parish was there too. He stood at the rail by the bed and prayed over Uncle Danny but that was normal. Father Paul was always praying to God, that was his job. She had never seen him this close before, though. Every other time she had seen him he was on the altar in the church looking down at the people and making sure they prayed right and believed and behaved. As Sarah looked on her mother took a handkerchief out of her pocket and silently cried into it. She was hoping Sarah wouldn’t notice but Sarah was too sharp for her Mum. She pulled the handkerchief away from her mother’s face and laughed. Uncle Danny laughed too, at her Mum being caught out so easily but he soon started coughing. His face turned red and he began spitting up thick globules of yellowy green sputum. Her mother turned away from the bed and Sarah could see her shoulders shaking. Was she laughing too? Sarah wanted to ask her uncle when he stopped coughing but a nurse had pulled a curtain around the big bed and told her to wait outside with her mother.

When the doctor finally came out to the seated room off the corridor her mother was on her knees praying again even though Father Paul wasn’t even around. He put his hand on her mother’s shoulder
Mrs. Henderson? Mrs. Henderson?
Her mother stopped praying and opened her eyes. She didn’t say anything. The doctor opened his mouth and said
I’m very sorry. There was nothing we could do. The disease had spread to too many organs. We made him as comfortable as we could. He suffered very little pain towards the end.
Sarah wondered what her uncle made of all of this. She never remembered him ever crying. He used to stick out his tongue and wink at her in church. She tugged at her mother’s coat
Mum? Mum? Can we go in and see Uncle Danny now? I want to tell him the joke I heard in school the other day.
Sarah’s mother looked down at her and said
Sarah dear we can’t go in to Danny now. He’s gone away and we won’t be able to see him again.
Why not? Where has he gone? Can we not go with him?
No dear. We have to be very brave now. Uncle Danny has gone to Heaven to be with your daddy and God.
Why can’t we go with him?
Some day we will see them both again my love but not today, she said as she stroked her hair and held her very tight, not today.

Sarah remembered the funeral and the wake, all the strangers shaking her hand and tousling her hair even though she hated it when people did that. She always tossed her head angrily afterwards but they never did anything but smile at her and say how beautiful she was. She didn’t care about being beautiful, she wanted to know why both her daddy and her uncle were so selfish as to go off and leave her and her mum behind to do all the work. How could they abandon them like this? Her Mum had no answers, at least none that satisfied her. God might have taken them but what did He want them for? Could He not have seen how much more work Mum had to do now?

As the days and weeks passed Sarah grew more and more attached to her mother. She knew that her Mum depended on her more and more too. She would ask Sarah little questions, about the shopping or the house, had she left the kettle on, did she remember to buy washing up liquid. Sarah worked hard to make sure she knew the answers and, even though she didn’t show it, got upset when she didn’t. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had to know the answers, why it was important she answered her mother’s questions correctly, she just knew she had to. Every day her mother would smile, a sad wan smile and she would reach out and put her arms around her. Sarah dreaded and loved those moments. Her mother’s embrace made her feel safe and comforted but equally, she felt responsible for the tears it seemed to provoke. It was like she was hurting her just by…by being there in the house with her. Sarah’s existence was now a boon and a burden to her mother. She lived as her mother’s comforter and memory on the one hand and as a reminder of her pain on the other. She lived this double life as scrupulously as she could because as far as she could see you couldn’t have one without the other. Every day she felt she had a part to play in the life of the house. Sarah needed to remind her Mum of the little things and her Mum could think of the big things for the both of them, the things Sarah didn’t fully understand.

What pain?

2010-03-05T15:55:00.006Z

Journey time has shortened, have you noticed? Of course you have. The distances which were formerly daunting and adventurous are now routine and tedious. Communications have ceased to be of the importance they once were. Time was, see, people were careful in how they communicated with one another. Not any longer. The composition of letters and billets doux was painstaking. Now the nature of communications is instantaneous and this means that these formerly crafted communications have descended into a half literate melange, inhabited by puerile and boring fuckwits whose enjoinders and entreaties to one another possess the skill and artifice of a drunken bar stool expert found in bars the world over. We are finding increasingly less to say to each other. Chit chat rules supreme.
Elongated glances at sideways strangers full of suspicion and hostility. Perhaps the time has gone or will come when we greet one another with a nod and a smile. Toughness has replaced amity in the terror-filled postures of people unfamiliar to each other. I reach for the sumptuous, lusty flesh of billboard babes piling on top of one another in a clear cut cacophony of prurient advertising. I see their faux friendly faces wreathed in the smug smiles of the commercially confident, conscious of crafting, conserving and creating conspicuous consumption.
We are too many really. Even in the differential application of enclosed social circles. The memories of times past are kept in the heads of the middle aged and the elderly whose imperfect recollections allow re-interpretative histories to be formulated and drawn upon. The battle cries of those who are now long dead rise again in slick new forms re-packaged and re-presented. They taint and pollute, colour and interfere. What was clear, was never clear, is no longer clear. Huge crimes hide the little ones which allow for grandiose comment and further crimes.
The cacophonous crash of a thousand broken bottles rings through the other sounds which make up ambient suburbia. Rattle, roil, rattle, the passing beat of trains drowns in with the hydraulic sighs and squeals emanating from the bright green truck. It moves off quietly having drunk in its monthly fill of the discarded wine bottles from dinner parties, the broken beer bottles from indignant screams at the referee on the telly and the furtively dumped gin and vodka containers of the secret alcoholics. Our waste and our problems murmuring off into the distance, dealt with by shunting them off to be someone else’s concern. Not a trace of difficulty left.
And now for the pain of ages to be recorded. The trees have fallen in clumps along a pattern of no particular interest. Green bushes, with their leaves semi-intact, populate ragged surfaces around the fringes of the village and are strewn with the detritus of urban living. Coke cans, plastic bags, cigarette butts, sweet wrappers, car tyres, all evidence of people and their ignorant stupidity.
Aged grips of patience and loyalty fumble for each other in comfort and fear. Two elderly people walking slowly. True affection grown old in a time of the all new and vacuous. Pitied by the young for being so old, they traverse on and happily accept that which no one can change. This, I recognise, is growing old with grace. Entire industries of lies and outright brainlessness have profited from this fear of adjoining wrinkles, of lacking the ungrateful energy of those juvenile idiots who hope to die before they get old but yet don’t clip themselves out of bravery but out of deep-seated personal problems such as not being famous.
Disuniting elements punctuate the periods of sorrow by reminding you of happier times. Small pieces of long forgotten Christmas decorations are visible still taped to the aero boards of the ceiling. What party did they see in their heyday? Or were they merely hung up there to alleviate the stress? Saint Vincent’s Hospital Accident and Emergency department. Not a good place to be at one o’clock in the morning. Places of time more than space as they are only utilised at certain points of the day. I hear the voices cry and scream silently of defeat and victory, the relieved laughter and terrible grief of small knots of gatherings long since gone. Where are they now?
Who knows or who cares, right? The pain of ages is still hidden, enmeshed in complex of the everyday, the mystic, the suspension of belief and the wishful. The evidence is behind me, before me and all around me but still the acceptance of it is suffocating in the extreme. Sometimes it is a vicarious pain, on the behalf of those whose loss you now mourn. It is they who suffered, suffered as well the ultimate price, they who have paid with their lives. In the throes and tumults of war a life seems like a very small thing, a very small thing indeed to waste or to take. But it is not war and the life was not a small thing. Its personal, concentrated nature underlines the beauty and brevity of sinking flesh. When it is blood of your blood it is a terrible thing. All has changed for you whilst the big wheel turns evermore, without noticing or caring.

Chances of the mind

2010-03-05T15:54:00.006Z

Scrupulous daydreams of wistful intent linger throughout my consciousness. Peaceful memories of times which will never exist predominate in my thoughts. This dallying in the groves of time serves little purpose other than to highlight how divergent my idealised dreamworld is from my mundane and sordid reality. Congruent strands of evil and good live side by side in the fantasies in my head. Alien thoughts find febrile surface and breed ever strongly, spawning future nightmares of graphic renown. These twisted tales are authentic, cathartic in a sense, destructive in another. Imagination and the powers and pleasures that it grants have fuelled my life and placed me at the head of my own queue. Distant memories do not fade but become detached and merge with other parts of the story.
A cold night on a warm day. The journeys of those who have finished their drinking lom loud as they noisily go on their way. We walk together, chatting an laughing. Conversation topics drift and break off one another. It comes to say goodbye and we hug each other. Warmth of flesh pressed on flesh, the heat of bodies calls forth an age-old yearning. We kiss chastely and stand back to look at each other. There is a glint in her eye which allows for interpretative meaning. I take a chance, not much of one, emboldened by alcohol and lean forward so that our lips meet. There is no resistance bu desire. Our lips part and our tongues meet, each gently and firmly caressing the other. Slippery. Sinuous. We trace patterns of lust in each other’s mouths. Our hands and fingers roam our skin and squeeze and caress, heightening the pleasure. When, all at once, we break off and walk home as if nothing happened. This is a life.

The mistake

2010-03-05T15:54:00.005Z

A small man stood, slouched against the wall of the train station entrance one St. Valentine’s evening. He is dressed unfashionably, not mention slightly untidily. I say untidily event though there are signs of some care being given to his appearance, though it is the clumsy attention of one who does not often gaze into the mirror at length, for fear of what he might see there.
His face is pockmarked by defeat and acne scars yet he holds a measly looking bunch of cheap flowers, the petals on the roses already curling into a dead, black colour. His hair, lank but carefully positioned twirls greasily as his head darts up and down the street, searching for little knows what?
Men and women walk hurriedly by, dashing on their way to dinner dates, meetings in pubs, breathy assignations in the eaves of shop fronts and the more public landmarks of congregation. The occasional glance is shot at him, none out of curiosity but merely to note him as part of the furniture, a transitory element in the streetscape, here one minute, who cares the next? Girls, women with large bundles, not bouquets, of flowers, clutched awkward with triumph, do not pause to compare their trophies with his. What a ludicrous disparity that would be! With each passing demi-second his demeanour wilts, his being growing ever smaller and less noticeable. He shrugs his head into the collar of his jacket and buries his mouth in the grey of his scarf. His gaze forces itself downwards, briefly leaping at each passing footfall but not daring to look up.
I sneer at him.
What a pathetic example of post-post-modern manhood! Out of the frying pan of barbaric misogyny into the fire of trembling mediocrity. Behold! A lay preacher of the contemptible values of uncertainty and self-effacement!
These thoughts and many more run through and through my mind. Each one picked out on banners of red and white and gold and black, the lettering visible to observers from a very long way away. The standard bearers carrying these banners stride past their healthy, shining faces and proud, firm bodies providing a stark contrast to their poorly appointed enemy. Many, many, many thoughts of similar type and virtue, marching past my mind’s eye as before a politburo balcony full of doddering old sociopaths.
They make me strong, these thoughts. strong.
Until I look at him again and see his eyes. I look through the windows and see the terror of his soul. I look again at the bunch of flowers in his grasp. There is a movement of the flowers, the tips of the petals quivering not in occasion with the wind but because his hands tremble. His hands tremble, the tips of his fingers oscillating uncontrollably with apprehension, with excitement, with anticipation but most of al with a kind of dread hope.
He has hopes and dreams and fears and desires like all humans, traits which in and of themselves are human, are humanity. He lives in spaces of hope eked out from the morass of anaesthetised vacuity of everyday life. Where his looks are agin’ him, where his lack of physical strength makes him a target, where his absence of confidence is a sentence of social stigma if not death. Even in the thicket of this dull, clinging misery he found the hope to draw breath after breath and put one foot in front of the other. Why?
I pause, about to enter the station. It’s late, I’m on my way home. My stomach rumbles impatiently, reminding me that I missed dinner and it’s been a long time since lunch. I hesitate. What business, after all, is this of mine? It is also a little uncomfortably close to spying on someone. But I am curious. I stay, hidden behind a pillar and pretend to send text messages to my myriads of friends.
Hope. I can see it now. The arcing, fading hope of the hard-bitten romantic. Who cannot let go his dreams for fear of crashing to the earth in a violent cataclysm of despair and rejection.
Moments tick by. My quarry glances at his wristwatch with increasing frequency. It is the same time only 30, 17, 28, 24 and, on one occasion, 6 seconds later since the previous time he checked in. He pushes himself off the wall, into the clutch of the cold wind which he does not feel. His head twitches back and forth in little jerks, like a small bird. His gaze sweeps the street, scanning pavement and road with greater and greater urgency. She is not there.
She is not there.
Nor is she here. In frustration, he bangs his fist off his thigh, momentarily forgetting he is holding the bouquet of flowers. Several heads are snapped off by the violent blow and fall to the ground, exploding quietly on the asphalt. Cursing under his breath, he bends down and fumbles with the flower heads. His actions are pointless. Even he realises this. His gift now looks even less impressive than before, the cheap plasticky bulbs seemingly misplaced alongside their decapitated sisters. He slowly gets to his feet, the damaged bouquet in one hand, the crushed heads in the other. He deposits the heads in a nearby bin and trudges back to his post.
Now he doesn’t even trouble to look at his watch regularly. The flowers are held by his side, their petals dropping off from time to time, lying at his feet like ash from the cigarette of a giant. His gaze is downcast, the light gone out in the blink of an uncaring eye. What use are those flowers now? They hang forlornly by his side, their petals weeping, silent tears. He hangs his head. Nothing more, more than nothing. More and more, one by one, two by two and four and seven and more, past, past until they all blur in the wet forming beneath his eyelids.
I cannot see the tears tracks which form on his cheeks but I know they are there.
With a slothful dedication that almost speaks of delicacy, he walks over to the bin. He looked down at the sorry bouquet before depositing them in the bin. He wheeled about and walked off down the street, one step after another. He walked with a certain deliberation, with a purpose. Before he left my view he turned back one last time, desperate with masochistic hope. Of course there was no one there who met his stare.
As he turned back to what he had suddenly started, I knew. I knew what was going to come. I knew what he had decided to do. I thought of running across the road to shout accusations and persuasion, to force him to change his mind but my legs would not move.
I remembered a time when I saw someone being struck by a car. In the heart-stopping, surging moments before she was run down I went to shout a warning but the words froze in my throat. I was paralysed by something I could not identify. Fear? Shock? A desire to see pain and drama? Was it cowardice? I didn’t know. But the something stopped me from doing anything once more.
I knew he was going home to wherever home was and he was going to kill himself. I could simply tell. I could see Death as his shoulder hefting a scythe with an edge so sharp it was only a blinding blue sheen. With each defeated step, he walked closer and closer to his doom. As I stood there rooted to the pavement slabs, my face a rictus of horrified knowledge, I felt the self-same helplessness the day I watched that woman’s body being tossed high in a rag doll tangle of arms and legs until she lay, broken and bleeding, in the gutter. I could feel the same hot, salty tears that ran down my face well up. I had badly, oh so badly, wanted to rush over to the lady and tell her how sorry I was but I knew even before the ambulance men pulled a navy blue blanket over her face, that it was too late for apologies. She was gone too far away to hear them.
As I stood and watched a sad, lonely man walk off into oblivion, I knew. I knew he was too far gone away to hear my imprecations, my judicious arguments for life and its preciousness. He had walked around the corner. I could see it, as clearly as blinding neon. He lived with his mother. His father was dead. He didn’t have many friends. He was not good at meeting people, feeling simultaneously awkward and craving contact. He was self-conscious and felt ugly. But he dreamed. Oh yes, he dreamed. He dreamed of love, of happiness, of life lived in laughter and fun, of more than the blank bitterness of vacancy and being alone. This was perhaps his first real date. Blind, probably. Set up by a sympathetic work colleague. Being stood up was the final straw, really. It was not essentially the lack of a date. That was merely the symptom, I mused, of the much more biting and insidious insult of loneliness. He walked off to his house, I knew, and tidied his small bedroom carefully. On the journey home I reconstructed his last minutes with a methodical, macabre precision. There was a little ghoulish thrill in it which I tried to suppress. He would do something like taking his mother’s sleeping tablets, there would be dozens of them, relics of repeat prescriptions assiduously collected but equally assiduously tossed in a drawer and forgotten about. He would crush them up, put them in some soft food or dissolve them in a hot drink. Yes, the hot drink would be easier. The heat of the water would not dissolve them successfully, the liquid would be grainy and bitter, the taste etching its way down his throat in a last toast to the world.
I knew all this. I recited aloud Chesterton’s ‘A ballad of suicide’, more as a prayer really, in a bid to remind myself of how tenuous and close we can all bring ourselves to the end without much effort. But I was wrong. I read in a newspaper a few days later of a young man’s body which was washed up on the coast about a mile or so from the train station. Foul play was not suspected. There was no identification on the body but then, there wouldn’t be would there? So he had drowned himself. Ah well same result even from a different route. The last line of Chesterton’s poem sang inside my head.
A few weeks later I was walking along the street and turned to cross the road I did a double take. A very familiar face walked past. A ghost. I almost shouted ‘but you’re dead!’ at him. The ghost was disturbingly solid-looking and even coughed in my hearing. He was also not alone. A girl held his left hand. She was not particularly pretty nor very well dressed but she had the smile, the smile that was the glittering downfall of devils and the very pride of angels, a smile full of warmth and truth and love. And she smiled it at my suicide. Truth be told, as it has been or so I thought, he smiled the very same smile back. Totally oblivious to my shocked stare they walked happily up the street, hand in hand into an unknown future.
The body on the shore was not that of the lonely swain. I had looked at someone and made them into someone else, a mirror, a reflection of another person. Me. I have never experienced love such as the love I saw in the those two smiles, the smiles of two plain looking, ordinary people in love with one another, soul entwined in soul. I am mostly relieved at that. It is not for me, I think. Too powerful for such as me to bear.
I was wrong. I hate being wrong. It fills me with a hot dread of uncertainty. But in realising that I knew my mistake. And I was glad.

Buckets and spades

2010-03-05T15:51:00.003Z

A small boy walked beside his mother down the busy main street, his left hand shyly clasping a new toy, newly purchased in a cheap shop. It was a bucket and spade, made of stout plastic and bright, cheerful colours. He did not look at it but simply held it tight, as if afraid that it would be snatched away at any minute. She stared out of the café window at him, something approaching a sad smile in her eyes which she could not raise on her face. He stared back.
He would build lots and lots of sandcastles with them, castles to defend, and castles to destroy, castles that would make temporary palaces full of danger and adventure in his tiny mind’s eye. He would do all this at the beach, this Juvenal sculptor and architect, in the lighting shade of the sea. A long hazy afternoon stretched out in front of him and he wriggled with anticipation and delight. The Sea, he dreamed, the Sea.

Delphine hated the sea. It smelled too strong, was too big, too dangerous, too uncertain. Its exaggerations made it an object, a singular thing. In Delphine’s world there was no English Channel, no Indian Ocean, no Baring Straits. There was just the sea. Massive. Implacable. THERE. And she hated it for it. Not because but for the fact of its existence.
She shuddered when she thought of the holidays she was brought on when she was younger, holidays that involved the entire family. There were no shirkers allowed. She did not mind the slightly forced enthusiasm and jollity with which her parents approached these outings. Family holidays, they held, were what families did. But they always behaved as if this was something they had been told once rather than something they instinctively felt. She knew they were doing what they thought was best and despite the noise and sheer work involved in getting her nine (yes, nine!) siblings from A to B without major incident, the holidays themselves were tolerable for the most part. Sometimes they even had great fun, especially when their parents relaxed and remembered that they were human beings.
No, this was not what made her shudder with spasms of unwanted recollection. No, it was the fact that a frequent (and democratically popular) destination was the seaside. Buckets and spades, thick, gooey sun cream, lobster-pink scars of battle, traffic jams of hours stuck in over-heated cars with icy calm, infuriated grown-ups. The ozone tang of the sea swimming into the nostrils, a smell which made Delphine want to retch. She could remember how, as the car inched closer and closer to the car park beside the beach, she grew more and more nauseous, the other children getting excited, until by the time the car door opened and they all tumbled out she would vomit stinging bile onto the cracked tarmac, the hot rush violently surging out of her throat and out of her mouth and nostrils. Her mother would squawk and scold and comfort her in equal measure. Her father would be immediately angry but would inquire if she was any better in a gruff voice and then spend the rest of the day looking after her.
Such was the cycle of events which preceded a day or two spent in misery for Delphine as the rest of her family gambolled and ran, shouting and laughing, along the beach and dived headlong into the cold water to show off. Her parents followed at a distance, gently ambling along, their ankles forming moving barriers to the water which ebbed and flowed around them.
Delphine never wanted anything other than to leave, hugging herself in her misery, ignoring the jeers and catcalls of her brothers and sisters. The hours stretched to minutes, the minutes stretched to seconds and the seconds stretched to eternity. When they finally left Delphine shook with the vehemence of her vow never to return. She always spent the opening minutes of the journey home looking out the rear window of the car and softly cursing the sea as vilely as she knew how.
She had been a little girl then or a very early teenager (she refused to go to the seaside when she hit fifteen. Her parents grumbled but acquiesced.) So it was many years since she had laid eyes on the sea itself. On trips abroad she kept her eyes closed as the aeroplane traversed large bodies of water. She felt uncomfortable in any room with a seashell in it for decoration. Predictably, she lived in the midlands. She wouldn’t let her children take swimming lessons, much to the school’s consternation. Her original hatred of the sea began to blossom and bear bitter fruit. She began to loathe the very sight of water. Rivers, lakes, waterfalls, weirs, dams, puddles, even rain. Drinking water out of the tap was approached with disdain. She showered with a grimace on her face, washing as quickly as she could.
She tried not to think of it. Her irrationality was something built-in, inherent. It bothered her, despite it all. The hatred of the sea was something understandable. It was, after all, something she could avoid. But the metamorphosis of a noxious emotion which had been there for as long as she could remember into a cocoon of revulsion threatened to paralyse her entire life. How long before she began to regard her own bodily fluids with unbearable disgust?
Her children, Jack, Michael and Aishling, all noticed something but they couldn’t understand it. Maybe their Dad could explain it to them but he was up in heaven with God and the angels. So they were left to creep around the house, hoping not to upset Mummy who saw what they were doing and felt terrible tears well up. Delphine began to walk the local by-routes, passing sage old drumlins covered with feltish green furze. She traversed the Esker Riada, an ancient route way still valid, muttering dilatory incantations under her breath, leaving all reason behind. The mud and grass stains on her shoes stuck to her story like glue to the binding of a new book. Every day she walked, further and further each time, long winding perambulations of peripatetic misery. It was when the walks were over a year old, the trees, bushes and hedgerows as familiar as old friends, that she began to talk out loud. At first they were just little injunctions to herself, reminders to do the messages or to avoid minor pitfalls. “Must pick up the milk” or “Don’t forget to buy biscuits for tomorrow” or “Oops, mind the fence”.
Slowly, but slowly, they built upon one another. The conversations that emerged became full-blown dialogues with another interlocutor at hand. They were, for the most part, merely paste boards for difficult problems or personal worries. She spoke with an imaginary psychologist about Michael’s dyslexia, she argued with her dead husband regarding Aishling’s lack of interest in sports. She would turn to face these interlocutors, her mind granting each the requisite amount of autonomy necessary for it to be a live conversation. They made objections she had prepared for, asked questions she knew the replies to, their criticisms answered. There were doppelganger extensions of Delphine’s consciousness.
Happily the walks turned out, happier and happier, almost ecstatic. Her monologues had turned to dialogues with only the barest murmur of attention. But they changed themselves. Autonomy became independence. The voices grew stronger, grew to become other than those she had dreamed them as. Strangers appeared beside her, offering to help her over a stile, chattily commenting on the arrival of the blackberries among the sharp rise of thorns that occasionally punctuated the journey. Increasingly though they did not speak. As each alley, by-way, mud path, boreen, street and field became saturated with ghosts, all voices and faces and claustrophobic tangles of limbs whirling on the edge of her peripheral vision, she descended even more into an apprehensive, breathless reality of flickering shadows, primal words and uncertain helplessness.
She feared herself now. She would stay in the house, waiting for the children to return from school, to drive away the shades and shadows with their raucous noise and cheerful shouts. Until then she was rigid with terror. She thought and thought on it, her mind accreting building blocks yet only forming around one centre, how to stop this. How to breathe. How to get out.
Until she glanced in a mirror and saw the pale, trembling reflection of someone she once knew, her descent gained pace. But as soon as that shocking visage stared back at her she resolved to snap out of it. Shadows and Shades? Ha! Tricks of the light and stupid, self-indulgent day dreaming. She went as far as she dared with her reasoning. It brought crumbs of comfort, small but plentiful. She wished she could really speak with her husband. Memories of him floated around the house, not wraith-like but as a series of stop-motion pictures. There was laughter, shouts, squeals and whoops to go with the more hushed tones of affection and excitement.
She smiled as she touched the couch. It was a pretty battered, old-fashioned item, much the cheapest looking piece of furniture they had owned. But Kevin had always refused to get rid of it. She knew why but could not resist sometimes suggesting buying a new one. His response was always vehement rejection of the very idea! Wistful with half-forgotten memories, she ran her hand over its worn fabric. She closed her eyes, feeling then as now his strong hands clasp hers, moving to caress her arms and tighten against her firm skin, his embrace moving her against him sinuously, sinfully, slowly. She could hear her breath shorten at the sudden, intense pressure of his sex entering hers, his strength and hardness burning inside her. Slowly, gently, building to paroxysms of joyful breathlessness as his muscles shifted and moved like eels in liquid amber. They both came in shuddering climax, unified in the most intimate love.
That was their first time. They had not been virgins but that night had surpassed both their imaginations and brought them into something unbreakable, further and closer than they had ever thought two people could.
All night they had lain there, on that couch, until the grey twilight signalled what had happened was over.
They were wrong though. It did break. He had died, whimpering and coughing, drowning in his own blood as his lungs failed, lashed between the broken steering column and the shattered windscreen. He had lain in that roadside ditch for hours. The right wheel of his car had hit a patch of black ice and skidded uncontrollably into the bole of a large oak tree, flipping over and ending up at the bottom a large ditch.
He died thinking soft, desperate thoughts of her, trying to call out her name between gritted teeth as the ruby-red flecks of pleural blood tumbled and killed. She would never know this. No matter in any case. She remembered. She remembered.
A branch snapped, broken off in a sudden gust of wind. Delphine’s hair flew about her face as she stared wildly at her suddenly incomprehensible surroundings. A large clutch of trees swayed, their heavy verdant branches seeming to advance at her, threateningly. She drew back in alarm, her left arm rising instinctively to defend herself against an unseen enemy. But another sound tolled creepingly. Delphine stood still for to her that sound meant she was where she had sworn bitterly to herself never to be. She turned to see what had been a long time without her.
A bright green sea rose and fell, tympanic, almost waving to her in a mocking greeting. Thick soapy foaming water fell upon the bounding wave crests. Hush, hush, hush the slapping of heavily cavitated water onto thick agglutinated sand. Delphine’s left leg began to shake. She blinked. The water lapped at her ankles, the cold of it tingling, mixing with the coarse rasps of salt and sand.
Horror on horrors. She saw the line of the shore. Michael and Jack roared playfully and threw handfuls of wet sand at one another. They laughed and laughed. She screamed warnings at them, to get clear of the water but they did not hear her. She waved her arms above her head, frantic, frantic. They just waved back at her. A plangent voice, hoarse and high with exertion reached her. A little girl was lying low in the waves, treading treacherous water, swallowing as little as she could, the water cutting off her screams.
MUM! HELP ME MUM!
Delphine froze in her mind. Her outer limbs trembled, branches in an unforgiving breeze. She could hear something living on the desperate edge of the world, a woeful shout, full of suffering and need. There was nothing to be done. It was decided. All these things she saw, had seen, left her no choice, it was a spectator not an agent she felt herself to be.
MUM! MUM! HELP!
She fell to her knees, praying incoherent gobbets of words which lay all around her, scattered to the surf which moved back and forth, regardless. Her own childhood hit her with a sickening force. Other mind images swarmed into focus, aching dramatic canvasses covered over by accumulated memories of the pleasant and the banal. Blood-sharp pictures drew themselves out, lines of form and function outlined in nightmarish detail…posit…an infant face down in a paddling pool, body blue and dark black at the joints where the blood collected, pink little flowers resting alongside the bas-relief of every parent’s personal catastrophe…posit…a young man who dived into a canal to try and save his drowning dog. The animal died first, followed by its master. His febrile limbs tangled in the long, choking weeds which rose from the canal bed like grasping fingers from hell and bound him tight, his face hanging agonisingly just below the surface, a strange sense of surprise written on it…posit…an elderly woman lying in a pool of blood, water and faeces, all her own, her face under the water which is turreted by the filthy liquid. Her hip bone is snapped out of place, the bath overflowing as a neglected tap pours more and more water over her dead back…posit…a young girl, little more than a baby, swallowing lungfuls of cold, salty water, her screams muffled by the contemptuous waves. Her head sinks from view, her fingers clenched in utter terror, every movement now the result of external forces for the internal engine that drove this little girl had been shut off. Her tiny body sinking below the snot green sea…posit…the utter feel of the wet sand crumbling between her fingers, tears rolling down her cheeks as she sang the desperate, regretful song of the lost, the dispossessed. The boys played no more. They just stared at her, as if she was a stranger who had intruded on their game and spoiled everything. She cried and cried. They walked away.
They disappeared, leaving her alone in her grief. A careful pit of darkness opened up with little dots of shifting lights. Delphine found herself reaching for these ephemeral points, trying to grasp them, to hold on to what little she knew of the stars in heaven.
After they had told her of Aishling’s drowning and the mysterious, inexplicable disappearance of the two boys, Delphine went mad. For some years she was all too scrupulously certain of things which were not true in any sense. She had been under suspicion at first but the authorities eventually gave up their suspicions and left her to her despair. She never knew what happened.
One day she worked up the courage to go to that small seaside resort where she had been on holiday as a child. She had seen the small boy through the window. She knew that it was not Jack nor Michael but he reminded her of them both in a odd sort of way. The urge to see her family again was too painful and too great. She paid the bill and left. When she reached her house she pulled on some walking shoes. She went to the garage to get something. She did not intend to walk far.
She walked slowly, breathing gently, remembering softly, storing as much as she could and drinking in all around her. She found the field she sought.
As she walked across the roughly patterned surface, she saw a small puddle which reflected the field and its surroundings. At first, she could see the faces of Aishling, of Jack, of Michael and of Kevin all reflected on its surface. She stood over the pool of water and as the sun faded in the west she could make out the figure of a small boy on the surface, as clear as light, walking towards the beach….

A fading theodicy

2010-03-05T15:50:00.002Z

The fading flames of the fire listed heavily to the right of the grate. The left was a pile of accumulated ash, white and dove-brown, crumbling into fragments at the merest pressure. Little dancing lights popped loudly at the sparks flew off the bitumen. Pale, half-visible smoke streamed slowly upwards, the curling tendrils bubbling lazily. The old man regarded the darkly coals absently. He spat into the grate, his thick phlegmy spittle hissing and crackling as it hit the coals. He sighed and left his chair. With the slowness borne of failing health he opened the door. Outside, the rain beat down, heavy on the windows, the gusts of wind lashing the panes with thick slats of water. The flue sputtered as the rain leaked in and touched the hot metal.
The room was sparingly furnished. The protean fire burning in the grate illuminated little in the gloom which fed on the shadows thrown by the flames. A ragged mat, ends frayed mercilessly, a small leather chair its stuffing falling out. A writing desk stood in one of the corners, the surface littered with scraps of paper all of them covered in a spidery screed. An oil lamp on the wall, the glass shade on top of it charred brown-black in parts, cast plashing shadows.
The old man opened the door to the room. Briefly, the outside world poured in. The silhouette cast in the doorway was outlined by a tumult of water cascading downwards in the darkness. A stark stab of lightning arced across behind the old man’s head but, strangely, the sound of the lightning and the peal of thunder that followed were intensely muted, as if it was happening on a television screen with the sound turned way down. With an incomprehensible mutter, the old man slammed the door closed and the gloom was regained. He shook the remaining drops of water from his sodden cloak, the drops falling in chaotic patterns on the floor around him. He threw the cloak in a corner and sat down heavily at the writing table. Taking up a piece of paper and a pen he wrote some laborious sentence. As he finished he tossed the piece of paper away carelessly and left it to lie with the others.
Groaning at an unspecified ache, he shuffled over to the rocking chair. The fire’s embers glowed brightly as he stoked the remaining coals. Muttering the same incomprehensible half-syllables he sat back in the rocking chair. Unseen, a clock loudly chimed the hour, its bells haunting the room as they marked the passage of time. The old man’s head raised, the scarred surface of his scalp gleamed shoddily. His eyes, though. His eyes looked around and they were…unusual. They were almost wholly black, not the eight ball haemorrhage black of murder victims but the vortex blackness of blank infinity. As the old man surveyed the room tiny stars wheeled in his eye sockets, the guttering of microscopic galaxies, blinking and brightening almost imperceptibly. What he saw was beyond the faded despair of the room he sat in. Whatever it was, he snorted derisively at it and leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled and resting against the tip of his nose.
As the old man stared into some fourth space, three loud knocks boomed at the door. The walls shook with the force of each blow but the old man didn’t flinch. He flicked a hand at the doorway. The door swung inward. A cowled figure stood at the threshold. Despite the pouring rain outside the figure was bone dry. The old man cleared his throat in irritation and motioned the figure to sit down. With a curious clicking sound the hooded man passed between the old man and the fire.
For a long time neither spoke. The old man regarded the cloaked figure over his steepled fingers. The other did not even pull back his hood. Something more than time passed. Thousands, millions of hours and days and weeks and years blurred as the two regarded each other.
Finally, the old man spoke
-It has been a long time since
The cowled figure turned slightly.
-Yes. But there was little reason to meet. Until now.
The old man smiled
-You think so? All of this, he said, gesturing at the mean little room, is not the end. This will all be again, just as it was once before. You cannot stop it.
-I do not intend to. But even if that is true, these times are ending and are ending now.
-But I am not. I remain. Those many things which are me, the old man said, the multitude of worlds and places I created carry me in them and I carry them in me. I created this world, I shall survive its destruction. That is self-evident.
-Every thing answers to me. From the smallest particle to the most complex organism, they must all face me at their time.
The old man snorted.
-You think me a higher order animal? For stupidity, Death.
The cloaked figure leaned forward. It waved a hand at the wall opposite which became transparent and revealed a nightmarish landscape of electrical storms, heavy rainfall, thick cloud cover, choking industrial strength smog, the muffled crump of explosions and the irascible orange of distant fires. Shattered tanks, trucks and cars lay in their thousands along with the tattered skeletons of civilian and military aircraft. Huge mounds of calcified corpses dotted the landscape. No living thing moved.
With a gesture the wall returned to its opacity. The old man was unmoved.
-So?
-The End of Days has been and gone. There are no more stories to tell. The damage is irreparable. There is only one more task to be completed.
-And that task is me? You overreach yourself, Death. I am not subject to you. There is nothing I cannot create. There is nothing I cannot destroy.
-Then why live in such a mean, pitiful place?
-Do you live in a palace?
-I do not live.
-Neither do I but this suits me. What would be the point of excess? That is only for humans.
A note, the barest tremor, of desperation appeared to enter the old man’s voice. His demeanour gave nothing away, unchanged as it was without the barest flicker of the eyes to denote fear or loathing. But his voice still carried trace elements of…something. Death faced him without moving. The old man shifted uneasily after an aeon. Outside the vastness of forgotten waste howled unheard. Clouds boiled across what was left of a broken sky and polluted rain corroded a diseased ground even further. And still the pair argued, unaffected and oblivious.
There is a time and there is a place.
The old man was becoming palpably desperate. His words said very little but the tone spoke deafening, illuminating volumes. His eyes shone now, the dark spaces fever bright with the intensity of a superhuman longing to be, to remain. The ghost of other presences made not a move though it spoke.
-You are decaying yourself. Look at you, frail flesh hanging on a weakened frame. You know the end involves you, must consume what form you take and that form has come to define you in the absence of other markers. There are no other ‘people’, he said pronouncing the word disdainfully, to compare yourself with. You cannot hold in your memory what it is to exist in the absence of others.
-I AM NOT HUMAN, the old man shouted.
-Not for a long time. But you are now. You have become so. The creator became the created, too fond was he of his creation, studying it too closely. Play became mimicry, mimicry became normality and normality became mortality. There is a cycle to it, an inexorable movement. It is too certain.
Death rose. The old man tried to summon what he knew was no longer there. Bitter beads of sweat formed on the old forehead with the effort. His hands shook as they clenched the arms of the chair.
Still, Death merely looked at him.
-I do not know the meaning of kindness but…
-Yes? The old man looked up, suddenly very human, suddenly hopeful.
-…you were great once. Be glad of that.
Death walked to the door which opened without being touched. It closed gently after him.
The old man sat in his chair until the breath left his lungs and his heart stopped. He could feel every millimetre of blood vessel that he possessed, he could hear every alveoli opening and closing but could do nothing when they stopped, when his body failed.
After a time, God died. And there was no one there to notice.

Entering the charnel house

2010-03-05T15:47:00.001Z

Wading through a sea of blood, I stop to look back

At those who float behind me, who have turned this sea black

They cover the surface for as far as the eye can see

They bob in slow motions and touch and terrify me.

Who were they, these victims of circumstance?

Who were killed without a thought, or a second glance

No one cares or no one knows, so I cry my heart out

For these now forgotten dead who have lost this last bout

In a fight they couldn’t win and didn’t in the end

So they lie in their thousands, of this I can contend

Soft voices whisper slowly in a thousand separate tongues

Speaking of the horrors and their deaths by stuttering guns

No moral laws were quoted in the performance of this slaughter

Few men or women spared nor even their sons or daughters

All done to enrich again those of gold and brocade

Satisfying the blood thirst of the gentleman capitalist brigade

And when the massacres are all done and the tales are all told

When the memories fade cruelly and the survivors all grow old

We can walk together, you and I, through these paths of dread

To breathe life once more and remember those who are dead