E

Early Closing

All the shops are closing early and this town is like an old western. The cowboys are getting drunk in anticipation of the holiday ahead. 

My taxi driver tells me it’s not worth staying out tonight. He usually works from four in the evening to four in the morning, but he’s from the wrong side of town he says, so he’s not safe. Last year he got swore at for working the holiday by a passenger of some obnoxiousness. Her friend reasoned that if he weren’t working, he wouldn’t be available to take her to where she was going. You’ve got to make a living, no matter what day of the year it is. People sweat and gruel on the Sabbath and on Christmas Day, despite the order to rest.

Parts of the city are packing themselves away. Little flat pack maisonettes and grocery stores put into storage for a week or two, hoping that vacancy will be enough cotton wool to protect them from the knocks of the season. It feels too unnatural to hibernate in the summer.
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Now the helicopters are out like tropical dragonflies attracted to the heat, scanning the heats for whatever dragonflies seek. Sugar or pollen or riots. Half the doors are locked and some cars are parked with a prayer. In here, an explosion is never a car backfiring.

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Escapism

A funnel: a hot funnel;
steam of tepee
nestled before me.

It is mine,
mine to contemplate
and pour over,

mine to stir
its collapsed architecture
inside the circular domain

to tease  with nonchalance,
exposing its heart
to the air of my kingdom.

I process this little
treasure of peace
to souse over time. It is mine.

Northern Ireland tea drinkers consume 3.98kg per person per year, the third highest in the world

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Expansion

See Ireland’s bog meadows
cloistered under dawn;
Autumn, when everything dies,
even the spirits of man,
no longer holding proud
his evergreen resolute traditions.

The forest of guns have been stripped:
see death’s wood and brass char
in the enterprise of progress.
You cannot build on marshland
thick with the history
of a nation’s blood.

Cluain an Bhogaigh, Bog Meadows Nature Reserve, beside the M1 motorway