Paul Durcan: Christmas Day

Excerpt One 

                    There was a young widow in black

                    In Glasnevin Cemetery. I heard her

                    Before I saw her - the tapping

                    On the tarmacadam of her high heels.

                    I spun around and I saw her

                    Hurdling towards me across the headstones,

                    Her yellow hair tucked into her black suede jacket,

                    Her blue mini-skirt more daring than a fig leaf,

                    The white ponies of her teeth

                    Riding red lipstick.

                    As we were about to pass

                    We stopped and stared

                    And she smiled and I gazed

                    Into the waterfall of her eyes

                    Waiting for it to stop

                    Thinking that she was a clock

                    But she was not a clock -

                    She was a woman,

                    A preoccupied soul.

                    Is there a role

                    For my twenty-three-year-old son?

                    She said: 'Have you got the time?'

                    I said: 'It is three o'clock.'

                    She said - as if I had invented time -

                    With dismay: 'Is it three o'clock?'

                    And I wanted to change my mind and say

                    That there was no time today,

                    That Christmas Day is a timeless day.

                    Instead I repeated: 'It is three o'clock'

                    And she walked on out of my life

                    Up the aisle under the yews

                    Towards the Parnell altar stone.

                    When she was out of earshot I said to her:

                    'May I hold your hand?'

                                                        Excerpt Two

                    The worst thing about loneliness

                    Is not loneliness.

                    The worst thing about loneliness

                    Is selfishness:

                    The savagery of selfishness.

                                                    Excerpt Three 

                    Why do computer programmers always answer

                    When asked in questionnaires

                    In Sunday newspapers

                    What is your idea of Heaven? -

                    Snorkelling in Acapulco.

                    Why do they never say

                    What I would say?

                    My idea of Heaven as a man

                    Is to be lying on my back

                    Smiling up into the eyes of a woman,

                    Her face latticed by her hair,

                    Her shoulders braced

                    As she squats in her starting blocks.

                    She leaps out of her blocks

                    To race 100 metres

                    Over low hurdles

                    In 10.8 seconds

                    While I lie under her

                    Clinging to her

                    And she spits on my shoulder -

                    There! -

                    And whinnies and dozes

                    And then she straightens the pillows

                    And the blankets, folds me up,

                    All my parts,

                    And puts me away in her violin case

                    Until the next time she decides

                    To go to hounds and cross over the river

                    To the other side.

Lying So Makes The Springs Restless

The Sleepwalker

I find him in the kitchen

everything is dark except

his wild hair once red

now golden from the 

Californian sun

He opens the fridge then closes it

then reopens and squats

pushing a few things aside

his hand pulls out a carton of milk

observing the fading expiration date

he writes on the cardboard side

-All lovers meet the same fate-

grunts, spoiling milk

the contents splash out on the floor 

as he slowly turns towards me

         Isabel,

             would you please stop using the tupperware for your memories?

             nothing ever refrigerates.

A Mere Representation

A Presentation of Love




And now
it is the space
before
assessing one's soul in silence

more than the naked limbs
unseen
here is where the mind
waits to be alone
waits for that relief
like sleep
stirring
somewhere
between the tension
flickers the flame
of impatience,
pacing
to trespass the stranger
with rolling eyes,
searching for inward rolling
representations of romance.

Stirring
in the searching eyes
of those who claim love
I have yet to see the
assemblage of me,
acquired or
unrequited.

Stirring
within some portrait
of a reflection,
in stillness remains
a mere chance
of a reproduction,
unsuccessful.

So to diffuse
a portrait that has
not my eyes,
nor my mouth
that cannot seem to replicate
the curve of my breasts
I refrigerate any chance
of backhands
and dilute
pleasure's presentation of love.

When The Ripe Fruit Falls

Cherry Robbers


Under the long dark boughs, like jewels red
In the hair of an Eastern girl
Hangs strings of crimson cherries, as if had bled
Blood-drops beneath each curl.


Under the glistening cherries, with folded wings
Three dead birds lie:
Pale-breasted throstles and a blackbird, robberlings
Stained with red dye.


Against the haystack a girl stands laughing at me,
Cherries hung round her ears.
Offers me her scarlet fruit: I will see
If she has any tears.


How Beastly The Bourgeois Is

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome?  Isn't he healthy?  Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
   thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
   man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
  face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
   demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
   than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
   England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

On The Ovarian Trolley, Occupy the Uterus

"But I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing seems clear, however, and this is a hangover from the 25, that I was born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes so passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. I believed, and the rest of the world did not!If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet...It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a soft of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails, that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such thing as a skeleton beneath the covering flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people live by."

Tropics of Capricorn, Henry Miller

The Empty Boat

Sunset —Coney Island


The sun,
Like the red yolk of a rotten egg,
Falls behind the roller-coaster
And the horizon sticks
With a putrid odor of colors.
Down on the beach 
A little Jewish tailor from the Bronx,
With a bad stomach,
Throws up the hot-dog sandwiches
He ate in the afternoon
While life to him
Is like a sick tomato
In a garbage can.

Who Untangles Bare Wires?

Explode Into Space Like A True Nature's Child
Lessons From Within The Laundromat


He enters,
charges directly
at a bunch of white roses
left on a table
clutches them to his chest
rotting nails against wilting petals
ascends to his nose
he takes a sniff

looks
straight on
at his audience, seemingly non-attentive
two lost or rather old souls
contained for the time being in the room

he speaks

Man, these don't even have a scent!
To the roof, is where these deserve to be left


he exits and then enters a few minutes later

points to the machine
waltzes like a dinosaur
melting steps, clawed fingers, broken wrists
spins

Man, haven't, haven't you guys
ever noticed Earth
is just a washing machine?

He then unzips
throws his blue jeans in

Wait, now look at it!

Lying in a Conundrum

A Room With a View

a whole centre

and a border

make hanging

a way of dressing

but its dressing

for pleasure and erections

and cooking

or stewing

better yet 

for stuffing

cause nothing

suggests difference

better than whiteness to a wall

it is currents!

even if you put two 

in space

together these two

you get rapture

you get dimness

in this room

intentions change

in this room

is where escapism

is a fleeting moment

that is why some jump

from windows

due to constipation

high-up places and spaces

always asked to consider

since it is my space too

we both got to look out of this window

and who ever is out there

has to look at both of us too

look at us both

disputing possessions

 fairness, mold

and rat poop

cause faucets break

screens do too

there is no disgrace in looking in

so here is the show

full of preoccupation

vacant intent 

excavation-al remains

of objects inside rooms

we use to live here

we use to love it here

just because of the view

Text Testimonials

"Actually, I lit the fire and got everything ready. Made sure there was nothing she could pick up and have a bash at me with. It's no good pretending I had my old trust in her. Well, she went up to her bath and it was all like as usual. When she came out I did her hands, no gag, and I followed her downstairs. I noticed she had a lot of her French scent on, she'd done her hair up the way she did it before and she was wearing a purple and white housecoat I bought her."

John Fowles The Collector

Back to Black...Boards

Back to Blackboards


But the blackboards are bare
teachers prefer chalk-less fingertips
and sitting on chairs
or standing behind podiums
we are herded
like old times
in chairs in a room
but this time
they ask us to plug in
to laptops
and take class online
while in class
so meta
so metaphorical
for the times
education
is a dying art
a dying breed
we are headless
dirty old men
flinging bills
at lecturers
who say
click on this page
and give a provocation
because
it is time to grade fair
in fairness
fair for all

PAYBACK

"He realised that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by men who made money in industry."

D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover 

"The dark side of the sense of fairness is the sense of unfairness, which results in gloating when you've got away with being unfair, or else guilt; and in rage and vengeance, when the unfairness has been visited upon you."

Margaret Atwood, PAYBACK

It's A Gas

the only sense

you'd like to have

is the two cents

i owe you

i woe you

i woe

for those

cents you have

been adding up

to ease yourself

will eat yourself

one day

at a time

Text Testimonial

"Portrait of a Lady"

The city was a vast emptiness. He stood at the window of Finbar's hotel and looked down at the River Liffey which was mud-brown after days of rain. He closed his eyes and thought about the rooms all around him, empty now in the afternoon, and the long empty corridors of the hotel. He thought of the houses on the long stretches of suburbs going out of the city: Clontarf, Rathmines, Rathgar, the confidence they excluded, the sense of strength and solidity. He thought about the rooms in these houses, empty most of the day and maybe most of the night, and the long back gardens, neat and trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. Defenceless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across the garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the house of a sign of life, for alarm systems, and then silently prising a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing the room, opening doors, not making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible. 


Your mind is like a haunted house. He did not know where the phrase came from, if someone had said it to him, if he had read it somewhere, or if it was a line from a song. No, he thought, it could not be a line from a song. He had stolen these paintings from a house that looked haunted. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it no longer seemed to. He had stolen the Rembrandt whose reproduction he was looking at now, plus a Gainsborough and two Guardis and a painting by a Dutchman whose name he could not pronounce. The robbery made headlines for days in the papers. He remembered laughing out loud when he read about a gang of international art robbers who had come to Ireland. The robbery had been linked with others which has taken place in recent years on the European mainland. 






excerpt from Finbar's Hotel

Is This What You Wanted

Why Does She Weep

Hush then
why do you cry?
It's you and me
the same as before.

If you hear a rustle
it's only a rabbit
gone back to his hole
in a bustle.

If something stirs in the branches
overhead, it will be a squirrel moving
uneasily, disturbed by the stress
of our loving.

Why should you cry then?
Are you afraid of God
in the dark?

I'm not afraid of God.
Let him come forth.
If he is hiding in the cover
let him come forth.

Now in the cool of the day
it is we who walk in the trees
and call to God "Where art thou?"
And it is he who hides.

Why do you cry?
My heart is bitter.
Let God come forth to justify
himself now.

Why do you cry?
Is it Wehmut, ist dir weh?
Weep then, yea
for the abomination of our old righteousness,

We have done wrong
many times;
but this time we begin to do right.

Weep then, weep
for the abomination of our past righteousness.
God will keep
hidden, he won't come forth.

D.H. Lawrence

Mischief And Repose

The Story of Ferdinand, Fictional and Far Away

If only I could be Ferdinand,
and sit here
quietly
smelling the flowers
there would be a single
cork tree in an empty pasture
and I would sit there
not feeling
lonesome in the breeze
or anguish in the sweat of droplets
no fuze
no short circuits
not a machine of a human
but the patience of a Spanish fictional bull.

James Jacques Joseph Tissot

Dance Me Through The Panic Till I'm Gathered Safely In

The collection is here!
 If you get a chance stop by The Fine Art of Design and visit Stacked Bookshop, located inside the shop if you wish for your copy. There is only five, yikes!

 The Un-Included Introduction, If You Will


There always is this yearning, almost dirty desire to be read and to be enjoyed. A sort of exploited desperation that exists within a writer when commissioned to create a collection. It seems almost necessary to title it i seem to have gone blind as well as cover it with headless naked women. Each poem dedicates itself to the idea that "the image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite." Nothing here can be claimed as fact, but nothing can be claimed as fiction.


I was told that this experience is something I will look back on and feel relief. And it really is a beautiful thing, in the way that beauty can be sick and intrusive. As for the recent pieces of poetry, a million thanks, dear Ireland. Finishing this collection brings me the release, the only path of escape. In the process during which I wrote the recent poems, I felt I did not create enough. But now I can remove myself and peer at what I did create, and although it is not much, I created something internally worthy for myself. For what has been created is exactly how I want to remember it.

Grrrrrr.

These Hills Exist

A Cacophony of Silent Redwood Trees




 I woke in Yosemite 
Jamie curled up next to me 
cupping my left breast, platonically
 her body morphs a furnace 
I find myself again 
inside of the tent this time 
with a single sheet tightly wrapped 
like a coroner's bag around my body 
the sun finally stretches its arms 
piercing the microscopic stitching 
and there is warmth 
stuffy warmth 
and the desire to desert the wilderness 




JMI