FIELDS OF HINDSIGHT

20/03/201616/03/2019 / deuxiemepeau / 1 Comment

There are fields beyond the trees,
fertile fields never turned or sewn,
ploughed or pillaged, lands his course
never crossed. If he had hindsight
would he still till the same lands,
plant the same roots, seek substance
in the same sunlight, find a farmer’s
favour with the familiar falling rain?
If he had hindsight would he seek
solace in the same fire that favoured him
in winter, in those fantastical flames
that nourished him, revived him,
that thawed his sorrow, caressed him
to comfort? There is music
in other rooms, alive on other keys
and strings he never played,
he never knew, he never cared for
or considered. If he had hindsight
would he still sing the same song,
words that were whispered to him,
music that made him, moulded him,
find reason in the same rhythm,
character in the same chorus?
If he had hindsight what use
could it be, what peace could it bring,
what would it make of him,
how would it change who he was,
who he loved and all he has still to be?
There are fields beyond the trees,
fertile fields never turned or taken,
their grass has other offerings,
their leaves all sway to other sounds,
their fortunes spark other interests,
there is music in other rooms,
alive on keys and strings, tunes
of other tenors, sounds from other
singers, they are not his sounds,
just as they are not his fields,
they have not made him,
will not tempt him, they can never
change him; hindsight is to hopeless
as happiness is to hopeful.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph taken just outside of Lisbon, Portugal.

THE MATTER OF THE MUCK

18/03/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

The Americans and the British were bent on finding Jim Morrison while the Irish and the Japanese, for some reason, longed to add new kisses to the now ball-less Sphinx lingering over the long decayed body of Wilde, who probably watched down over their stupidity and offered a wicked wand of wit as their rouged up lips found a free side of the concrete to consecrate. Kissing a carcass is much like kissing an ass, you come away from both with a distinct desire to rinse out your mouth immediately.

At one point, somewhere amid the ongoing battle of the trees reclaiming the conquered landscape, I took a turn into the shadows and a darkness fell all around as if a cover had been put on the sun like one drapes a cloth over the cage of a bird mid song and suddenly the silence is stifling. Darkness comes over you in the same way when unannounced. The weight of its dominance takes on a persona as its very essence runs its icy touch along your skin. Under its spell, and there was a spell upon me, I lost all sense of direction, trapped so strikingly between the desire to run towards life and the horrid reality that I was standing upon so much death. I didn’t believe in ghosts, not because I was sure they didn’t exist, but because I’d never thought about them or allowed such superstition to cross my path. But there, in that twist of day and night, amid the moss covered beds of those who had long since reached out their heads and hands to eternal rest, everything was open to suggestion.

I twisted and turned over directions in my mind, the routes I had taken that brought me there, both literally and figuratively. I’d come for the fun, to find the forever flames of the famous, now fruit for roots and worms. I’d come also to escape, to escape the daily drab of life, the 9 to 5, the rush hours, the traffic jams, the gossiping, the nattering, the crowded metros and shoulder shrugs. I’d come to death to escape life and lost my way beneath its shadows. I’d wanted something different and found something terrifying instead, mortality. Under the silence of the surreal, I heard bones rotting, flesh festering, souls scratching, ties breaking, my heart beating and my watch ticking, teasing me with every minute I had wasted seeking diversions from the right roads, the real roads. The track trembled before me. Tombs lay broken and open, dark holes reaching into darker realms that only Dante had dared to dwell on in life and all that watched me were birds; black birds, big black birds, baying, sinister sentinels and not a single dove to drown out the darkness.
I felt my own skin tighten around tensed muscles, pulses pound around veins as if starved for blood, as if my whole body feared its finality, foresaw what would one day become of it, here in this place of buried beds and eternal sleeps where the angel creeps and mourners weep.
Suddenly I heard a child’s voice laughing and I turned and ran towards its distant direction but my feet heeded not my mind and my footing fell upon a broken branch of nature and the break of my ankle echoed through my frustration as I fell while nature itself looked and laughed and length. I fell upon a grave. I fell upon an open grave and I lost sight of the cemetery. I lost sight of the trees fighting the concrete columns. I lost sight of the weeping madonnas. I lost sight of the stone eyes angels and so, as I plunged down, deep down, I closed my eyes and waited to be swallowed by the bowels of the earth.

With a shock, I jumped up, in bed, at home. My bed, my home, not a grave, not the end, not Dante’s inferno. My breath could not find itself in the confusion, still stuck in the dream, in the nightmare disguised as a dream, down in the layers of hell. Eventually, in a sweat, I managed to make it to the bathroom and turned on the tap to wash my face in cold water and drown myself back into the security of reality. I looked in the mirror, it was still me, still my refection, still my face. I looked down to turn off the tap and noticed the dirty water running down the drain. Then I saw my hands; covered in muck, my body; covered in muck, my feet; covered in muck.
What in hell is going on, I asked myself? What was happening, had it all been real, had I actually been to the cemetery somewhere under the cover of night and nonsense? I looked back into the mirror at my reflection and it smiled back at me. My heart stopped. My skin tensed, just like in the dream.

My reflection was smiling but I wasn’t.

I wasn’t anymore.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

All Photographs taken at Cimetière Père Lachaise, Paris, France

IRELAND, THE EMERALD AND I

17/03/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 9 Comments

Reposting this oldie about Ireland for Saint Patrick’s Day

And again I found myself, of a morning, that morning,
on a winding road, once more, meandering like a stream,
before it opened up to unveil a vast expanse of stillness
where brook and lake entwined, where rugged roads
wandered into wilder woods and the light, that sat upon mossy mountain,
reflected the break of another boorishly boisterous day in a landscape
where Yeats, having left the Mauds of his world to fight the battle
without him, had climbed nightly The Thoor Ballylee to find rest, and so,
that morning, I revelled in what it meant to be connected to these often harsh,
sometimes barren but seldom anything less than breathtaking lands.

Immense clouds hanging on the horizon, fertile lands out front,
awash with the 40 shades and a silence, amid so much
awe-inspiring nature, that the Emerald in her name seemed so justified.

And yet, as if forever ingrained and known, but for a moment forgotten,
from somewhere deep inside resurfaced the notion that it was not these lands
that I missed but the memory of laughter that blew above these lands
on the breeze that crossed fields of verdant greens, that skirted over grass
waiting to be grazed on and found rest in trees that longed for lovers to kiss beneath.

And then, as normal as the nodding of the cap to the passing stranger
along the roadside, I was taken back to those lucidly liquid days shining
from my youth when the patriotic spirit of a nation, so small but spirited,
more laughed with than laughed at, doused itself in shamrocks
and drowned itself merrily in spirits of an altogether other nature,
a time when neighbours knew each other like family
and a new face in town was merely a friend we did not yet know…

And there I stood, home again, spun on that same laughing breeze
into the past and I saw before me the Me of today reflected
in my childhood form of yesterday with teddy in one hand
and Tayto’s in the other, smiling amid laughter I had heard
but was far too young to understand in a land that I’ve fled so far from,
swept up and away on other breezes, and yet, however high I fly
or however much I roam, I never seem to feel too far
From that Fair Green Isle called home.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

First 4 photographs in Skerries and Lusk, Co. Dublin, Ireland

Bottom photographs at Ailwee Caves and along the shoreline in Dingle, Ireland

SUNSHINE AND SNOWFLAKES IN MONTMARTRE

16/03/201613/03/2016 / deuxiemepeau / Leave a comment

I climbed you today
in downpours
and falling snows,
no snow flake ever the same,
no foot step ever similar,
I climbed you today
in sunlight and stealing shadows,
in strokes of paint splattered in your memory
by artists as foreign as they are familiar,
I paused upon your steps,
your streets of steps,
the steep steps
others have taken,
others have trodden upon,
to take possession,
to take pictures,
to take part, to be a part
of all that once was
and has fallen to dust
through depression
and recession,
no sails blow no longer
to the winds wills,
the winds upon your hills
no longer home to the mills,
no more the spirits linger
green to the fairy’s touch,
spirits are in bottles now,
corked and capped
and cost too much
and the artists now
are but a shadow
of what once was,
shadows for sale
on the site of what once held cause,
on this martyred mountain
in Montmartre.
I climbed you today
in wind and rain,
the past and future present,
in a reverie of what can no longer be.
I climbed you and stood above you
and marked out the steps
I had taken along you,
along your lines and lanes
that lead me here, to this day,
to this moment, to this place
as this snowflake fell,
this unique particle
never to be repeated,
falling through time and space.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

MINUTES MOVING

14/03/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

There are but minutes now,
minutes in motion on metros,
minutes moving in on me,
on my identity
on my mark, on my leaning,
on my meaning,
meaning I am moveable
like a feast, as he said,
A Moveable Feast,
meaning I am manageable
malleable,
maybe unremarkable, mistakable.

There are but minutes now,
minutes moving in
on my metamorphosis,
on my undoing,
on my unbecoming,
is it unbecoming?
on my being misunderstood,
misinterpreted, misrepresented,
missing.

I am famished,
the feast has moved, on
mindless to the matters
that manipulate me
mould me
remodel me.

Minutes, there are but minutes
multiplying on metros moving,
on me, in motion

minutes making minutes minus minutes.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph taken in the Arts et Métiers Metro Station, Paris, France.

HEARTSTRINGS

12/03/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 13 Comments

When I am broken

I hear the strings of my heart
and its music

moves me.

When I am mended

I forget the sounds
that once resounded

within me.

Perhaps that is why
it breaks

again and again

that my heart
be never far

from the music

~~stung~~

strung upon it.

All word and pen drawing by Damien B. Donnelly.

THE WATERS OF TED AND KARLA

10/03/201616/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 10 Comments

Every summer for 5 years they made their way to the banks of the water. Even as a child he noticed the stillness under the breath of morning that bayed across the river as if the day and the pair of them had not yet been discovered. And it was true, in part, of them at least. Their youth, their innocence, their view on life was mysterious, like the mist above the water, imagining where it came from, what lay beyond it and where it would one day take them.

Somewhere in the last years, someone built the wooden deck, measured the timber, cut it, laid it, hammered every nail between the lines years had carved into what had once been a tree, attached the metal ladder that slipped down into the waters beneath but clung always to the wood as if too nervous to dive right in. But it was too late.

When he was 9, a year before the deck and the chopped wood and the metal rail that cast strange reflections into the sleeping waters, the stillness of one summer morning had been awakened by a silence more shattering than a scream, as if the world had stopped beating, as if the water had stopped moving, as if life itself had stopped. And it had.

Like every other day in august, they had met on the stoop of her front porch, he in his stripped trunks and brown leather sandals, she wore a blue bathing suit and tiny white pumps like ballerinas on stage. She had to be back early, her mother was making pancakes for breakfast. She promised to keep him one for the following day. She always promised and always came through, except when she promised they’d be friends forever.

They ran, as always, from the stoop, down the lane, past the trees and bushes and the bins and the beaten down cars, past the boats raised up out of the water to dry out.

Karla was 10. She had green eyes and liked sherbet dips and read the Beano instead of Mandy. She had freckles on her arms but not on her face. She had brown hair and her mother said she already looked like Ali MacGraw.

Ted was no Steve McQueen. He had dimples on his cheeks and black curly hair. At 9, his moustache was already the talk of the school which meant they finally stopped joking about his belly. Karla never mentioned his belly, like I said, she promised to bring him pancakes.

When they reached the river bank, they usually jumped in holding hands, breaking the surface, breaking the stillness, waking the silence. But that day Ted was still eating a bagel he’d pulled from the pantry on the way out the door so Karla ran and jumped and hit the water and it splashed and she went under and it settled and the stillness returned as he stood there watching and eating, and the silence mounted as he stood there waiting, and the fog stole the air as she failed to surface and he looked into the water, so still and silent, and he saw his reflection in the water looking back up at him and nothing beneath it but nothing and nothing.

She was gone and all that she was became the light that lit that day and all that she had been washed away in the water and all she had seen rose up to the surface and became a reflection that looked at the sky as it looked down from above but only the heavens saw her reflection in the water, only the heavens looked down as she faded, dissolved beneath the milky mists of morning.

Only the heavens and the boy named Ted with a bagel in his hand and tears in his eyes who once loved a girl who looked like Ali MacGraw.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

PARIS IN PICTURES; MONDAY MORNING IN MONTMARTRE

09/03/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 13 Comments

All photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photographs taken on the hills of Montmartre, Paris in rain, snow and sunshine.

SNAKES AND SHEEP

08/03/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

We slither and snake
in united unison
past the signals
and the stations
and the beggar
with his chanson,
trying to get
his chance on,
clambering to get
his way on,
chancing his way
on into pockets
of passengers
loosing patience.

We slither and snake
our manoeuvres
along the carriages
of commuters
preoccupied by i-tunes
on iPhones and
hand held computers
and fold away scouters
while a girl eyes a guy
in a muscle bound shirt
as another guy notices
the mini of her skirt
and dreams of dessert,
dreams of slithering,
sensual and slow,
along her carriage,
to drive his train
into her station
like he were Spartacus,
the Thracian,
now riding high
on the train’s vibration.

We slither and snake
through the darkness
on tracks laid and loyal
unlike our own tracks
seasoned to spoil,
we light upon
platforms packed
with people panicking
fretting about fitting,
fitting on, fitting in,
into trains and tracks
and skirts and holes,
cyber lives
make us whole.

We slither and snake
and stand closer,
strangers coming closer
to scents and smells
and stenches
that choke us,
breaths breathing
on the backs
of tensed up necks
of strangers
struggling,
slithering and snaking
on tracks that take us
back and forth
to and fro,
to work, to home,
to him, to her,
to passing parties
and improbable
possibilities.