You are the gold
that is injected
into my tired and weary veins,
but still
I feel
that my cracked
and broken
soul will never be
anything
other than Tupperware
in a dishwasher;
orange stained
from overuse and
un-washable
sauce deeply imbedded into my plastic
lid.
Lonely
is
the
sand
that
is
not
touched by the sea
Ian D. Hall 2022
Listen my love
As you take my hand
As we walk gently to the town’s fair
I can no longer love you
in the way that you wish
under Wolfs Tone’s marbled stare.
You see my Ma thinks that we have
no future together
and I’m inclined to agree
for I seek a different life sailing the sea
beyond our small life
here in Bantry.
So she said her fond farewells
his face drowned in tears,
and the taste of bitter salt
I’ve been called boring,
I’ve been told I am miserable,
Weird, odd, names of derision,
Not our kind, useless,
Straight up to my face
That I was going to Hell,
That they wished I hadn’t survived
The experience of self-harm,
That I was a disappointment,
That I wasn’t loved,
That she wished she hadn’t turned up
To our wedding,
Three hours after saying I do,
On a train to London as we set off
To make something clean,
You
must understand
that something else
will have to become dirty,
leave a mark, a smudge,
a smear
elsewhere…
My mind keeps whispering
clean and purge
the pain
in the leg, the sciatic nerve,
the fearsome ache in the neck
and spine, and groin, and eyes
and take a cloth to the arm
and leave my mark there…
over
and over
again,
till
It may look spectacular,
The first-time roll
of the – count them and weep – five sixes
that make up the thrill of Yahtzee,
but what does that matter if all you roll
afterwards is the odd
double four,
forever chasing the large straight
or the four of a kind,
shaking your hand, blowing
the dice, willing them
to give you the thrill once more of a five
that leads to a hundred…
forgetting that the win is based
partly on making sure you score
Surrounded upon all sides
by a mountain of inspiration
I could ever wish for,
and yet here I sit behind
a lock down home, scared
to take a peek, occasionally
being brave to see what’s happening,
the peep hole giving a glimpse of
what is normal.
Normal, nothing
had better be considered
as normal again, not by their standards,
not in our lifetime, not in the next,
because all is out of control,
“Put that light out”, would come a voice of thunder
from outside on the street, “Don’t you know
there’s a war on?”
You couldn’t answer back
by saying I know my rights, but I need to see,
how am I supposed to do this, that, and a bit of the other
if my lights aren’t glaring, lighting up the streets…
any way I don’t believe there is danger
up in the skies, I think you are over
reacting, jumped up little Hitler,
that sound above
If I should cease tomorrow
would it matter, all that I have achieved
is but dust waiting to fall from my hands,
to shed loose from my skin, the words
lost in Time, nothing ever truly resembles success
for in the end, life,
is the mirror’s illusion, the offering to resign
before the shit gets wiped in your face
from those who have forgotten you.
I should have stayed in the dark,
waiting for you to carry me home,
for in you, at least, there is no despair.
I have in my family tree
only one person in five hundred years
who was born in Ireland, technically that makes me one
in five hundred and twelfth of the Emerald Isle.
Even then it was by default as he was born at his mother’s insistence
as she could no longer hold on to the pull of the umbilical cord
and would kill any man
with a face of black thunder who tried
to stop her getting rid
of her impetuous fairy like Cornish-Scottish hybrid load
and to history, who knows,