1
The two of them were forever banging
on about keeping your conscience spick and span
as a scoured kitchen surface and grafting
bone-hard in life’s grim dockyard, each time giving
it everything. If a peeler took one through
the cummerbund outside the secret policeman’s
dancehall, or Marks and Spencers blew
its windows one hundred and seventy-
five feet in the air to rain down arrows on the newly
disfigured, they’d be livid if I didn’t wash my hands.
Maybe this is why I’m licking my chops
at the thought of microwaved trays
of pork bangers and bleached potato slops,
driving to Killymoon through hay fields and green
fields decked with pat-caked cows;
why my parents have turned into odd
truisms, viruses mutating through the thin streams
of my brain into screenplays of low-beamed
corners in dancehalls; why I’m wondering how
two free wills become two peas in a pod.
2
Half-baked under the spalding orange rays,
they birl and dunt their pitchforks in the fum.
A horse’s scream of rain will soon come
and wash all this away, but now the women lay
the table with hot boxty bread. She sucks an orange finger.
His breeks are ripped to flitterjigs
as he snuffles his neb and spies the stoppled eaves
of her breasts, before gobbing a pure emerald yinger.
And he can’t help but to think
of her in a bool of earth-swell, the hurt
weaver’s kiss of her tights, raising her skirts
against the clay-baked orange-brown turf bink.
Now they trudge back along the oaten
shingle, a bunch of branny-faced boys in jouked
breeks by the reed-kissed bebble of a brook.
It’s hard to judge when the sky will be opened.
3
Trigger-happy tomcats and hornets jet
into the sun, their motherloads dead set
on the clay-baked cities of Iraq, as I sit
back and order an overcooked frozen fillet
of salmon with hard potatoes and spoon-
mashed turnip with my parents at Killymoon’s
nearest Hotel, my newborn son on my breast
with my Ma insisting, despite my cloud-dark frown,
that a brandy-soaked sugar cube is best
for traumatic nights as the rain knuckles down.
Someday I might return, and tell him this
is near where they met, where they might have been
married, as the rain batters remorseless
on watchtowers, their camouflaged polytetrafluoroethylene,
as I lead him down the road of falling
hazels and vetch, finger to finger
until he lets go and leaves me by a reed-shushing
brook under the sky’s orange plumes,
the fallout winds and elder
stealing kisses on the road to Killymoon.