Galway musings: Blowing fire, young Buckfast drinkers, acrobatic acts, juglers of fire, Brazilian dancers, some twirling fire, drums that travel and congregate bringing more fire more bagpipe players, acordians and gagles of guitars; there's a black man and trumpet hiding around a corner to escape the bagpipe waves, ...you know, people really crowd to fire, like they do fastfood at 2am, people filling their guts on microwaved burgers processed cheese and mayonaise with the river getting the rubbish, piles of shit everywhere on these keg-lined sidewalks keeping the wind busy, one keg floats in the river caught between some willow branches. After fast food light another cigerette. At a coffee shop glasses clang, enough to rattle me. No food in my stomach. Pause. Chairs drag and scratch, but finally some smooth rap, no more melancholic Brit shit, next Nirvana. Lesbian coffee shop, what? She says she needs a dildo, and an American makes me sick talkin about Americans. I hear news that Jeff and Martin smashed their hands, what kind of story? And why did Sophia have to go: New Yorker, Korean, literate, with lips I could paint.
It's a Friday night but everynight may as well be Friday, the heat just scorches a little brighter. Running into Jeff, he tells rich and I that we're hooking up with duncan, the madscotsman, to tear things up. It's gonna be Buckfast, boys, the fine tonic wine from the monks of Abbey that'll expose your brain to direct sunlight sans sunscreen, it'll make you think you can commune with stray dogs...lit like Texas sky on the fouth of July. We grab a few tinies to get a proper swerve and head for the cannal. Swig and pass, swig and pass. Meanwhile, Jeff the shark, is laying out stories of the past and trying to get us to swallow all of ireland during one pull of the Bucky. Finishing a story he'll hold the cans or bottles up over his head donning his shark grin, then flicking his tongue like a lizard.
Karkass and swervedog:
I went home. See you @ the Blue Thunder fools. Hot dogs tomorrow if we can't find the swerve.
Buckfast forever,
Pouch Hooligan
*****
Like a bear in fall, i'm gonna go sleep this off.
*****
"He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven"
Had I the Heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with gold and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths,
Of night and light and half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet;
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
-W.B. Yeats
*****
"You know, there's a million fine looking women in this world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work, most of em just cheat on you."
--From the movie "Clerks"
*****
Trust is the tip of the elephant tusk that
Whips in a jungle furry
Twists and tangles through a grassy plain
Like a snake in the thick
Wraps about a limb
Sticks the hapless in a hurry.
Venom of jealousy parlyzes....
*****
After throwing a beer back I begin to head towards the library. Crossing Eyre Square, who but Kate lay in my path, with two back packs. Is she going to the Aran Islands? Already has, says it rained and had stayed at such-n-such, but now she is moody. Too much contruction is Galway, she says. From the corner of my eye I notice a pair of ravens laughing in the small tree next to us. She doesn't know where she is going, maybe north, may be alone on her birthday which is in a few days. She says it all like she's waiting for suggestions to drop from my trap, like she setting the trap in a fruitful position. She asks, what have I been doing? I fill her in on the film fetival duties, the new place Rich and I found to live, and how comming back to Galway was a real blessing, 'cause a lot of things were sorted out, fell into place. I ran into Jeff passing out handbills, then saw Rich, the mad Scotsman, Ben, all brilliant. I had a nice job prospect.... All the while full of grace and cool as a cucumber, probably good I had a beer under my belt. She tells me of tickets to Prague for cheap, a piece of genuine information or trying to set the hook? Then comes the Jew, shakes my hand, and after a few short words I tell them sincerely to take care, and maybe I'd see them later. I was surprised not that I was polite, but that it wasn't a facade! Now, she was the perplexed one, and questions srang and dove deep.
*****
-- I don't feel like a war movie.
-- I do.
*****
An airwalk with
Head of lead
Molten @ 17 C
To the quick
Freezes and breaks
Like a heart on Moher
Like a heart that can digest.
--
A head weeps a loaded breath
wind and tears meet with the sea
But the heart...
Too heavy to reach the sea
Lay exposed to the gulls and crows.
The wind
It blows so hard.
--
Selfish, fanciful whore!
So calous has your heart become
Like your feet that know miles and miles and
Many shared showers.
So acutely ruthless
I see you in the vapors
Accending from the comode;
It's the Dublin train station
And don't you look tasty.
*****
Pit-pat...kathump-kathump...boom-boom. Breathe before you scream. What power an eye lid has! Or is it pores, teeth, lips, bones, the curve at the base of the nose-- all conspiring together. Her breath spills about the counter?... I blush and want to bathe like a bird. I want to rub my face in her shirt. I can speak and she seems pleased, now I can't speak. Maybe she enjoys the smell of poverty?... Or is it the dusty film on her tongue kicked-up from my road of dreams. Does she breathe like me? If we could rub cheeks...cause waves to reverse...light the dark across the Atlantic....
"Love travels faster...Love can leave you as fast as it came," grief and hunger are fast but love travels faster. A surprise dose of good fortune can peel the spirit from the sidewalk, but love is the spirit.
*****
The tile floor is soaked. Rich mops the floor, Patrick adds a fresh layer of news paper for the day. I wash some clothes in the sink adding yet more water to the floor. Walking into the sunroom there is a clothes line with red, yellow, and blue clothes pins. Lena and Helder are outside the broken french doors having a smoke. I take some and feel faint. 'It brings back everything back we had last night,' helder says. Only I didn't have anything last night. Next enters Robson, smiling as usual, 'Oh Troy! Good morning!' The Verve is on our new stereo. Robson dances with eyes closed and arms out like an airplane. Then, later in the kitchen out of the blue in typical fashion, Robson exclaims,"I go to the forest!--by the beach--some tall grass there-- a river-- I go to the second.' I'm thinking that he's trying to convey that he found a new beach to do his daily swimming. 'No, I not swimming--maybe,'he says lifting his shoulders and turning his palms up. But then he squats, 'I go the second, not here, but in the grass,' he says waving his arms around. We laugh.
*****
"His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature...."
*****
Jerry stumbles from the curb in his brown corduroys and blue Wrangler shirt. His chest concave, wirery gray/black hair to the shoulder, a chin like a witch-- one that seems to grow as an ear or nose-- bigger as one ages. Hands and arms craddle his stomach like he's holding back water.
We hide our beer under some stones for after the show. Later, we find them uncovered, and all but two gone. We wipe off the grit, scrutinizing.
Jerry couldn't resist. His blood needed thinning-- his stomach was churning itself to knots. His coffee colored teeth could laugh at the joke.
I can't believe it took me so long to know of Jerry's condition. Now I notice in the late morning when grits are in the pot, Jerry will walk by smelling like he has been sleeping in piss-n-sweat. A cold flu sweat with nicotine, cheap sherry and porta potty.
He cooks sweet-n-sour pork on the grease stained stove. Hands shake. He drops a plate. The neon pinkish sauce turns dark on the floor.
He rolls another cigarette, with raccoon eyes glancing up occasionally. They start to sparkle when the talk turns to history or music.
*****
Change
Like a train
On scrapping brakes
Sparks fly
Like a train braking on
Self hate
Soon
Loses weight
Like a fully loaded tilted plate.
Like a train
Suddenly halting frieght
Like that only with colors,
Awake.
*****
--Patrick, your not going to clean that pan. It's absolutely filthy, man!
--It doesn't matter, really. Just fryin a burger for Seamus. Could be shit for all I care.
----
"The only pound seamus has got is a pound of shit, ohhla-la."
----
"If it's in this house, it doesn't work, jeepers."
*****
Dirty stuffed animals hide around toilet pipes,
Victorian prints hang
Content as water always runs, drips and
Stains
-----
All throughout
Broken antiques and clocks lay and hang
Arabic rugs and and beautiful laced drapes
Stained
And over there! On the wall
A Jimmy Carter plate.
-----
With porage crusted
To the corner of his mouth,
The Warden saws
Logs, in
A sunroom of gray
----With character
About a sunken couch.
-----
A nearby spider shoots
His filaments to
A broken record player
While grease rains
Like trains from the range
To classical music.
-----
Johnny Cash looks wistful.
-----
Walls unravel like dreams
The ceiling caves under running streams
Ceiling caves as
A heart toiled and burdened.
-----
Jr. burns the thatch roofing of a school
The girls want money for sweets
And a Salthill swimming pool
She needs a new car and mobile to do her miles
Just do the deal,
Push stamp and file.
And developers, like hyenas, wait
With song and smiles, excretions of acid and bile
for a fresh carcass.
Relentless
As greasy smoke rubbing
Kitchen tiles.
To classical music the
Beef fat splatters and drips
Finding the metal overhang.
Clinching his fists, snarling,
He pounds his gut
"A man needs his meat!
...it gets so fucking cold!
...only have few bags of coal, man...
The fucking dole..."
-----
As the rain naws and rips
fiberglass atop the
Sunroom of gray
----About a sunken couch
The Warden is running free...
Throwing his tongue
Taking trees
Here...the Warden is free.
-----
Free of head lice cream
Of moldy walls
Of moldy clothes and old breath
Of dishes where
Blood and underwear soak
Of leaky pipes
Of newspaper floors
Aggressive Germans
And slammin doors.
-----
Still yet the winters!
...They're so fucking cold!
*****
From Claire Galway
And your lips hang
Like curtains
So much
Your black drips off-- you
In dead black
Raven black hair
Are the seconds of my stare
Next to my memory of the ocean
Your blue black
Lips I dare
The water, soap, and pots are in a fine dance. Just minutes earlier my hate was chipping at carbohn crusted. It was hitting me back in the eye, making me cry like when i'm peeing onions, only i paniced more. Think that i'll lose an iris or something, nobody likes scatched glasses. so i strip my gloves off and splash cold water, blinking. once i got hot water instead where aw my teperature promptly matched that of the water and i kicked the large hoover that clears water off the floor giving it a statisfying dent.
i'm not a destructive person, though. you see, the irish are fierst world, industrialized, whatever, but in workplace dynamics and management styles they seem to be rat brained. There have been times when i've said 'hello' or 'good morning' to an upper and they seemed pained to reply. it was as if i've asked them to go to the dentist on their birthday or something. there is a constant extortion to cowtow to their needs of intimidation. its as if their lives are so empty, reduced to lottery tickets on a saturday night, in need of more money for a bigger sledge hammer so they can beat their brains to soup. pathetic creature this aman, pisses me off.
My hands, arms, and the water in which they plunge are living their own exixtence now. my ees have blurred and me brain has shut down the ears. its like meditation, but no light to fix on, no light but green and brown waves and swirls. i don't hink i hear the metal clang of steamer trays and pots, meditation. is this what i give my youthful hands for? idleness. wrinkles and ichy palms, hands that peel, so....
Christmas season. i've heard the carolls outside the corner department stores. even in America they don't start this early. America...every new turn agrandize with strip malls to the quick...all an inbred retard with some fat guy laughing, tie too tight his face red with alcoholism, the kind of alcoholism that acts as a morphine to placate dead souls, infedility. Strip malls. Meditation stripmalls. Meditation stripmalls with streams of dreams, wet and dry. we laugh and cry but we know we own it. We drink bottles of nothingness and the tv's are tunned to channel Z. it starts to snow and we freeze to desert warmth and laugh with the thirsty jackrabbits. down the stream there are people with their faces smashed to the glass. i think they can't think. men in purple blankets play wind instruments that make bird songs and waves. off the stream up the escalator, i hear a harsh cacophonous voice demanding attention, i hear some of what he says:..."My garden's starry wreckage...over my hope...generous dead of my years...in the chill streets I hear the hunting and long thunder of money." Suddenly there were people everywhere