Dead poets/mice society

The two Irish poets I like quite a lot who died this year

Now, it is the least necessary thing, the most superfluous, the most un of unnecessary things to have a day dedicated to poetry, especially for those of us for whom poetry is important on a daily basis. However, it is National Poetry Day in my recent homeland, the British Isles, and I’m drinking beer and smoking in my bachelor flat after a very prosaic work week, in anxiety of the mice that are sauntering along the cracks of my ceiling, atop their dead comrades ,(I’ve named one Robert for obvious reasons, and the other one Duchess, re; Blandings) and Seamus Heaney died recently, and there was no one, being new and odd in town, to whom I could say “Janey Mack, isn’t it terrible about old Seamus being dead ‘n’ all,?” and the other party going “O aye, the poor creatuir – sure he looked grand on the telly all the same.” So I’m including a poem I wrote that will (hopefully) be included in the fifth issue of Dublin based The Poetry Bus magazine.

The problem with attachment

–Prosigo sin cuerpo – Octavio Paz

Find your breath in meditation

and the world outside turns into

hundreds of starlings

unfurling your fingers in flight

The thing you desire the most,

like a telephone wire

hanging from the side of the building,

burnishes trapped memories

you catch from the corner of your eye

Each calculated move in gratification

starves in a satisfied hunger,

lives in folly on a stage

of its own making

You fall into the unwinged

shadow of your being

Fingers break the skin

that bind you to yourself