...in your vomit and shark and sawdust sweatshops my eyes were opened to dirty beauty.
I think I fell in love with you then, hopelessly, eighteen and horny.

Where are my long lashes of poetry that run into my eyes and blind me with the sting of gin on rainy days in Dublin? Where is the sun?
If it is not here is it elsewhere drying out olive oil complexions in some other city of coffee and moderation?
We have no sunlight for salvation... let's face it.

Where is my bloody dignity, Dublin?
Where is my other bracelet - the one with the barcode from the Saint James Infirmary Dublin 8?
Where are the words to resonate my strange humour with your cracked pavements and stem ends of dead flowers?
Your glass towers to the mighty dollar harrowed with shadows of ancestors sleeping and whoring in close quarter tenements; flea-bitten crabbed and eaten alive...Your fucking eyes sneering from the gutter trying to swear but choking, your broken bottles your wiry hands under filthy fingernails clawing for one final merciful pound of flesh...
Where will I draw fresh water from your backyard taps and stench of stale stout - your black pools and greasy canals of dampened cigarette ends - your crushed aluminium cans of scrumpy that drift down the Liffey pumping tar to your arteries?
Where are my poesies that withered from no water last summer and needed an emergency vodka transfusion in the autumn to save them from mediocrity?

Dublin...my whole brain is itchy in your sweltering damp...

I have seen my mind muttering and dribbling at bus stops counting the pennies in my pockets like some mad old hag and harpy on the rocks of vanity... I am touting my sleazy wares to old sailors, lend me your ears... lamentations, quotations and kisses for sale... If this stale song had words they are forgotten, alcohol has not preserved them... my semen shanty is the streets of docks with all the smell of urine and salty air...vinegar...I am being ugly now for it's own sake Dublin...

... I have nothing left for you to take...
... I can't even spare a euro and I'm not being scabby it's the truth...
... I need it all to buy cigarettes to get me through your baleful afternoons...
... I mean....what are you trying to do to me? You never know when to shut up...
... Fuck...It's probably best we both shut up we don't want to say anything we'd regret...
... We're both sick of regret. I know you can be romantic but I've yet to see you sexy...
... I write secret bitter poetry about you behind your back I don't really mean it you know I still love you don't you?
... It's maybe the darkness or the last glass of wine but...

I mean, I'm trying to tell her I'll always remember how pretty she looks when she's all upside down and dizzy staggering home happy and just for a second she gives me a smile and I know I'll never leave...I mean I think I'm trying to tell her I don't regret staying with her...
I mean... It's just strange is all to think I never told her before...

Beautiful whore city... strumpet of gaudy lippie... graceful junkie in drag... foul mouth slag and fishmonger... imagining her former self pushing barrows through side streets cackling at young fellas inhaling the fumes from gas pipes at the back doors of oyster kitchens... her chip shop literary tradition... her midnight poverty of inhibition... knickers at odds with gravity... her strange poise and tragedy... her grisly poetic legacy... her stubble as she kisses me; goodnight... her face with sunken smoke dried eyes... her animal cries of drunken rhetoric... her love laced with arsenic...no city for a poet so romantic.

Next week I'll have a stab at writing limerick.

Want to comment on this Poetry? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Poetry and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...