As/Is







11.11.2005



An Irish Poetry Knobhead Squad was out in force last night, prowling a gallery of art, puffed up in an all weather jacket the operative felt unable to remove, due to her unhygienic state. For the last forty-eight hours, "Dick" (lurking undercover in the guise of a balding white-slum male officer agent on duty for the Global Poetry Coalition's Intelligence and Enforcements Agency) has been sporting a dress and calling himself "Doreen", fully equipped to capture and extol the showtime vibes crucial for honest poesie to thrive, and; he as a she had a right old dust up of things

So much so
that the muse whose balance weights his reality
- in the critical pieces of incisive reportage Mr Misery has been contracted to produce -
is no longer writing for us at the moment and arrangements have been agreed with an alternative member of staff which are now in effect.

The role of author
exploring where language may lead
has been handed over to the mind of MC Megagag
Lovidia Yeats,

who wields
through mechanical pencil
to keyboard
what thoughts within her allotted span
will breathe or sneeze in print towards
unmarked borders winding through the breeze unchecked

to a point of light calculation
- now gadget measured -
but once a knowledge vast generations
of ancients guarded in the temples of their gods.

On the cusp of getting brought
within a complex of arbiters
whose practice of symbol
ritual, truth and belief

takes place continuously
here at the Helicon Height HQ
of Dublin Quays

I urge you drop in, turn on and tune out. For a strange thing is afoot in the world of verse, and the art-hewn bulliten board is straining under the leish of trivia and tremendously important developments in the world of Irish poetry and, as one night's tale can be told as anothers let me recount how

In concrete sea
beneath some steps
a shorebound salmon
listens to nuts talk of fish
who swim through blather squalls

and an audience of water falling sedate
as its force lifts bouyant
affirmnational rites.

Elsewhere
a lone headlamp collides
with alert rabbit-like eyes, alive
but

unable to hop through space
unexpected, bouncy
pressing, real
or merge in absent disconnection
unspotted
heard
tasted or told,

the animal sticks up a paw
to cut figures through air
searching for a centre-point
of dawn's eternal love

in the flame of life
timelessly tick
tocking homeward to a cool
faced glow where modernity's edge

sits atop of nature
kip grim
unable to hide or stop
from flopping completely
as frozen shatters
of tap run meek clop beat bop
bleats chip silent from the clock.