Legends of Dundrum

Legends of Dundrum

8 Nov

Written By Dave Lordan

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.

(In the Underground Car Park)

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.

(Mall 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 night-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