Babbling Brook (2)

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 sandwich left in a drawer for a week. His boss was one of those tedious fuckers for whom there’s always a punch line.

Driberg was maladjusted to the world and every day he walked through a horrible door. He would try to make belief believable. He had a mystical sense that “everything is connected in the end.” “Throw your homework on the fire,” sang the gospel choir. He used to love to go up to Grangegorman and let his mind switch off. 

He met me one day when I was coming down and thought I had snubbed him; I would have snubbed anyone that day.

There is no space outside the matrix. Sometimes when she stood in the sunlight and it felt like she was inside a photograph, she was certain God had His eye upon her.

We met Thomas Dusgate. He’d had one of those hellish mornings when you wish all your colleagues were dead. His tones were so measured he spoke in miles.

Fourth stab at it: “It was one of those sunny days when the world is as colourful as a cartoon.”; and a fifth: “It was one of those dull as ditchwater days in the canyon of Mint Street.”

There was nothing he hated more than an easy peeler that wouldn’t peel easily. He began reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Then this sentence: “Acting is a craft of hissing bitchiness plastered with fake smiles and frigid air-kisses.” That’s just the chatter of anxiety; don’t listen.

The court case left her dangling dangerously in the law’s jaws. John Fleming killed his wife, and Pierpoint killed him. She’d say something and you could be laughing for months.

During a game of charades one Saturday night in the rehab centre, he stood before his fellow patients and asked: “How many of us will be dead in a year’s time?” The question did not go down well. When he finally kicked his coke habit, he vowed never to let anything have such control over him again.

The people in the canteen were squawking like birds in spring.

—“I’m currently constructing a dartboard in my garage comprised of your features,” he said.

I sometimes feel I have whole paragraphs pre-written in my subconscious.

She began a longer piece, working title: #Detroit—Detritus of a Dream.

© Brian Ahern 2015