bahern7

Dublin . A.D. 2003. Georgia O’Connor stepped from the shower onto a fluffy pink bath mat in her en suite. Taking a towel from a hook on the wall she began drying her beautiful, tanned 20-year-old body. Bending over, her hair fell forward—blonde, wet and tangled—until it almost touched the floor. She bunched it together tightly, squeezing hard, as a thin line of water came forth. Straightening up again, she wrapped her mane inside the towel and walked naked to her bedroom. The room was exceptionally neat to a near obsessive degree. Unlike many girls of twenty,   Georgia   took great pleasure in such tidiness. It helped her to feel in control—a feeling she loved very much. She was in fine fettle this bright May morning, tingling with excitement at the thought of her upcoming three-month stay in   Boston . The college year had just finished—this was adding to her sense of happiness—and she was due to leave for the States in a couple of days. If it turned out...

Not so long ago really, there was a lonely boy who lived in a flat. The flat was cheap and comfortable but, more often than not, it was cold. His name was Thomas Arthur Bloyd. He watched documentaries on Arctic wolves and—every Friday—paid his rent to a moneyed bully. Okay, I’m going to be a bit more specific about the date. It was the mid-nineties in an autumnal month. You’re a whole different person when you’re stoned; and he would come down and mope morbidly for days on end. Although no longer living with her, he often thought of his mother and the many nights she could not sleep in her bed with the worry of the family finances filling her head ( “a world full of troubles, anxious sleep” ). Standing in University Green one afternoon, watching the people milling about, he recalled an old photo of the same scene from a hundred years before; in the shot an equally buzzing crowd had been present—all dead now, naturally—and he knew that in a further century the curre...

                                                                                      ‘The sighs of seven seraphs inspired him to sing                              So he allowed the trifling act to finally begin …’ Dwaine Lush was a young man going off the rails. Dark of hair and twenty-three, fond of drinking, he was also chronically shy. What a task he had just getting through the everyday truck of his life. Although young in years, he sensed, keenly, that his would be but a brief stay in the earthly home. One could call it a hunch, I suppose. In his idle moments, he debated whether to go with the idea of a postmodern prose poem on the subject of 8/10; an event which he considered to b...

The clocks were stopped at seven minutes past seven. The situation had pertained for five hundred years. He came up with the beginning of a story: “It was thirty-seven years ago and eight miles from here.” After several hours, he formulated the following: “The thoughts you think are real and the things you think you feel are only notions in the mind of God.” She smiled at him and he caught a glimpse of the attractive woman she had once been. The economy had got so bad people started digging up corpses to steal their rings. His Dublin Christ had a crown of holly: Gerry Driberg. He started again: “It was one of those gusty days harmful to umbrellas everywhere.” I left a poem behind me in the old rooms where I worked with Giles Bocking-Wellyfed and Fred Like. Third time: “The sky was a flawless lapis blue.” Shortly afterwards the rooms were raided by an Islamic morality squad. By evening Gerry was often dazed with reading. The flat above smelt like a cheese and onion sandw...