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Part 3.
Moon in my Room
xxi.
Nobody Visits this House.
Tipped on a hill, south
its garden uncouth,
out back, a yard’s mouth,
with its spiders & cats
its cracks & its creaks
& skeleton key leaks
that open dark draughts
to occupation of territories.
Nobody visits this house
where only the poor go out
in the dark like rats
watched by street lights
with their camera cells
written on plaques
in the name of the state
in the town Hell’s Gate.
xxii.
Pat’s on the Mantelpiece.
There’s not much left
& i don’t contain memories
of funerals with affection.
A few small trinklets
that mixed with other junk
i’ve given up separating
Where or when
they belong or come from,
one day they’ll be gone.
Perusing some alchemy works
i find Chhi, a word
in Chinese philosophy for energy.
A dual force,
it’s a little more than a year.
a few years before,
Her paper mache tray,
oriental ornamental
to put things in.
No more than a saucer,
laquer & paint et al,
in Chinese caligraphy Chhi,
A gift for me.
rose petals from the garden,
a conker picked as memento
From a walk long forgotten,
whither there, on the mantelpiece,
in redolent glow.
xxiii.
Suibhne’s Song to the Shadows.
We have lived in dreams
That could not be broken,
But years as time have stolen.
& struck by a blow unseen,
I see a vision fading.
Fading as grail in grain,
In the corridors of time,
Floored with their pain:
The loneliness of the unknown
In the illusion of return,
A roaming creature on the plain
Following the beckoning horizon.
xxiv.
Suibhne amongst Chimneys.
Quarried rock from the hill,
mason hewn, smooth, rough,
round or hand dyke laid.
A town’s tier walls stained
in clouds of moss, fungi, lichen,
only grime belies their fragrance.
Drain pipe in September rain,
wild weed corner, dandelion,
leaf red bramble in black warts.
Rain runs as blood into shadows,
its speechless phantoms amazed,
after so long, still misunderstood.
xxv.
The Moon is in my Room.
The moon is in my room
Immutable, imperturbable
As before this world began
I am crisis in transfixion
Between subject and object
The quest of identity
In the moment of appearance
Should I say auspicious occasion
The moon is in my room
Or those nights of Borge’s Buenos Aires
Those distant hours also occasions
Now forever gone
xxvi
Tourist.
I met him in Europe, one out a million
Japanese students making, perhaps, a
Once in a life time two week excursion.
A young guy with extremely broken
Business English privileged at University,
Being too expensive for common education,
Who would return to his village/town
Somewhere in Japan to row after row of
Interminable urban suburbia guaranteed
a job for life, in turn promotion & the rest,
He says, with a patient concentration set in a
Slight frown, is a philosophy of life, in Japan,
To be Japanese & squints his Buddha eye at me.
The next day in the reception he bows in
Decorous formality, lawn after lawn of his children’s
Children in neither Nirvana nor Samsara.
xxvii
Hoods.
Sick in bed, a steel hammer in his head,
Host to a ghost father who was host to his.
You want to escape in a time machine,
He remembers you said you curled up
Very small and tried to pretend to be
Nothing, but you meant dead.
Should we put on Beethoven’s Ninth*
To send this hip hop rap clap stuff
Out of sound. The hoods have returned
Without dignitaries in shadowy strands,
Thin bands, like the oneness of ant waves
Or Piranhas with the broken doll faces,
That hoods to youth betray, batch by batch.
In anticipation of what? a nuclear age?
Nod, nod, the ghost is dead, sweep on
Let’s see how hoods do with global warming.
* Clockwork Orange. Anthony
Burgess
xxviii.
Evening.
Breaking twigs:
Spindly silver birch
Collaborate with twilight.
Lingering phantoms in shade
Waiting for Spring’s arrival,
Have they forgotten,
Will they remember again,
When life quickens them?
xxix.
Fanciful Pessimism.
Facing sheer doom
We share names
As host to ghosts
In profession of fame.
How the story ends,
How it turned out
Versus what we are,
Unto the occasion, or
Until nothing is left,
Stars will turn off in the night
& there are only names,
Ghosts in their own remains.
xxx.
Goddess of the South Seas.
Like Aphrodite drawn
By her wild sea mares,
Naked in scalloped shell
She crests the waves’ spray,
As beautiful & as alluring,
As since art & time began.
The sea serpent, her alter ego,
Dwells in vast caverns beneath
Sheer precipice of coral reef,
Where you dive into luminary
Depths of shimmering lights.
Her names, once known by a dead
Long gone to a sea of phantoms,
Dance in the womb of incubation.
A well of gravity that spawns
The ocean’s unleashed shoal
Still trembling from the deeps,
Where you hover in suspense.
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