Poetry

Three Dublin Songs

by

Andrew Burke

(i)

Tom Conway, held up high on Boland’s broad shoulders,
haloed by streetlamps, shouts, marshals the crowd.
The weekend dictator between nightclubs, high court of
the playground, striped shirt, dubes, dyed dirty-blond hair.
While the girl on my arm with the bleary slurred-stagger,
I’ve been trying to avoid for a good forty minutes,
tells me in whispers as the crowd starts to push
how she was fucked for the first time at Wesley,
in the stalls in the shitter, too pissed to protest,
by a ‘Rock boy in fourth year when she was fourteen.
And then goes all quiet, then whispers again
how she feels stupid for telling me, lets go
of my arm and staggers back into the crowd.
And I probably might have found something to say
if I wasn’t so totally rat-arsed myself.

(ii)

Mulrennan and Savage, standing tell on the fairway,
Oisin texting ahead to say he’ll be late
(From the Bentley he got for his seventeenth birthday)
“When d trfk clears up on d fkng M50”
for the golf game at four, then the drinks, then the nightclubs.
I’m trying to hit the damn ball in the grass,
the maddening swing of the air-cutting arc
throwing up only the lazy green blades,
get bored; watch the caddies haul some drunk off the green,
asleep in the bushes, a bottle of Dutch
and an ancient stained raincoat, all ripped at the seams,
while Mulrennan distractedly cradles a 9-Iron,
examines it, feeling its weight in his hands.
“I bet you could kill someone with this.” He tells us.
“I bet you could fuck someone up with this rightly.”

(iii)

When the ghoul-star rises behind the parted clouds,
We’d fill the cold streets with our goading bravado,
trying our best, all the while, to ignore
the muzzled roar of infinity, mocking us,
on the edge of your hearing, just there, but so low
only dogs, and the moths, can properly hear it.
It teases you, peeping the edge of your vision,
in the space when your watch stops between every second,
in between streetlamps, and where buildings join
as we creep the shouting streets tasting childhood’s slow murder.