Drawn, moth to moon I fell, down to the fermenting Newfoundout,
that fabulous, infamous refuge, tugging in awe
at sodden sleeves of thieves and anthropomorphous mounds of drought.
Idealistically, in each ascetical, grim face I saw
non-attachment, secret masters, stoics bearing bravely existentialist distress
with humble, stumbling steps, routing worldly poverty through rank integrity.
All lost within the sawdust strewn cidered wilderness
where faeces, phlegm and violence were doled out uncharitably,
dispensed in that sanctuary where vomit flavoured lungs
cursed and vowed, dreaming aloud in raucous, rambling tongues.
In departmental stores, jaded housewives with highlighted hair sipped cappuccino
coffee
from china cups or scrutinized aisle and rail for colourful placebos,
aching with denied desire for self-forgetting liberty,
like playground children spinning to a pitch transcending egos.
While under a hazy, pomaceous glow aligned with drug tinged tolerance
two consumer subcultures combined
in perverse addictive drives to fill the empty distance.
In bright eyed naivety I dragged each guttered, burnt out mind
into the blinding light of shining Sunday streets I knew,
uncomprehending protests of so many at so few.
Fleeced and sheepish, shifting weight, legless drifters, lame
passed over lambs in patient florin files,
before a no-change, two bob bottled Dionysus they came,
rancid shirts, odd, battered shoes and crooked smiles,
eschewing changing fashions, broken free from common thought.
Among this diaspora I would stage my misplaced quest
for an iconoclastic sage, a displaced Daedlus sought
by a tabid Icarus. Ask of cloth clad bones possessed
of two ounce tins and dead men’s coats for heresy and esoteric eloquence,
no lasting truths are learned to justify a man’s life long existence.
Mike McNamara (B.A. Hons.) Humanities was born in Ireland but lives in South Wales, UK. He had his Selected Poems ‘Overhearing The Incoherent’ published by Grevatt and Grevatt in 1997. Mike is a published songwriter. His poetry has been published in Acumen, Aji, Dawn Treader, Dream Catcher, Envoi, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Lyric, New Welsh Review, Orbis, Reach, Tears in the Fence, etc. Mike also had a selection of poems published in The Pterodactyl’s Wing (Parthian, 2003).
Illustration Nick Victor