Paradise Lust Book 2 Part 3 (91-133)
for Thomas Glave
Penance is not forgetfulness and the passing
crisis made past in reportage and chit-chat
is no less agony: the seepages and accumulations,
stocked-up fishbellies in stock standard measurements
of ‘stocks’, quotas in net islands abolishing
and expiring in reducing and consuming
their own denials. Perpetual roads
with working woods clustered about,
as Roman as permissions ordered through decrees,
a recording of dissension is divine or worse
to sound the bells, make fatal thrones
of all our coaches and swivel chairs,
or shucked up with newspaper
beneath dual carriageway, a rumpus
of transport warmed by the victory
of vibrant airwaves: the Tetra tower
nearby hummed through the night:
homelessness denounces lesser gods.
Which heaven ranks a fairer person?
I won’t stand down, renege clown antics
you grow weary of: O the plangent
wistful insightful (little burst of incendiary)
troubled sensitive invigilator of trauma
with clinical but rouge-like distancing,
that fairer person, that not lost of Heaven.
We subjects of colonial disordering.
In the pompous buildings a calmative
or restorative tempers invention:
pragmatists and idealists rubbing toes,
their tonguey mannas respectable for all
seasons they shift like cards: wisest
counsellings. And noble to boot.
Some peers already who might lament
the burning in pitchworld, lament
the regressive, gingerly nibbling the ‘bestial’
over their classy humours: O for the blue waters
unhindered: yes, indeed, the clear waters of lagoon
or just extension of blue water wishes; I should explain,
my shifting allegiances of many years not in politics
but in embodiment: and in the beatings I received
I hand a plumage to all sufferers (I have not forgotten you
and would never abandon): it’s true, and fear will leave
letters floating among the security services,
nation and exclusion bedfellowing semantics
to smile through urges and persuade wars:
‘cast ominous conjecture’ to unfurl their
success, that regular gruel all might ingest
without the posse’s revenge. Dire, the towers
of Heaven looking to ancestry for the clarity
of air, the rights of flesh, untrammelled love.
Dire, the legions’ fear of obscurantist wings.
John Kinsella