GLUTTONY HAS GOT THE GOAT

 

There is a goat
dancing in the parking lot
and this train cannot proceed
along its track,
interlopers interrupt on intercoms;
there are packages of suspicion
on the trail up ahead
and a goat in a lot
dancing round the cars.

There is a goat
dancing in the parking lot
as a woman tells tales
in the seat behind me
to a girl with fingers
fixed on her insta-fame,
on Instagram,
while a goat
with shameful notoriety
throws shapes in the parking lot.

There is a goat
dancing in the parking lot
and a plane descending
like a sub into the sea
while a package has been placed
in positions of pedestrians
and a woman complains
to her daughter about her day
and her daughter captures it all
on Snapchat to ensure it exists
as a goat in a parking lot
continues to dance.

There is a goat
dancing in a parking lot
and this train has lost the thread
of its tracks
and in a synagogue
on the sabbath
in a state out of states,
someone opened fire
while the goat in the lot
continued dancing.

There is a goat
dancing in the parking lot,
trying to distract us
from the collisions
he can’t cover.

Winter is already here.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

IN THE PLACE OF THE FORMER PRINCE

I flew back to a day
no longer this day,
returning to the rubble
I had run from
to catch the last slab
being laid upon my childhood
buried under a concrete garden,
not even a root to latch on to.

I saw the permanence
of the pavement
pour over the past
no longer possible
from the next-door vantage point,
access no longer available
to my own old room
with its red walls and worries
for the former local
now unfamiliar foreigner
with footing bound
to a fondness to regress
but reality is no longer
the daydream we used to skip through
under the glorious sunlight
of the innocence
that blinded our youth.

Dreams are sometimes
rotten weeds to return to
after the dawn breaks
through the haze that once held hope,
our once great grounding
is not always as we left it.
We cannot fit into the clothes we once wore
nor the skin we since shed.

I saw my childhood today,
buried beneath the cold concrete;
the final closure on the kingdom
I thought I was the prince of.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

A WHISPER IN THE FADING LIGHT

 

I heard them marching through the streets of Madrid, at midnight, under the first floor moonlight as you sang me songs strung from their souls, men marching a million miles away, a million years away from the momentary memory we were making, your fingers stroking the strings I’d pulled too tight on the guitar now clutched to your chest like I had been, or you on mine (I recall only feeling with fleeting time, not the practicalities of posture or position).

I heard them marching upon the melody you were making, like the music we had just made that would never be bright enough to linger on into lyrics, but you brought them from your history into my home beneath a still shouldering moonlight straddled on the first floor; a shining witness to the totality of our all and nothing, to how much closer we were getting and how much more like strangers we had become.

I took your cigarettes to my lips and watched the smoke burn to a whisper in the fading light of our afterglow and wondered how your words (more meaty than meaningful after midnight) could stick so to the softening skin, like my sweat and your scent, afterwards, after we’d come and before you’d left me humming a song from streets I’d never known but could taste on the tip of my tongue like something familiar, once favoured, long since forgotten.

Might marches upon steaming streets,
melodies make moments beneath the moon,
memory is often all we can hope for.

ENTANGLEMENTS

There is beauty
and there is decay,
they are gardeners of the same plot,
seeking sustenance from the same sun,
shade from the same soil,
one awaits the wonder of the weather,
the other;
weathered by her ticking thunder.

There is beauty
and there is decay,
they are inseparable,
one holding fast to its height,
the other;
falling fast through its fragility

and in between
their entanglements
is left life
until that, one day, leaves.

All words and photography by Damien B. Donnelly

THE THAW

 

Blue is the breath,
blue is the earth,
morning, early,
the sky a clean canvas
of white and the earth; blue,
a bed of frozen blues
born from dawn’s breath,
a blanket of freshly fallen
slow snow, trembling
along the hairs of the land, caught
in the calm before the crunch,
before the footprints
mould into mud
all that is now a myriad of mystery.

There is beauty in blue,
there can be beauty in being broken,
in time being frozen,
in the breath baying.

I twist and tremble
between these sheets
still fresh upon these old shadows,
still crisp over this drying skin.
I twist and tremble
through this season to be unsure,
falling into blue,
into time, time is frozen
along with all that is born in this bed,
a blanket of fallen findings;
some things I thought to be more,
some things I hoped to mean less,
like loss, less loss,
less time, less breath, more blue,
the mystery is already moulding into mud.

Blue is the breath and slow,
soft as the early morning snow
so slow, awaiting nothing more
than the affirmation
of an approaching melt.

All words and drawings by Damien B. Donnelly

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