Ghost 5

Alone in yellow-lit bedrooms, contemplating fat mattresses. Alone, breathing, half-awake, knowing sleep will come soon. Remembering, remembering... In my T-shirt under the duvet, weak at the remembrance, half-thrilling, half-despairing.

Switch on the delicate yellow lamp, or the bold bare bulb on the ceiling, wake up and be adult, alive in the brave life of the real world... Consider your loves rationally, like you've seen other men do. Conceal the depth of sadness that constitutes your emotional state, give yourself over again to dreams.

Alighting into dreams, give yourself again to the knowledge of real images spurned bitterly from real life, achingly remembered, visions, images, messages, things that actually occurred long ago in summer streets, where the sunlight slanted from concrete to concrete, now rained-on, now degraded, now unspeakable. Consider her in her porch like a roadside Madonna, stolidly encamped there, clutching her suitcase, surrounded by porticoes and railings, baroque embellishments of yellowed concrete as the sun glimpsed between buildings and lit where she stood, streamed down the street, got in the eyes of all the white transitory ghosts that glided by, glinted on the windows of angry cars racing downhill, reflected, slid away, faded again as the crowds dispersed, back to darkness again where all days return.

Struck by the memories of it, struck by my pink, frightened soul across the street, suddenly frozen into love but afraid to follow its lead.... I was saddened and glum in my bedroom.

Ghost 4

Imagine perfection lowered into earth, in silk skin, with no barriers or boundaries, but flawed, female, sulky, full of jokes! Imagine a latter-day Venus that could sit so solidly, with such an effervescent and mysterious beauty that it would take your breath away. How often have I dreamed in nights that I could see it again, her face, framed in brown hair that fell prettily in her eyes, her lips, her eyes a quiet blue. Her arms sturdy, her mouth laughing, her waist I yearned to grasp, slip an arm around. All that was beautiful in sixteen, all that was wicked, laughing, joyful, glooming and sad in a woman, in her, brought to life in her. She was a phantom that passes, she was the dream of beauty that disperses.

Wrapped in a uniform, in the quiet and commonplace uniforms of nineteen ninety one. A dark, blood-red jersey she would wear in lowering autumn afternoons, everything else black and comfortable. Outside, of course, the air bloomed, welcomed her, even the dark rainclouds wept, comforted her. The broiling smokes of autumn were her companion.

Her red lips, that spoke evil, that told jokes! Her brown hair and disgruntlement! Her sleeps in Sunday night silence. As she laughed like a débutante in the prefect's room, as she stalked, affronted, late for another class, through the corridors, loved and loving, sweet-lipped in sour glances.

I first saw her in the Modern Studies class, which was quiet and pastel-shaded with

it's Venetian blinds and sunlight slanting on the bare back wall. There were groups of brown school tables...

Ghost 3

I was in two minds... That marvellous girl, her fringe, her legs, her perfume, smiling at me, close beside me. She had silken brown shampoo-smelling hair sweeping down like a curtain, a red mouth and a vicious grin, a solid body full of dark-clothed promise, varnished nails, a quiet prettiness that sometimes turned aside in gloom.

We met, as usual, in the Art class, me hardly daring to believe my luck, desperate almost. One day she elected to sit beside me and I struggled to keep my heart from pounding as she quietly worked beside me. Ah, her dark brown hair, her blouse, her breasts beneath.

She was a popular girl in school, liked by boys and girls, outgoing, glamorous, sainted in my eyes. I didn't know much about her and was afraid to ask. As we began our conversations, our casual discourses on our likes and dislikes, I could barely restrain my sense of wonder that she would even stoop to talk to me. I hadn't, for any length of time, been so exposed to a girl in school and I let it go to my head, quietly, with a secret sense of rapture.

To me she was all the warmth of autumn embodied, everything pure, a Venus for cold nights. A sixteen-year-old, red-mouthed, in blue nights in the atmosphere of hometime. Her silken skin in bedrooms, her dark jokes. In school, with such dignity and grace, she carried a practical woven bag filled with her essays, everything non-serious and light. She cracked jokes with the teachers, chuckled disgracefully, but always with a drawing-back, an inner reserve, as she leant at stools with her soft skin, exuding a secret, unspeakable perfume.

All enacted in the empty atmosphere of nineteen-ninety one. She was left to empty suburban rooms and duvets, to the humour of streets and wallpapered rooms. Outside the bright yellow lamp-post burning all night long, while she swept about her brown hair, whispering secret joys to herself.

Ghost 2

Colours of broken street; painted with swathes and swashes of grey, rainwet, sodden and perhaps brokendown, ignored by everyone. Somehow though, i always remember it as yellow, a welcoming, sultry, Mediterranean yellow as ancient as time. Constructed by shiftless Scots, the purposeful bunnetted Hen Broons of time, smoking cigarette-butts, haunted by work. Ignored by endless faded-grey shopping-bag old ladies past the moulting autumn trees. Spat upon by all the drunken teens of a hundred years. Ignored by me heading past in some species of anxiety. The old grave walls ignored, the midnight church with its stained glass windows, the crumbling bricks, the sad monkish cell with its ancient pane of glass, and some sort of sad tumbling bookshelf behind. Here's the lofty, rainwet tree at the side of which i once pissed freely coming home drunk in the night, uncaring. All of this a black valley spotted with electric light and mock regency facades that look down with blackened eyes on the heat of drunkenness and carryout and eager, sexual, redhot 21st century spurned in the alleyway fucks and sweats going on in chambers over the road. Where in the modern apartment they have two TVs and all the glossy superfluous paper they could want, a fat computer and an excess of useless information held dull in the weighty brain at bedtime, as the occupier stumbles over the carpeted floor to snooze. Or at some nameless three in the afternoon, a guy clashes the door of his sportscar and is already grappling his mobile phone like a moviestar. Ambles into the Italian restaurant like it was Sunday afternoon...

Ghost Part 1

Drink for tonight, O ghost, on the elixir of the past...

Let's begin with the normal street, High Street, dark of course, post-cinema and utterly empty... Here there was sometime resonance of post-Star Wars, the Star Wars movie had just finished and we had grown sleepy inside, not realising the evening had already come on...

Or it was a pale afternoon out of nowhere, in this deserted street. On Saturday long ago. One day i'll tell my full vision of Saturday as it really is, of the perfection of yellow childhood Saturday, full of rejoicing in streets crowded with ghosts...

Ghost (prologue)

Silence, utter silence, loaded

Down with broken shards of glowing

Glass; profoundly shattered,

Scattered on the grass,

Hope left battered, in a grating,

Bastard blast.

Ghost, o ghost, that walks the breach

Between the holy host of days,

And melted beaches, endless childhood ways,

Or giant cinema boulevard of tears,

Or bankjob in the suburb's uptown fate,

Or Angel that arrived too late.

Ghost not nameless, ever seen,

But fleeting, ever fleeting, on the brinks

Of madness, joy, surrender,

Dancing on the Psyche's weakest beam,

Flickering in its grandest scene,

That ghost upon the streets of midnight cities

Is sometimes seen:

Serene, but haunting,

Ever haunting,

All the backward realms of wanting,

Every passion's deepest dream.

For Tír Chonaill

I came from the west, with the sun in my hair

I came over the green hills, with brown eyes

In the morning.

I came with a song on my lips

From the western lands.

I came complaining from dim parlours

And a fish-moustache, and a cursing hallway

Filled with old wallpaper and swearwords

In the pub.

I came with eyes of brown, like blown, rich-blooming fields

In which the sun still shone.

I wandered, my hair brown too, and ample,

Like Cuchuillain's in the morning.

Memories of hallways where we struggled and wept.

Disappointed, embittered, tousle-headed,

Full of sorrow in sods of fields. Ah this or that

Commodity, crop, or coin.

What good is that? What use

This looming earth?

Evil-teethed, we loomed in yards, unshaven,

Avoiding zealots of the lord.

Rat-infested townhouses in Donegal, burst water-pipes,

Turds in the drainage, courtyards full of refuse and must.

So we stayed indoors and prayed.

The room, high up, and dark,

As dark as rosary beads.