Legends of Dundrum
Legends of Dundrum
(Just for the Kraken)
Shipwrecked in Dundrum.
I have been swallowed by a Kraken
though I am no Jonah
just an obscurely drifting piece of plankton
among the shoals of my kind
who are also being eaten.
(Switching Over)
After handing my keys and my cards
and my identity over
to a blue-faced officer
I was prodded through a strip-lit tunnel
toward an enormous concrete bunker
that was damp and cold and far too brightly lit
and filled with hordes of elephantine machines
engines wrapped in polished steel
and glass gleaming
like an arsenal at rest
I was washed
in throbbing phosphorescent rays
sprayed with anesthetic
force-fed blood and vomit
injected with a yellow lotion
that reeked like wino's piss
before being loaded
onto a reinforced fibre-glass
elevator that spun me
out of the planet at
a bone compressing speed
so that by the time I'd reached
the third floor mezzanine
I had been shrunk
and was now numb enough
to make the switch
and be hauled in backwards
through an eye-sized sore
into the kingdom of the rich
(Stowaway)
Just me
me with my single
conspicuously gleaming tusk
a lone stowaway
on this cacophonous vessel
this cargo hold
a thousand metres high
stacked with row upon row
of glittering cages
containing everything on earth
where nothing else shines by its own light
and every captive has to double up
excepting I
who must hide
in the interstitial shadows
in the narrow hope
of outlasting
forty days of flood
unnoticed
in the guarding dark
a solitary unicorn
who has snuck onto the ark.
(Seanies' Jinx)
A fool half-jarred
on a lonely road
I jump a wall,
seeking a shortcut;
but instead I cross
into a jinxed field
Despite the oft repeated warnings
of that drunken mentor of my childhood
who later choked himself to death
I have no coat to inside-out
I walk and I walk and I walk
always the same eerie patch
of nettles and grass
beneath my feet
running gets me nowhere
the stars have stopped wheeling
the dark bulks of the clouds do not drift
they just lie there fixed
like the upturned corpses of whales
in nigh-time's frozen ocean
I walk and I walk and I walk.
I do not bother to scream
the full moon
has shut its stoney face
will never wane.
(White Horses on Giant Screen)
On a giantscreen
giganticpurplebotoxedlips mime a lovesong
underneath, subtitlelike,
the pixellatednewsloops by in standoutwhite
white horses ride around a carousel
the faux-punk grimaceswiththepainof unrequitedlove
HEALTH MINISTER PROMISES DELIVERY
punchestheair with a demonapingfury
AMERICA
WARNS ISRAEL
ON VIOLENCE AGAIN
white horses ride around a carousel