Home (Poetry Monthly)

Concrete feet slap concrete street, 

old stone anchored on

the swell of piss-soaked Lagan.

A filthy tributary, choked vein

as I pass through the heart of this

Titanic town,

 

glance close-quartered huddle of houses,

the stench of sea, salt and Scotland in their brick.

Pallid faces leer through mortar,

daubed rebellion whitewashed from every eave.

I touch my forelock,

pay respect to whichever side’s here.

 

Blown-in accents, transatlantic, jog

pertly by in Lycra swish.

My aftershave stolen by ocean chill,

I sail straight through.

I'm home again

to count the fucks on bar bog doors.

 

Whorls of bodies ebb to the same bars

on the same nights.

Jetsam trading in embezzled histories,

outdoing miseries,

cracking the same jokes and the same heads,

“Did you hear about the Irish boomerang?

Sings songs about going home but never quite makes it there!”

“Wind your neck in!”

“Look what fat your head is!”

 

All while the fizzing of the pumps suck the same barrels dry.

The pavements glitter reflected shards of lager glass.

 

After - shit burgers from malaria wagons.

Plastic cheese takes a layer of skin from your han’

The scream's a phone call home

from a distant land.

 

I wander, nomad, half sober,

craving water, like the Moorish

but there’s no Alhambra here,

just cacophony of culture.

As I see stars, a sacred heart

could not choose sides.

I need to piss but nowhere's

clean.

 

Where are you now

you kings of Ireland?

Some descended Boru in bed with the British

fumbling a greasy coin across the Pale.

 

At nightclubs, foundered skin-tight cackles from belts and goose-pimpled young flesh

crack the night.

“Blow it out your bangle!”

“Bout ye big lawd?”

disturbs the cripples’ and veterans’ careful chew and hum of tired eulogy.

In every war grave, rotting morals, flowered pasts blossom

to the tune of scraping forks on single plates.

 

With one voice we sing from Famine to Reconciliation in one short night.

 

This city's a morning sigh,

too clichéd to be a contradiction.

A sob in the night.

Like turning things on that aren't even plugged in.

 

The years when hype came

some sort of peace followed.

Anglicised saints played cauterised scholars,

prayed to the feet of the dollared gods

in this city that ate the weak

and spat me out so many times

I grew to call it home.