ULYSSES on the LIFFEY

Stephen’s Penitence

(I sit) on the cuckold
Of Martello tower
Thumbs flailing (madly)

In trouser pockets lurched
(Of money)
And hard candies

And (as always)
The fear of waking
To Stephen’s penitents

Irish notes inked (from)
Pocket to bar-top
With James’ one-eyed smirk

A tenor’s arrogance
Passed over wood and rail
Hard coughing men (and)

A brown frothing of ale
Guineas for Guinness
Black Death and madness

Breathlessness

Bullied head first
From between red blistered thighs

Formed in the solemnity
Of a belly

Where life forms life
In a silence unbearable

Life’s first breath exhumed
From a silence that denies

Life’s first breath

Formed in the solemnity
Of a belly

No sweet succor to nourish
A formless soul

Feeding off the ambient silence
In a belly swollen ripe

Awaiting the silence
That reveals the last breath

Bullied
From between scabbard red thighs

Life’s first breath
Formed in a belly ripe

Feeding off the silence
Bullied headfirst

Into the breathlessness of it all

Inconspicuous

By no means am I recluding, some say deluding
Nor am I conceding, or improperly receding

Perhaps amenable, some say loquacious
All too polemic, too often fallacious

Now in concluding, or is it eluding
By no means saluting, nor refuting

This too often deluding, some say confuting
Inconspicuous recruiting, of dower reusing

Evenings Ugly Shoal

I found myself wandering through time’s fiery hole
Through catacombs and cobblestones
Steps swaying unevenly scorning mornings’ light

Eyes fixed like godly scaffoldings on evening’s ugly shoal
On killable and crumble stalks and all things never sought
Ants bodies brittle crumblings beneath tiny soulless boots

When sleepy eyes go searching through time’s immortal hole
All fieriness and cobble-stoned steps
I’ll eat a plums sweet succor all stickiness and warm treacle

I’ll find myself wandering through catacombs and scaffoldings
Scorning evening’s ugliness that sinful intractable shoal
Through time’s fiery unseededness inglorious wretched hole

If I Were a Bog

If I were a bog
I’d be oil and loom

Sod clumps, bones
And peat

As I am not
I sit in wet breaches

Cinched twill, hiked
And taut

Jocosta

Jocasta blinded her son
In a vex of anger

Over his unwillingness
To grabble

Between the scullery
Of her legs

The Dane’s are know well
For incest and ghosts

The cup of a skull
Jibbed in the palm of a hand

Calipers and slides ruling over love
And remorse

A phrenologists rubbings chinking bone
From skin

Clicks of Lice

A bundle of clothes
Happed over shoulder

Feet drawn like stones
Over mud and brick

(caulked with lice)

Souls worn through
With fear and reason

And the clicking
(of lice)

In the bundles
Of clothes

Our Dog

Our dog ate rinds of
Black bread
Stropped in molasses

The rats
Violent with heat

Chuffing the crumbs
From the slaver
Of its mouth

And our dog
Chasing its tail
In an idiot’s circle

Fending of rats
And an indifference
To heat

Morning Gluttonous Morning

Morning is gluttonous
Like sheep cutthroat to the slaughter
Red, arterial, perhaps redder still

As the sky’s hatchet
Beating a drumming, a tympana
On the throat, the skull bones

The lamb’s wool queuing
To the slaughterhouse, mouths
Slavering, upturned, curled like

Stalks of rhubarb, yet perhaps
Tarter, and redder, waiting for
The cutthroat, to put a silence

To the lowing and grass culling

What a black cur, never so much
As a blinking of an eye
As the hatchet, swinging arched

Cuts through tendon, bone, whiter
Than marrow or milk

Levinas’ Face

For Levinas
The other Face
That I face

(not while shaving)

Is the face that faces
The other
That is a reflection

Of the face I face
While facing the face
(shaving in the mirror)

Facing the Other face
(not shaving)
But face to face

Facing the Other
That is the face that
Faces the I that is

The Other face other
Than I which is I
The face that faces

The Other
Face to face
That is I and Other

(than I)

That is I as Other
Face to face
With I the Other

(while shaving)