textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp001203.txt

     "She's nobody's child, the law can't touch her at all..."
The Anarchives 				Volume 2 Issue 10
	The Anarchives			Published By
		The Anarchives		The Anarchy Organization
			The Anarchives	tao@lglobal.com

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               --/\--			Buckfast & Soda Bread
             /  /  \  \			The Ireland Poems
         ---|--/----\--|---		
             \/      \/			
             /\______/\			by Taj <taj@lglobal.com>

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Finally able to spruce up this list with a small hiatus away from the 
political discourse. We're going to start putting out some of Ella's 
poetry. Noteing of course that tao@lglobal.com is always open to 
submissions. The more voices the clearer the struggle.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Buckfast & Soda Bread:  the Ireland Poems

By Taj <taj@lglobal.com>

* The picture, taken by my mother,
is of Ambrose and Auntie Margaret.
I can see her even now, coaxing
them into her sights, the shutter wide, waiting.
Just their faces, wary.  Smiling maybe,
squinting at least, in the way of the sun.

Ambrose is young, the skin pulled tight
across his cheeks.  The bones there are high and smooth.
The hair that grows from him
is almost all grey.  It hides
the motions of his mouth, still
he looks a little surprised, covetous even. 
It comes from the eyes.  
He's schizophrenic.

Margaret is in her eighties.  Her face is full, deep lined. 
Eyes leaky, blue.  Spidered translucent
in the pockets beneath, her brows 
yolk-white.  Save for the slight
beard, slightly turned eyes,
she's an older version of my grandmother.  

They live together, well
Margaret lives in the house and he
stays in one of the trailer homes in the yard.
He visits for tea, marmite, cold cuts, and they sit.
Just listening to the radio, the odd car as it passes,
kicking up dirt, guessing who is it this time. 
Newborn kittens in the barn.

The paved puddle in back overfilled
the goldfish muddy, spitting water as they rub.
The hulk of the trailer that burned still there,
though the tenant has flown.
It smells like fire, spent wool.  Steeping like curse between
the other two:  Ambrose's, and the guest trailer where I slept, 
cold, but the windows wide and the sagging bed.
The curtains water stained, stitched with tiny flowers.

Margaret would visit, come all the way
from the house, down the white paved walk
to the unlocked door.  She would sit with my mother,
laughing, the little scabrous dog in her lap.
Less comfortable when the others were around.
Matthew, my eight year old brother, and I
checking her out, the shared sidelong gaze as we strained to see
any trace of what provoked the rumours.
 
This one we'd heard
from my mother, who'd heard it from my 
grandmother who'd heard it from Auntie Noni,
who lives in England, but she should know.

It's said that Ambrose sat in his trailer (a lone bulb,
scrapped paper, the odd
furtive glance at the back of Margaret's head
as she watched t.v., or read) and wrote
her obituary, planned
to kill her first, with an axe, then
submit his piece to the Mallow Times.

We never knew how he was found out, or why.
Just that horrible, secret thrill of the thing,
and more, the inscrutability of them
as they wait, possibly even out of sympathy,
for the collapse of the shutter.  My mother's elated,
guilty look, half-suspected in the act of dispossession.

Hers, like mine, is a grubby disclosure
of the perceived strangeness of those who stayed.
A little like "Brother's Keeper".

_____________________________________________________________________

* Margaret writes.  Accounts of what it was like, growing up
in the Mallow orphanage, after their mother died
in childbirth, wrapped in infected sheets.  The war was on.
She remembers being at home when the men came.
The family of 12 running amok in the yard, the road.
She was given a box of crayons, and told by her father,
"Go in and draw on the wall or something".
That's when she knew.

The girls were taken to the nuns,
the boys were kept at home I suppose.
Some died later, in the war.
Margaret describes the brutality of those nuns.  
I read things my grandmother neglected to tell, 
though I had known of the marble baths, which fit 15 to 20 girls at a time,
cloaked in wet white gowns to hide their bodies.  The water cold, and gray.
I've seen pictures, of the tubs, taken by my grandmother when she returned 
some 45 years later.  I've heard that she ran away when she was 15.
Took her baby sister, and worked as a housekeeper, until she met a boy.
They planned to marry, but then he died too, and she became a nurse,
in a hospital in Cork, where she met my grandfather, an x-ray technician from the States.
They moved here.  

When in Ireland my stepfather wanted to keep Margaret's biography,
get it published when he got home.  Margaret was shy, though I think she agreed.
But my grandmother was upset, claiming that Margaret's account was inaccurate.
So, she's decided to tape her own impression, to right things a bit.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
* Fleeing Dingle.  Found myself at 7 a.m., tiptoeing, trying not to rouse the hostel, just 
my brother, so we could shake the bad dreams of freefall - the beds did 
that, being 
so high and narrow, with no siderails.  And the others, dreams all twisted, 
foreign-tongued.  These as a result of the proximity of the next traveler's head, you 
know, 
magnetic field interference and all.

Peeled back the towels that hung from the upper bunk as insulation from the strange 
bodies.  Poked him once, then twice again, anxious and envious of his sleep.  He grabbed 
me by the throat, and whispered hard, with open eyes, 
"Do that again and die".  
Claimed he couldn't remember a thing later, when awake.

My pack half-stuffed, balanced away from the piss-puddled floor.  My clothes 
moldering, dusted with spat muesli leaking from the dented little box.
There was no room in that sodden fridge down the hall to store milk in anyhow.

Our memories, our bags slung across our backs.  Walked past the field from the day 
before, where we spent five minutes, a veritable eternity, on a hill,
overlooking the squat town, the sheep 
before us, spray-painted with big X's of ownership.

They began to bitch, aimless but hostile somehow.  Hundreds of them, the cry emanating 
to us, in waves.  The foremost, the bull,
eldest and nappiest of the flock, oddly reminiscent of that archaic, toothless Dread 
croaking primordial Rasta vibes in Peter Tosh's "Stepping Razor Red X".
It began to rain.

Passed the greasy pub from the night before, picked up our pace, laughing a little, 
thinking on drinking Guinness until the badass crew tramped through the door and 
plucked up instruments from the sideboard, and sang.  Unchallenged by the bartender, 
who turned up the radio, and avoided eye contact, 
radiated disgust.

Vowed we would walk all day, all night, just to be free of the forsaken town 
(home of Fungie the friendly dolphin). 
Discouraged, but still flashing thumbs at oncoming cars, for hours.  Shoulders 
threatening to separate from the weight of it all.

Scratching out a path along the Inch Strand, living proof of Chaos theory.  How a 
measured distance expands in size with each successive frame of reference, how 
suddenly a mile or two explodes into infinity.  How time stalls.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

* The first time we tried to make it to the Cliffs of Moher, 
we weren't prepared.  Began too late
and ran out of breath, still talking the same talk as before.
No hope of compromise, our words as weighted, as the sweaters we wore,
saturated and fated.

Arms crossed, not quite looking, the other's face
too self-similar to bear.
Dropping frustration, dripping spite.

Believed ourselves at some nether reaches of precipice at least,
and not here, with just the gradual slope 
all the way to the beach.  Paced out, pulled taut by the hand-piled fences
linked like fingers except where broken away,
belying the bonds of marriage and debt.

Grasping, finally, the settling sun,
the length of our trek, and wanting only
to lose him, not to have to listen anymore.
I walked into the field.  Walked further over the breast of the hill,
and further still, feeling soaked, so bitter.

The wind yawned wide then.  Its wingspread
flatted out the grasses, and it gathered to bruise against my forehead,
pull tears from me.  Its whistle through the chinks in the fences
more like the resonances from some disemboweled singing bowl
than anything else.  Uncanny.

My brother's voice, teasing, worried, rushing
to me, then away, the muscles at his mouth working like fear, like prank.

The wind stopped for me, let the words drop to me,
"Taj!  Taj!  Oh God, Taj, the bull!"
His mouth was long shut by the time the words winded to me, 
and he had only to watch, the mechanism set in motion.

My eyes (by all accounts) as big as plates,
my head twisting for sight of either bull or shelter,
and when none were found, the ridiculous bent stance, sort of 50-50 karate style,
only the hands splayed out to the sides.  The sorry feet tangled in too-tall grass.
Fight or flight, baby.
My brother almost split with pain, with laughter.  
Said he wished he had a camera.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

* My brother and I, two farmers, a cow, and its lame calf.
The leg above its hoof cut to the bone
dragging limp, roadrashed.
The broken part knuckled under
the body's weight ponderous
the eyes wide seeing only 
the road's turns, the stones
in its path.  The pasture gate
a notion suspended barely beyond the caul of pain.

The blood too fresh,
just spat from blue into air,
rubbing deep into the dirt, and the flies
blackflies fat like fists
clotted into bouquets, frenzied, blind with smell.

The farmers walking slow, swatting random
at the swarm, making little head-shaking gestures,
tongues involved in a slow suck
against the teeth.  Kissing their teeth like that
and shaking their heads
speaking remorse, out of synch
with one another, or the delicate arc
of the shears used to cut away the wire,
dangling from dirty fingers.
Calf blood on a pantleg.  Walking slow.

My brother and I crippled too, bikes folded
into our sides, spokes cartwheeling sunlight,
treads smearing
through puddles, tracking
our procession along this crooking road
between nettled shoulders.
Only the sky, the road home at our backs.

The cow faking a rush at us, dug-heavy
and grim, warning us to stay slow,
as if we could run.
Her desperation plodding like that, thick.

I think I made retching noises
the whole time,
and when the one farmer
walked ahead, still slow, so as
not to spook the calf, who paused, broken,
while the farmer pulled away the gate,
the other stayed to turn at me,
and laughing bitter, said,
"You'd never survive as a farmer, you know, with a stomach weak like that."

Or something very much to the same effect

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

* Sweet on Buckfast tonic wine, talking South Africa. Rubber bullet scars and boxing 
stars.  Kagiso and my brother and I.

And old Tom, stumbling apology.  Tripping, almost, into our laps.  Drunk, demanding 
change, or just one sip to smear along his soured breath.

He's pausing to gather himself into stance.  Half-atrophied, the rest flaccid, flexing still.  
Looking yellow, bruised and wall eyed.  Smells like turf.  

Knuckles congealed.  Blunt fingertips feel over Kagiso's ring as he holds his lighter to 
the borrowed fag.

The ring, a gift, is piled in brass.  Scratchy, it describes two lovers stretching to kiss.  
Turns his finger green.

Only Old Tom is blinded like Quixote with visions of gold.  He fumbles, persistent, 
considers applying a tooth to loosen the damn thing.

Kagiso all the while cocking his finger so the ring, worn loose, won't slip. He's working 
at tight-lipped negotiation, incomprehensible in other side, Salthill dialect, low and 
threatening.

Challenging blows, he stands and my brother and I follow, curses thrown 
at our backs.  Old Tom's too incoherent to ball a fist anyhow.

Careens instead toward the others, cooing belligerence on their perch:  the foot of the 
statue.  

J.F.K. memorial park, Galway

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

* Losing my drugs, 
the ones I'd taken all the time
to sew so carefully into the waistband
of my karate pants, wrapped in plastic, not foil,
Thank God for foresight, else
I would have been shamed, maimed, busted
at Lester B. Pearson
with my baby brother in my arms
and the whole damn family in tow.

I had been warned, by friends, to mind myself.
One in particular had suggested that I find an empty film canister,
fill it with chlorinated water.
That way, when and if caught, I could whip it out
and throw the hits in, trusting they would disassemble,
and prove ineffective when tested.
But Goddamn!  Consider the dynamics of the scene...

Anyhow, I ended up giving them away, 
thinking I had no need for them there.
But my brother tripped, once
on that trek through the Burren.
Now I see that if ever there was a time, that was it.
Just the sky, the rubble.  Druid burial sights.
What he must have known just then.
I could almost cry for loss now, lost sight of eternity.  The clouds.

I gave the last two away, to the crusties jamming in the park.
Quadriceps, the very very finest acid money can buy. 
So clean, and I told him so, yet I doubt
he did them, had he had his wits.

We met Andrew the next night, and he was appalled, absolutely appalled
that I'd given pure trips away, to them.  
It all culminated in our search for a sodden mike, which we paid a full $10 for.
Pure poison, and Andrew nearly got beat for it too.

Rented a boat and headed to the Norman castle just down the canal,
taking turns, the 3 meager lines divvied up on my passport, 
one rowing, one holding the Buckfast (rumoured to make you fuck fast)
under water to keep it cold while the third crouched,
holding a five pound note up to the nostril, snorting.

The wind was so clean, the sun as it shined
on our ritual.  Just the three of us, lucky to be.
So improbable, landed there, my brother and I
and Andrew, 'Kagiso' in Bantu,
moved from South Africa when he was 12.
Fly in the buttermilk.

Smiling.  Dousing ourselves with strychnine.  Feeling so genuine.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________