Riverrun

The stately tower, sky-seen blocking, betrays the lives of the rangers taking issue with you living there. Down to the sea we go, a mass of friendship, stabbing each other in the back until the spume off the waves brings us back and back to the world we left in that mess of drink. In the cold mess of the Irish Sea, our sea bringing mermaids out of the deep, dead trenches, up for air, up for the songs that bore their own songs all those years ago when myth and reality split and became two worlds. Out on the horizon, there are systems of weather we just can't imagine, thunderheads breaking up the smooth line of sight across the sea, jagged layers of grey cloud, attendants to the high cumulonimbus, the queen of clouds bringing rain and regality to this city.

I'm peckish now, the tang of offal in my nose gives me a desire for something savoury, a wine-soaked kidney, flashed across the pan behind the bar and brought forward with applause and whiskey, thin slices of liver in the same spirit, brought out by the landlady. It's a choice between that and her beating you up, the rent you still owe and all that food she brings you for free. What has she got over you you dog? Oh for snow instead of all this rain, the cloud emperors in on this land have got nothing on the hurricanes at sea. Spelling is nothing either. Off we go, razor in hand and that claimed handkerchief, stolen back, washed and folded up in some allusion to something only you know. Callay rhyming at you mouth and yet held back in silence. They'll think you mad with all that rocking, have you carted away into some nice, neat prison with food three times a day and the rain kept off by proper roofs and windows. You wait! You'll be screaming to get out after an hour, all those doctors prodding you and trying to find out where all the ideas come from.

You think that! I'll be there for life - happy and snug inside, a kept man of the state, dreaming of how the blackness takes you, dead at forty, curled up one cold night in the doorway of one of the posh shops in town. Celtic Tiger my foot, you'll be dead in a year, if that, if it keeps up as bad as the last one. All that rain coming you idiot, all that rain, just off the sweet-smelling coast under the eyes of the millionaires who have nothing in their wallets for you, you waster, you purloiner of razors. The rangers are back for you and you will be dead I tell you. I'm off to the bin, to keep silent and dream of and with the fishes, up tailing myself in all that grub. Potted meat and dragos! It's all there and rivers of hot tea and cocoa, sugars from the tropics, from the cane and the sweet darlings of the sunny fields rather than the draggie-haired matrons of the mud that harvest roots here. Up to the sun all that sweetness comes and a lass with a head in the stars, eyes like planets swimming into ken and no back-talk, just a tinkly giggle and a desire to please you in that sun. Out of the rain. That's where we should go. Come with me friend and we can lie on rainy days and dream of the silken girls bringing sherbet, back on those metal beds with the lasses keeping us clean for home time and back to the woods when the sun comes out.

And with ullulations of pure pleasure, these two break out of the litter under the arches, rising like whales out of the mess of newspaper blankets and meticulously gathered material to keep out the Irish wind, out into the arms of the perfumed ladies with compassion and soup and a hot line to the social services, all the drugs forgotten in the waves of the future washing over them, spirits flying and keeping everyone company. The river runs by in the dark, carrying unseen garbage down to the sea to be forgotten, dead dogs, timber, discarded food, perfectly good for anyone remotely hungry right up until it hit the water, passports lost, money made and lost by millionaires and pissed away into the Liffey, an cat dubh, a wily thing until drowned and flushed down with everything else, all that food, all that money and the animals tripping into the stream up in the mountains, washed in the clear water until so clean; they are pure, unsinning, unsinning, unsinning, angelic beings in this world of sinners, the dead tramps, forgotten in the doorways, or loners found dessicated years after they last spoke to anyone. All that food, all that life and love, missed and flushed away. We are happy though, bringing these two like powerless barges, dragged between docks and canals, back into the speaking world, the world of sweet girls smiling and helping, keeping the rain off them with laughter and with warmth and all that food, with all that food. Famine's over boys! We'll be here for ever. I love the smell of starch and all that whiteness it makes me feel young again, before I ever misbehaved with the silken girls behind the factory. Whose famine was it boys? Not mine! I didn't starve and I won't starve again. Oh all that food!