Beds

Sheets laid,
Pillows pressed,
Plotted, spaced out
and listed.

A final check,
Masks at our necks,
Some seconds to pause-
All exhale.

The fair hall gone,
A hospital made,
In the breadth of a
breathless day.

How many bound?
Who can we save?
How much a bed
Looks like a grave.

Balsa in my Hand

Balsa in my hand

Your sandy palm,

Its splintered skin, a grainy papyrus

Of innumerable and tendril lines,

Fissure etchings that tell me

My favourite story,

Always warmly read

By the tracing fingers of my hand,

That on each precious line linger and

Caress the cherished seashore fabric

Of your sandy palm,

balsa in my hand

Seehaus Day- Fueling a Biergarten

The working day begins at 9 A.M. when I walk the incline in through the back gate of the staff yard- the hidden engine room that powers Seehaus. Entering, I’m welcomed by the large, filthy mouth of the refuse compressor fixed into the grotty yellow wall face. Rows of equally filthy wheelie bins, sludge coloured, line up three deep alongside like rotten molars. To their left towers of latticed plastic crates, various sizes and bold colours, are stacked stacked together, climbing above head height. Further along, the metallic door to the bar is open but its dark inside, shutters still closed. The taps are dry and the tanks are dormant at this yawning hour. By the door a stairwell runs into an enormous bunker, where the supplies that fuel the whole operation are stored. This place is a haven on the morning shift, offering the sanctuary of a prolonged hideout in the jacks or a cheeky gobfull of Nutella in the pantry.

Beyond the bunkers passageway, still on ground level, there are two doorways, one leading to the grill, the other to the kitchen. Outside sits a decent sized table, green in colour, and surrounded with matching benches. A sizeable parasol is fixed through a hole in its centre point. Some of the early morning crew, half snoozing and tenderly clasping the day’s virginal cigarette between their mumbling lips, sit around the table propping themselves up on their elbows. Clearing my throat I muster a morgen (‘morning’) which is met with a tired, croaked chorus of morgen from my colleagues. A copy of Bild-Zeitung, gaudy sheets already scattered and wrinkled, provides something to stare blankly at while the trauma eases up. After throwing my book, tobacco pouch and company rain jacket into my locker and downing a glass of cold water, I head back round the side of the bins, grabbing a rake from the tiny tool shack on my way.

Tramping out into the beer garden by the playground side, I never once fail to be sedated by its early-morning beauty- hues of gold, yellow and bronze brushing softly onto the lakefront, forever like a watercolour cheating reality. Hundreds of rows of wooden tables and benches, the kind the teddy bears would picnic on, are spread out tidily around the pebble decked ground. The first hour passes spaced out floating through ripples of thought, as I rake rows and rows of gravel on autopilot. Reflection upon reflection and nothing really shifts, except minutes and cents in a plodding exchange, as all the littered receipts, napkins and cigarette butts are dragged into tidy, archaeological piles. These artefacts of the previous night’s revelry are promptly scooped onto a hefty shovel and dumped into the gaping black hole of a bin bag.      

Escape

Hidden off a side street by Karsplatz Stacchus, the surgery light alleyway cuts through a hole in the buildings. Pull a double take again. Could it be? Maybe we imagined it last time round. A solitary steel bar stool stands empty outside a meat freezer door, across from the Turkish hairdresser’s, which is shut after hours. Gaudy bouffant Europop hairstyles like shiny 90’s football stickers are splashed on its muggy windows. The walls and ceilings are bare in the alley, grey smudges showing up under the brightness of the artificial pale yellow gleam. You can never decide if it's more indoors or outdoors and though that’s mildly curious now, by early morning the duality of open, nude sunlight and waxy kitchen flooring will fuck with your fragile mind. Tug on the heavy door handle as if it’s that book in Bruce Wayne’s library and you hear the sucker pad smacking as it pops open, infiltrating the space inside. Step in and we're early, though the midnight hour's already been devoured. Three Middle-Eastern heavies man the bar- diamond ear studs, black v-necks and swelling forearms, folded over oil drum chests. Standing on a dormant dance floor that’s waiting to erupt, we reacquaint with the surroundings. The catacomb ceiling hangs like a giant spider belly above us, lifting your eyes to the metallic stairwell, hugging the near side of the room, climbing upward. On opposite side, a wall like a beehive melting in fire blaze curves along. Scarred with black flecks- marker-tip scrawls attempting and inevitably failing to convey in words the charming degradation of this place. Each  a leap for permanence from another hand, another fleeting someone striving to pitch their flag of conquer upon this nowhere.

Round of halbe helles for the lads. Deceitfully light liquid is gulped gratefully and we all eye each other with scheming smiles, as if we all scored an invite to the secret banquet. One or two eccenteric heads are milling in every couple of minutes now. Get a scuzzy rollie in while the tin fills up. Sit outside in the alley on the shiny floor and compare tobacco brands, sniffing and sampling like learned connoisseurs of the finest vino. Conversation turns to argument turns to counter argument turns to sparring turns to distraction turns to toilet humour. Then we're all cleansed by the filth again and back inside we go. Suddenly it's packed and we all act surprised, elevating the illusion of unpredictably. The DJ's in his cave banging out an inimitable setlist of everything from metal to girl pop to classic house. Here the lads begin to split, spreading out in every direction into the labyrinth. Up the stairs with banging giddy footsteps. A tiny second floor plaza for a minor breather. The couch, flesh sunk into it from a thousand drunken flings enmeshed, is so littered with sex and sleaze it's as if its core structural parts were stiff cocks, sticky fingers and bare buttocks. Further on two battered jacks- Herr and Damen indeed. Interiors like Fourth Division football stadiums; all torn-off logo stickers, tacky bold panelling and shattered cheap frames. Mirror like a river of lost souls. Toilet's splattered with hurried piss as custodians rush their flow so not to miss a second of the triumphant seediness and freakazoid bonhomie of the sweltering club below.  

Cabin Fever

Standing, the room feels upside down, a cabin aboard a ship sinking to the sea floor, and I’m queasy and despondent. Finding Connolly’s sheets, they feel as if made out of Crayola paste and I cling to them trying not to lose my grip. Dragging myself along the bed, grimacing, through tobacco grains, human grease and discount paperback lit. Crime and Punishment. Can’t lift my head and I almost laugh remembering morning’s of Connolly’s Stretch Amstrong bollocks spilling onto the bedsheets. In the end I only groan. Jack and Bance just left for the 3pm shift and I’m whimpering for them like a grounded puppy with worms. Tempted to cry. Didn’t want them to see me cry but realise I wanted to cry just so they could see me capitulate and maybe they’d have burst into infantile spasms of tears too. We’ve suffered an Exodus. Turner’s Gondola. On ‘temporary leave for family reasons’ amongst the Venetian waterways. Connolly’s flown back to Mullingar for his Granny’s 90^th. Tony and Calvin just bolted. Too soon, too soon I’d insisted but not anymore. I just want to go home. To lie, foetal on the couch, with Mom watching shite telly and complaining about shite chocolates, while my Dad’s complains about shite telly and devours shite chocolates.

What the fuck had happened? This had been forecast. The meltdown. Jacks neuroses have been made flesh and I can feel them gnawing and slashing at my guts and liver and almost every other sentient part of me. ‘The drink is a curse’, Bance solemnly prophesises. I’m in the throes of the DT’s with no preacher for an exorcism. Realise I haven’t had two consecutive days without a drink in over a month. Mass glasses clink in my head and the impact is as shattering as anvils on dentistry. Soon I’m begging and pleading but there’s no one listening. Bargaining with an invisible jury. Overruled. Texts are fired at random targets and ‘message sending failed’ pings on repeat. The room is perpetually dark and dank and it’s my fucking coffin. Helped off the U-Bahn by a German pensioner couple. Lost my keys on the 100 metre walk from the station to the door and know I’ll never find them again. No lenses, can’t see. Can’t hear anything clearly. Through the walls, the muffled shifting of pots, mattresses, furniture. The lads will be back but don’t know what time. Cabin fever.

I need a fag. Hope I remember how to roll. Grope myself for that pouch of American Spirit dust. Wek. Verloren. But it was there only seconds ago. You’re imagining it. Stop please... I know, I know. Roll over and smash onto the wooden floor. Frenzied hands sifting through hills of dirty jocks, filthy socks and mustard mosaic smurf blue t-shirts. In the ensuing maelstrom of cold perspiration almost every square centimetre of the room is tossed up. The search party has failed. Hope is lost. Chest heaving, I sit on the bed and moan in childlike confusion and pound my fist into various points of my skull to distract from the headache. After a few minutes, I lean back resigned to finally being the first of the lads to completely lose their sanity in Munich, when suddenly I hear a crinkling. Opening my legs I see a Native American Indian sternly staring up, half crushed beneath my arse. It’s not quite sanity but it’s a small step back and I’m on the metal grid step loving and hating every drag as it cuts my throat and dopes me. Watching the dark lavender sky and the knotty pines loom like blurry totems, I lie on the concrete and await rescue.                  

Oh, Phnom Penh

Through the jets porthole, neck craned, my vision galloped across the land now not so far below. Both lunar and tropical, barren and sunsprayed, the sounds of spectral shovels and wheels battered against the earth, clattering in distant echoes. Tuber skinned ground was painted sparsely, wearing scrub bushes, debris and cracked branches. A thousand scrawny streams trailed into big stagnant puddles of metallic looking water that lay thinly on the surface. The total absence of wind hushed everything to photographic stillness while my mind went ‘click, click, click’ again and again over this scene. At intervals, colonial mansionsappeared, windows boarded up, plywood planks peeling and roofs smashed. Withered but once glorious, like consumptive empresses, they sat forlorn in barren plots. Pastel colours of blue, green and pink, faded by the sun, hummed a funereal lament for past glories, the demise of French Indochina and the sinking of their Pearl of the Orient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu6HpVo5oUI 

Lost Track of the Time

‘Out on the Weekend’ by Neil Young

Though physically I sat in the front seat of my Dad’s car, driving reluctantly towards another school day in March of Leaving Cert year, track one of Neil Young’s 1971 classic ‘Harvest’ transformed reality into a countrified vignette of blown apart barroom romance and sour mash aftermath. Each morning, that stoic foot-drum tapped out tentative and sad sounds before the thin, pining harmonica began to weave its way about, eventually stretching out, long and vast, in a steady, pained whine which pierced my chill bones and clenched teeth. Neil, who knew what it was like to be young, sang to me of ‘the woman I’m thinkin’ of... she loved me all up’ and it was the most empty and emptying song in the great, big world and I could for four minutes and forty-two seconds envision losing all but never the poetry of the lovelorn. Suddenly, sinking entirely into this dust bowl dirge I’d find  Waterford forgot, reclining in that rusty pick-up headed ‘down to L.A.’, chugging along a low, open plain with blue moon memories of how ‘she got pictures on her wall that make me look up, from her big brass bed’. My toast and nutella became a rough griddle cake and my juice a scalding hot and muddy coffee, as I meanly chewed and slurped them down. The Cork Road housing estates blurred into deserted gold mining settlements, which looked as hollow as boot polish slapped on cardboard cut-outs of stagecoach towns, echoing Neil’s misery and mine. Finally, the harmonicas piped up once again, louder still, screeching out in emphasis the loneliness of the lonely, lonely, lonely boy out on the weekend, ‘tryin’ to make it pay’. Then the lulling fade-out and everything was vacant as we’d trundle along to a halt, reaching the end of the journey. Parked at the gates of school, I’d suddenly feel less weighed down, having dumped some heavy baggage in the back of Neil’s battered old pick-up on our escapist hitch for a ‘lonely boy’, in need of a contemplative ride to nowhere.