LOVE COMMANDS THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
for Karl Parkinson
Boy who bellows like the Fresians on a Monaghan hill,
boy who screeches like a martyr in the flame, love him.
Stunned woman in slippers and nightgown,
slouching a zig-zag to Superquinn,
scoring cider for herself, vodka for her bruiser, love her;
Indianinkman who on the night of his break out
smeared dog dirt on his neighbours’ front doors,
hurled a brick through a little girl’s window; him too.
Teenage thief who nicked your MacBook
in the park and in the cafe your keys
and will anyway die sometime tomorrow afternoon
in a glass or a powder. Speeding mother
of four on her smartphone in the car
yet to crash into a toddler.
TY dealing molly and weed to the JC’s
in the flytip on the banks of the Three Trouts streamborder
dividing private and council estates.
Drop-out student whacking the wall and the wardrobe
next door, trying to drown all his fatherly anger
in the well only he can be drowned in.
Croupy kids who will whoop through the walls
all the nights of the week.
All-hours alarms - electric hysterics
bansheeing silence, noisebombing calm;
Yakking mutts you want to throttle or drown.
Love all these.
Love them though they press you to white noise
and earplugs, though they edge you to codeine and dope.
They are helpless like you are, they are helpless like sorrow,
like anger, like love.
Chubby Thai always chuckling like
the chuckle-God’s his brother
as he jogs after a football on the green.
Love the laughter and the boy, love the football
and the green, love the god and his brother.
Love the Ghost of the Pole who crashed into the wall.
Love the neighbour in a sari from Nairobi
who claims you spoke tongues in a warehouse
in Tallaght called The Victory Centre.
Love the door-to-door hawker who was born
in a hut in the drone-flattened Kush
and now parks his black beamer in front of
your western house, special-offering
bakemoulds and marbles and flyswats,
dispensing catalogues of flim-flam and gee-gaws
your daughter’s absorbed in for hours.
Love all those with a love like a grieving,
for they too are leaving, they too are going their way.
Close by there’s a man who stole through the barracks
after bombardment, collecting watches and teeth,
and a woman who walked out of a bomb. Love them.
Love fissures in footpaths that unspool overnight
like the nerve ends of an earthquake, or graph-lines
of impossible interest. Love the playground laid down
seven years from its promise, where youngsters
are pooling in twilight, nursing their secret new lives.
Love the road they call 'spine', and all the bright
yellow signs of advice that nobody follows.
Love the sexual nightscreams of cats, the boorish kaka-ing
of crows, lamp-posts they look down from
and assuredly outwait.
Love the first rough throat in the morning.
Love the last sad mutt in the night.