I cannot call back the time, lasso the millions
of minutes by the scruff of their scrawny
wee seconds, or knockout the lost years,
bop the back of their heads and bale
them into a getaway van that will welly-it
to a warehouse where time is put right
by a crack team of agents in tandem
with a renegade but brilliant neurobiologist.
No, the missing months are truly missing,
marooned, cut adrift, left for bye-bye to dry
out in the wreck of themselves, then stalk
an undead and hollow land forever thirsting.
Anyway, it’s been ages since I last happened
by this riverside walkway, where the dead
wood reeked by weather’s spring cleaned.
And I never learned the name of anything,
but it’s nice to see no-one’s ripped the plants
out by their roots and burnt and pissed over
the empty burned space where the ripped-up,
pissed-on plants used to be. And it really is
great to stick-on names that you’ve heard
to whatever you like without caring. So,
along this riverside pathway that snakes
through the city, this laminate lagoon,
buckeyes and rose of Sharon bushes occupy
snowberry banks, restharrow and gillyflowers
garland bamboo trunks and sapodillas,
while a lotusbird perches to coo-coo
with currawongs and chuck-will’s-widows,
orangequits and greenshanks tra-la twittering,
tittering and tottering on high branches
of lacquer trees, getting liquored on ylang
ylang, oakmoss, dragon’s blood and thyme.
But tiring of this, I ask my better half
if she knows what anything is, and she quotes to me:
‘Happiness is good health and bad memory’.
A man screams. I jitter. But he’s shouting
at his pupils tinned in a pointy-headed
rowboat, and I’m almost insulted,
given the streets are full of men who would
think nothing of going right up to a tiger
lily and scrunching its corolla, who’d shoot
the crows for target practice if they could take out
their guns; and so, I shouldn’t exaggerate,
given that if a duck even tried to quack-
quack in that water, it would be a stone-
dead duck before long; given that beneath
the bokey fudged mulch you can see 3D
nightmares of chains and pulleys, high school
bullies, trolleys, satanic creepy crawlies,
a Black & Decker angle grinder, outstanding
debt reminders, buckled pushchairs, threadbare
pink and olive striped deckchairs, moustachioed
schoolmasters, startled newscasters introducing
shots of headshots, roadblocks, deadlocks,
English cocks and Irish Jocks, mutilated livestock,
a timer’s tick-tock, confused with the cistern’s drip-
drop, keeping you up to panic at a midnight knock-
knock, which is just a drunk neighbour who thought
is missus must ive change da fuckin front-dure lock.
Anyway, while all this flows towards Belfast Lough,
it’s not exactly Xanadu above water either,
not quite Honolulu, when above and beyond
the trees all I can see are weed-nooked rustyards
fighting for space with erect hotels and pearly
office centres, tall cranes stalking everywhere:
tower cranes, hydraulic cranes, cranes for all terrain
policing thin streets in bright-sprayed armatures,
lording it over buildings like a supreme new race,
looking towards their unused elders hung
in sorrow in the dockyards to the east; whether
in sympathy, or saying up yours, I’m not sure.
Closer to the riverside, terraced doors keep
their mouths shut and children are clamped
in by barricade from this steep fall of river-
bank and clean public walkway, though buttered
faces size me up from behind a useless wall,
cursing the river’s limitations, my trespass,
this tourist sprawl. But then, moving onward,
by a cream call centre, a sunbed-skinned sales team
have finished their shift and stream through
the fence-gate to traipse toward happy hour
promotions, black power retro-nights, their navel
studs and highlights sparked by waterlight.
But these airs, this river, these sights have not
been to me some happy-clappy totem,
nor a masochistic home-truth tucked away
in the dark corner of my room mid the nee-
nar drone or bling-bling neon of foreign
towns and cities where I’ve ordered Pad
Thai noodles and drawn the blinds to dwell
on the blank page at the end of ‘Ovid
in Tomis’. It’s just I’ve never come down
since these tracks were laid, and this path
is like my tongue after biting a Pink Lady
cling-wrapped in a thin film of cellophane.
Of course, this happens all the time: you walk
up to your neighbour and note his nostril
hairs, dimples, pocks, scars, cheeks and creviced
chin; then five minutes later you catch his nut
brown eyes in the light and all the features
of his face fuse into something whole but shifting
like this river; or you run your hardly-haired
fingers over the deep blue tiles that line your bath
and soon they’re pigeon’s neck or tortoiseshell,
turquoise flashing eyes on a peacock’s wing;
so it’s unsurprising I’m a bit bamboozled
by this crash and build of trees and concrete
under ice-blue skies, which are hardly ice-
blue, but electric, kingfisher, and air-force
blue stretched over this crocodilic river
preying straight for the lough’s open maw
to leave behind all guarantees; horse chestnuts
and hazel trees; the roadways’ injured circuitry;
wheelie-bins and empties; wideboys hawking
blow to the gothic daughters of the haute
bourgeoisie; and my better half and me
below clouds that taper the city’s spires,
cupolas, scaffolding, lithe birds of origami.
No wonder I’m astray, a little bit this way
and that way, for the dockyards and ghettoes
look like a grey-quiffed and tattooed uncle
intensely line dancing on a hot night-
club floor, thinking he might yet score,
like I’ve been caught with my guard down
by this dizzy glint and easy rapture
of poplar and clover, wire-fence and river
flooding towards the basin’s broken jaws
as if hit-and-running from a crime scene,
though flushed and peach-blushed with pleasure
at the prospect of coming to a head,
having it out for once and forever
as the missing months and years dredge
past the massage of washed-out slogans,
sleek towers, ghosted union buildings,
the river overrunning its own ledge
to find itself played out in a final flush
into open seas, under drizzled rain,
while the sky arrests an outbound plane,
and my better half lags behind to savour
the shifting terrain, leaving me to find
our way back to the streets, knowing
I’ll never leave here, or come back again.