One does not shoulder much water for a fist-squeezing Euro bottle, like a child I have been snared, hook, line, and sinker again - colour leering on labels, it was always my Achilles Heel, 20 Major smokes in 1981, had a similar nuance of mystery-cradling green,
and I looked at men dying of cancer, in that catacombed Blanchardstown ward, solar systems of fields outside Dublin yet to conquer - all shielded in 20 Major packet green,
I grew weary, coercing a pallid drained bottle on a belching sated bin, greener than their retirements of skin, with morbid envy, arriving ambulances wailed their blues on the city’s bony fingertips,
sapphire water submerging the grassy,
now abandoned deltas.
Man of a Certain Vintage
He is a man made from shadows that move at a far enough distance for him not to bite, his medals are Persian spices, Tibetan cloth, a hearty diet of Judaeo-Christian prayer,
he is a man who pokes the flame at camp fires, devilish shadows daring the retort of sunken trees, his life lives on the bonfire of 8mm film, sifting through the burnt offerings of evening song,
in a tin blue-lipped cup homemade wine waits, for the women he met in Arkansas, a woman he met in 1968, smoke signals for those vintages he could have sank.
The Last Testaments of Kurt Cobain
Almost poetry, isn't it, how your garage roof points somewhere you aren't sure exists, the art of the silver spoon in motion, then it's metallic teeth biting back. That regency face in your recreation box, now he's the guy we should chat to, ask had you washed or eaten, how scraggly your hair had become, blotchy Levis, love-sick and sorrow fattened face, a glare on cornflake-fix morning T.V. Yeah, he's the one, pretty songs sung for a cop called Muldoon in a hat that points somewhere he hopes exists for you, generation gap formalities put on hold; curtains a secret portal in which he finds segments of you have escaped to, segments floating around in the 22 years it took me to say this, to fathom you were more than spit on a camera when I was frisky for the carcass of Aerosmith to come to town.
Bio: John Doyle is from County Kildare Ireland, and has been writing on and off for the last 20 years with occasional and bewildering forays into total and consistent lucidity. His work has also appeared in The Galway Review, The Screech Owl, A New Ulster, A Clockwise Cat, Jotters United, The Maynooth Newsletter, Three Monkeys Online, Ink Sweat and Tears & In Between Hangovers. His hobbies include but are not limited to crazy golf, ripping up phone-books, bingo, & playing hide and seek with common household insects grotesquely enlarged by radiation.