The Lion-Tamer Someone said he met his death Like a lion-tamer Who decided to tease his animals Until he could tempt them no longer. He misconstrued their appetite And left the circus divided. Someone called him a ‘Hero’, Someone else preferred, ‘The Fool’, A third party argued life was a show And commended the part […]
To Scotland on the Occasion of the Vote for Independence on September 18, 2014 If I were in Ireland three hundred years ago I would be hedge schooled in militant I would speak emigrant I would despise the English empire with the passion of a poet whose hands have been cut off in an […]
One of a series of poems by Kevin Casey, published as part of TMO’s original poetry collection.
The youth I know are angry drones Appeased by a certain smoke alone. Their function done: their queen bees Ascend to forensic matriarchy. But it’s futile to speak For these smoke-dazed drones – “The Armed Struggle’s” ASBO epigones. They only want to get away with it And so be left alone.
Oft have I heard the chymes of midnight In adjacent flats or in the streets. These materialise, like Balla’s lamp In the morning under my feet. I awoke to a peal of beer bottles And white-cider tins Tintinabulated by OCD winds.
A young derelict with a baleen beard, In which every drink or meal he’s had adhered. Traversing headlights lifted this stone I practically hurled on the way home.
As a child, mother’s aluminium head-lice comb Was more beautiful than any princess’s diadem. I saw it’s avatars in music box clockworks, Turnstile’s thaumatropes , science fair spectroscopes And lately, on the Grosvenor Road . The park railings diffraction grating Transfigured the wet road. The tram-lined aurora of traffic and car lights Slothful as […]
To me alone there came a thought of grief: A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong. William Wordsworth. And so Bella stopped crying; Stopped waking in the night Stopped being the person she had been for all of her thirty-seven years years. Bella became someone else. The softness inside her […]
RAINDROP I hold on by day, but in the night when lonely shepherds tend their flocks bending low from arching lights under an iron sky, the blackness criss-crossed with prayers, laced with phosphorous tracer and laden with soldiers metal, I listen to mosquitoes choosing their moment. The sirens begin to wail but I am dead […]
BAD DAYS The mist peels back for the rainfall, I feel the craziness once more. In the wild eyes of an old man’s face I see his mirrored thoughts fouled by the bad days just gone, still trapped here in this place. The sky is falling, lingering mist slowly revealing pain as it […]
