Satellite.

Satellite.

 

I'm home.

Home home.

Skin shed,

an eager snake rattling

down this birth canal

 

past facades that used to be places, fumbling fingers and the stink of sex.

 

Tiny buds of yesterday open, a little bird's rib cage raw to the elements,

skin crawling with recognition.

 

Fifty miles downriver,

gone a hundred years

in the boil of the night,

a man is buried.

 

Here, one death stops them a century,

twenty a moment,

a breath.

Then the silent file back into comfortable lines.

This is madness that we tolerate.

 

But what right have I to we?

To throw my weight around this town I truanted.

Amongst these

voices that belong

that persist

that tolerate

much more than I.

 

They're hewn from bedrock.

Embroidered by the wind,

the very millimetre of it.

So sure of themselves,

every breath a certainty.

There's no locks on this house,

just windows open to birds,

satelliting. 

 

Here, everything's personal.

Home and home home.

 

Home is cardboard.

I walk and think

no country was ever mine

 

not so much as O'Connell and Pearse, the heroes of selected prose my father loved more than us.

Coke cans float in nooks  of mossy wellsprings,

steeped in comfortable tolerance.