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On Turning an Age

What have I learned but
Nothing
Nothings
Somethings about nothings
like
Heart is wild animal
Wild animal is pilot.

Life is absence much as presence,
names, stones, the splitting of sticks
missyous strewn across the holy scape like erratics.
Cavern …

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Notes from the blunderground

Haven’t been on Twitter since Russia invaded Ukraine. Hot takes, meme noise, and am-i-the-asshole all powerless when that nasty power-bloated shit decided to assert his vision as of course, guns and bombs, death, blood and soil.

Today I’m trying to …

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Soilmates (Short Story)

Donal Kelly Feenish Island Black and White

Out in the rhododendron, an old wind lies coiled lengthways along thick roots. The acidic slopes they twist through drop steeply towards the curve of the fjord. Sounds of the Atlantic and its dwellers drift up on younger, more eager …

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Fragments, #438

I will go to the cafe, pull up the chair at the table by the window, and become at once both swallowed by the world as if sucked into the gob of a passing fish, and a poster of this …

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Song: Deep Blue Eyes

demo memo recorded in Baurisheen. Crows scratching the air in the back garden. Early September 2019. Look at where the time has gone, how is this possible?

See the line, it’s far away but
Getting closer all the time
I …

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Essay: What does irony taste like?

A shallow meandering attempt to understand irony

Here’s a fun way to generate a headache. What’s the definition of irony?

Is it when you write a song called ‘Ironic’ that lists examples of irony but which aren’t technically ironic?

First, …

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Dispatches: vote for slugs

[image: Corrib river bank near NUI Galway on Ektar 120 via Hasselblad at 80mm; I expect this area will be re-purposed as per the planning permisison notice on the path, to give way to more student housing and carpark, and

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Song Attempt: Please Talk

Somebody is grafitting the walls down by the docks. The docks are deep, the docks are deep, the docks are deep to let the ships in and for… Somebody is writing “I’m not well Please talk” on the walls. See

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Tiger Wake

The Celtic Tiger, stone dead.
Isn’t it awful, awful?
She wandered onto the M6
Somewhere near Kinnegad,
Into the brute smack
Of a Lidl truck going west.

The heft of headlines, snap rage.
Isn’t it a real disgrace?
Someone left …

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Battleroad (song)

battleroad. song about dislocation and zerosum narratives. Or not.

Lyrics

On the battleroad, on the battleroad,
Whatever you were told, out on the battleroad.

You don’t fall, when you are dropped
Don’t know you’re moving, until the moving stops.…

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Short Story: Birds of a Feather

Joe waited until he was home alone before opening the bag. He dropped it on the kitchen table over a touristy place mat and scattering of unopened envelopes. His sweaty fingers gripped the zipper and the canvas spilled apart into …

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To Hanbury Gardens We Will Go

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

The car pulled up outside the entrance and three siblings stepped out into the hot sunshine. Sharp light …

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In Sea Tea (nct)

It wobbles now. A new wobble. Undisguisable. Over 50, something in the glovebox vibrates. Discomfortable frequency. Or maybe the world is wobbling, not the car?

I must try harder to never become emotionally invested in mechanical things.

Must try harder.…