A resurrection in Charlesland
A resurrection in Charlesland
for Stephen Murray
Men are fools to invest in real estate
Basil Bunting, Chomei at Toyama
Under an avalanche of downward spikes
the flower cafe sinks
and could-of-beens
is all there is.
Pòl Potbelly lives.
Rank-risen butchers and grocers and pigmen
have gone cuckoo in the dàil
and annexed the last of the airwaves
where they are laying a 24-7 all -channel siege
to back-up a billionaires’ heave
on the commons.
It’s the age of the cowboy economist
of the fire brigade turning out to be arsonists
of the world’s most dickeybowed shock-jocks
of the midwives mass-trialed
with no right to reply on your laptop
of all the high-toned Pinochets
on the Radio
of a thousand and one Killiney Pinocchios
of the UCD Friedmanite
and his unchallenged pubgang of preppy echolytes
self-titled experts
in the necessary suffering of others
and how well they should bear it
and of a brutal commentariat
droning for national government
for slashing whoever’s timid and convenient
they keep saying that
deep and swingeing cuts
must happen quick and always,
always be more significant
$$$$$$$
Here lies my anonymous address.
Charlesland.
Dormtown full of jobless insomniacs,
paupers who were affluent a year ago.
Some of many in the Stranded Archipelago
of such. Not yet a ghost estate.
Still occupied by living souls,
just.
In a nation once again
For Sale.
And our symbol?
Well, noughty Aisling's been roughed up.
The vicious alchemists of capital
put a hex on her imported make-up.
From a gorgeous cocaine go-girl
she’s a riddled ghetto hag.
Everyone’s a patriot now,
flying their For Sale flag.
££££££
All the golden nest-egg rows changed back to brick.
The hoardings’ painted sunrays sprouted teeth
and claws.
In the online brochures the blue computerised skys
were recoded
as nets that are
thickening over us.
We’re webbed up in debt
and domestic addictions.
Our white-walled kitchen loneliness
is great
and always hungry.
Force-feeding ourselves Dan Brown, valium, parox,
Gerry Ryan and angelology,
we repeat the neo-liberal prescriptions:
staying in is the new going out
and there is no such thing as society
and we swallow down the lot
with a supermarket own-brand plonk
that unmiracles to vinegar in your mouth.
Morning after after morning after
we look back
while we’re hanging
fur-tongued and possibly still langers (why not?)
at the up-arrow years
when developers spiked us
with a hyperstimulant called greed
with no known antidote
or comedown cure
but death and disaster.
Estate agents casinoed our existences
spun a wheel with only one bright number on it,
Looking-After-Number 1
kept plying the line that everyone
was guaranteed to be a millionaire,
for starters,
till we were hot-cheeked with money lust
and then they swayed their magic keys in front of us
like hypnorapists goofing us
for all possible advantage.
Bankers brought the kinky costumes and equipment.
Adpimps supplied the glitterdust and lube.
Channel 4 filmed every oiled up inch and second of it
flatscreening it back to us
as we squatted
on the chaise-longue for years
to watch ourselves being screwed
while being screwed
on the chaise longue for years...
and most of us knew what was happening
and some of us truly were hoodwinked
and nearly everybody wanted it never to stop.
Thus were we rightly sodomed here and dumped
two million life-indentured gimps
stuck without an exit plan
in one of time’s bogged-down pauses,
history’s less-interesting amber phases
dream homes become burial mounds
in which we just about get by
most of the time
without killing
ourselves or our loved ones
square metered cells in dolmens of brick
subsiding nanometrically
in a slow motion earthquake.
but one day we all know the cracking open will accelerate
the falling down around us will be far too fucking quick.
Because isn’t it obvious?
Our imitation terracotta roofs can’t wait to collapse on us
cave in becoming overnight poetic and mysterious
like all the slumped stone cottages they’re jealous of
relics of so many oldsung irish hells
that memorise the bitter twisted centuries before us
and that we wist on whizzing by in cars or trains,
lulled to a deep-thought serenity
by their silent exterior stillness through the window-glass,
as each of them weakly yet perceptibly
returns to us reflections
that our inheritance is the mirror of our legacy.
Here let me put down my stake:
I bet you all posterity- that bingomasters’joke-
that far far future tourists visiting our formerland,
as they flipper through the shoals of broken glass and
the corals on our underwater weathered brick,
will paddle lyrical about our mystical decrepitude
our enigmatic spirituality,
our rough-hewn fortitude
in phrasings no-one now alive could hope to understand
and they will be delighted not to have the chance
to know what you and I
actually felt,
because sensation is what truly dies.
Brick and even word a while survive
but pain
has no remembrance.
Pain is now.
Pain is all the stretched out moments
you must just go on
living through
while your middle years
are being sucked
into finance’s bodiless hole
and your swinging retirement is hauled off
in a secret convoy to a noplace
for disacknowledgement
an offshore no-address
somewhere west of Easter Island
with all the rest of the lost lottoed lives
and forfeited futures of Charlesland.
A no recoverable haven.
Think! Memory!
The globe of time spins round upon
a carousel of catastrophe.
Our joust is coming round, again.
Who will ride and who be ridden?
The million damn-blasted cottiers
paragraphed in your textbooks
are not just your ancestry.
They are your childrens’ ravaged shadows
catching up with
and becoming
your children.
Our grandchildren’s days
will be worse
than our nightmares could dream of.
€€€€€€
Christmas zooms
because Christmas is a zooming season.
Family close in.
Pixelated friends of ghettosuburbs gone are sudden
flesh and musk and yep yap yup again
just like Mike TV.
The 365 Xpress
hurtling irreversibly
towards A and E terminus-
standing-room-only-
dissolves at the stop
while it’s dumping me off
as full and as empty
as when I got on it
$$$$$$$
and how those Kens and Barbies in the Crescent penthouse
can still afford to throw a 12 day cocaine orgy
at which everyone is fucking elephants
when all the Chalkdust Charlie’s been metabolised
and flushed away to stupefy the riverfish
eventually
them gang solicitors will
I sweat to God
levitate butt-first
and be whooshed off
in an UFO
like a black yacht
or a Stealth or the Holy Spirit
to New Ould Ireland in the Outback
or the Huron or Dubai
with powdered millions in their rectums
to fuck-kill some other slaves there
get themselves
replacement gums and septums
€€€€€€
to latin treks and altitudes and jungle wars
decapitated roadside borderland Does
twelve hundred unguarded
south-western coves
all mourning glory and nose-annah be
interbreeding panics multiply
epidemics spume through pipes and Gaps
from Blessington reservoir
and the backstreets of Bray
with their royal republican monikers
Albert Walk, Wolfe Tone Square
a seaward alleyway called Connolly
where Junkies shit, shoot-up
and die grammatically
in looping pre-recorded sentences of death
as if death’s browned off with death
nothing left to say upon
the utimate subject of itself
geriarchs as flaccid-fat as seals
dropping off in black and white
beneath remaindered paperbacks
on fin-de-siecle seaside holidays
skull and crossbones on a kite
the sighing ageless sea
floating kids and
donkeymen
brass-band-skeletons
lightning
glints like shells on the horizon of quartz
through the whole submarine the oberleutenant’s bronchial cough
or death being born-again reformed
in famished strung-out multiples
along the motorway
in a skinning hood’s
reversing testicles
a collallapsing doll’s
backsliding ovaries
her shitfaced unitoothed barflea uncle
a quartermaster in the Chuckies
gave away the mysteries
of the uphill avenger a.k.a mercury tilt
to a founding looder of the INLA
and it’s thanks to Tony, Bertie and the mid-fall USA
that the peacetime là and dividend has come
to these two leg tarantulas
with strictly business petrol bombs.
$$$$$$$
The wise guys in the headshops
are running low on scientific miracles
having just provoked
a snowed-in soiree
in the Grove
-late night revellers
zanier on unproved chemicals
than a thousand Timothy O Lears-
to let fly an emergency flare
that swallowed the moon and puked up a blanket
of cold electricity
indifferently smothering the stars
£££££££
in number 47
two tokes on the postman’s Divinorum
opens a wraith-hole to the Salviazone
where wind-chimes are buzzin like saws in the Amazon
and something gnomish but sparkling
and scheming far harder
is speech bubbling sinister hieroglyphics
to strangely gyring russian dolls
as they circulate among the eel-crowd
with their stringalong faces and garments of worms
££££££
gaping shadow cries
$$$$$
ghosts
of lost estates
sempiternally must mourn
all futures past
achieving of
the neverborn.
xxxxx
And could things be worse?
Of course, of course
said the horny black horse.
In the all alone field it was eating.
At least we’re still breeding.
Guiness books of unprophlyated spunk
spouting out through our divining pumps,
the ovulatians raging.
xxxxxx
On a moonlit mountainside in No 58 upstairs
by lakes of crinkled foil and absolüt
under clouds of lavalamps with lightning tentacles
MBA Tina still whirls in her upper class dreams
the vapour of her expectations
a quaking rut in an oak chateau
with an upright and parlying wolf
whose prick can sing librettos
in simultaneous RussianArabFrench
while downstairs on the rocker-cum-guest bed by Lidl
Georgie hums a medley of Lady Ga-Ga, Christy Hennessy and Handel
in a cock-eyed trance
an ecstasy of unimpeded masturbation
as he scores the cursor back and forth
across the genital hors-doeuvres
and sub-sub-sub-menus on slutload.com
pronging through the teeny gang bangs
he’s a clicking connoisseur of
and when alone with other men
an opinionated critic of as well.
$$$$$$
Twenty sets of curtains and a wooden fence out west along
the small dark wood that forms the gap
between private and public estates
the bonfire eeaawws and omadans
shotgunning Bavaria’s run-off
flagon-bonging Incense and Sniff
and the Genuine Gold
would lacerate the Luciferan throat, be Jaysus
shove that in your pope and mitre it
says he
while Urbi’s eating Orbi out
of his tree.
££££££
The over sixty-fives are being strongly advised
by the shock weatherwoman
not to venture out this heart-chilling year
except for mass and visitations
the weather’s unholy, prehistoric, perfect for mammoths
and statues
mares are going bronze on the hillsides of Wicklow
sheep lying down in the folds of geology
stranded cattle crystallise in drifts
foxes brittled in the fossilising winds
rock outcrops are raisins on the iced flanks of HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camenabologue" Camenabologue
and Tonelagee
and bones are snapping all around me
it is a trying time for insurance executives
there are far too few ambulances
€€€€€€
The host, I chuckle to myself, is eating corpses
xxxxxx
Every family electrocutes their back-yard rowan sapling
pookabuds beaming with
vanilla-leaf, assumption blue, peachy tea,
rosè glimmerers
pretty for a night or two but sure then
sure then it’s like hanging out your rubbish
though I stop
every time
to drink
the silver shimmer
at the tree of glass.
$$$$$$$
Wheelie bins of every crawling creep and colour
celebrate together
ecumenically
lid-lips glistening and sweetly-sour with poultry fat
and week old cream of brandy
streams and screams of their fluorescent laughter
their subsonic belching at the culinary joy of so much refuse
at how they’ve done the competition
built the stock
to break the neck
of any unionised binman.
£££££££
The childkillers in Superquinn play Slade repeat
and Wham and Huey Lewis and the News on infinite
until Wham!- American Psycho appears
going forward and aftward through the aislefuls of shite
we will all have to pay for
again and again
waving his brute insignia
the heraldry of present times
the almighty axe
of his restructuring.
€€€€€€
90 is the crack and speed at which Tadëuz
smacks the Crescent wall.
Redundant carpenter from Lodz.
£££££££
Christmas grows old quicker than fabled men get turned to stone
dies slurping its own waste
as if shit were the elixir
gross and indolent and pucker-lipped
thick with bling
burping its last fart
$$$$$$$$
my head my head my head my head
my head my head my head my head
my head my head my head my head
my head my head my head my head
my head is a fucking goldfish bowl
its five second memories
circle gleaming
flat-eyed and innocent
virused senseless
by the poisoned-information overload
they suffocate
go down
into the all-encroaching blackout zone
€€€€€€
and it is the last and final
take-away chicken supper
and all night I am destined to suffer
the martial jealousy of fireworks
sure they are small and trash against the night
as childishly as toddlers pot and can the kitchen floor
but they are all the fathers of firestorms
and the alarms triumph over every human sound
saving David Bowie’s little geniekin
sobbing on the pavement
his-her running glamourpus
like someone maliciously photoshopped
by a fucked-over ex
a clown with the face
of a used-up palette
a goo mask
found in a pile on Francis Bacon’s studio floor
not sure if he's a teenage rape or rapist
when here comes a security guard burglar with 10000 volts
in the nightstick of his cock
and the year shuts down like a manhole on a sack
sudden unassuageable
boom
and
clang
echoing
while
the horizon pointlessly resorbs
the last unfertilising star
into its scheduled slot
in the globe spanning nought
and Jan First struts out of the unhinging year
in chainmail and mace
with clipboard and smartphone and second-hand lash
cruel Sgt of the dawnless, the light-bled
to threaten and to goad
me over the top of every morning in the world
towards trenches and managerial objectives in China
and TOMORROW STINKS TOMORROW STINKS TOMORROW STINKS TOMORROW STINKS
tomorrow stinks like a tricoloured Cod
tomorrow spills the deep sea’s blood
upon the playgounds and the pebbledash
tomorrow salts the Sugarloaf
tommorow cancels poetry and physics
and the only true promise I can make to my tomorrowgod
is to be as
resolute and
as heartless and as
boiling with love and the apocalypse
as anybody’s sun and lord