Ken. by John Doyle

Ken

fosters thoughts and dreams,

murder, annihilation, 

all a moment's ripple

within the fetal badlands of his smile -

one faithless semester.

If a smile is what it is

I wonder then which semester

he sat like Robert Wyatt on that window-cill

looking down at the judgmental colours

of street-dancers and perfect flesh,

Jesus and his galleons of switchblade bikers in

a flash of blue-jean lightning.

I wonder how many times they called him Fatso,

before he stood like folklore's sack of ancient bones and held back seas,

a prism made of numbers, a batch of code

he crawled into beneath an ice-cold shower

and clutched the darkness of the womb

and all those smiling souls he would make pay

with strings of silence.

I wondered until Friday. There was a free bar for fallen staff -

I met Marco one last time, Paul I'll see again three years later.

El Clasico spits and screams from the digital venom of the T.V. screen

and Paul tells me - Fatso was a mercenary, nothing more; that we kind of knew -

a few hours into year zero and the ticker tape was knee-deep

on a beer-stained floor.

I can't imagine Fatso on horseback in Texas in 1894,

protecting livestock hours before they give birth,

he was more a plantation owner

named Claude Dupree,

focusing his pout 

on dusted strings of death-punctured soil

long before the id, the ego and the superego had been conjured,

losing all contact with human essence

John Doyle became a Mod again in the summer of 2017 to fight off his impending mid-life crisis; whether this has been a success remains to be seen. He has has two collections published to date, A Stirring at Dusk in 2017, and Songs for Boys Called Wendell Gomez in 2018, both on PSKI's Porch.

He is based in Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. All he asks is that you leave your guns at the door and tie up your horses before your enter.