Month: May 2020

VREEMD OF MISSCHIEN NIET (STRANGE OR MAYBE NOT)

/ deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

 

She was called Éireann, even in Holland,
(misschien vreemd, ik weet het)
though she was greener than I ever was,
back then, with the mud of the land
still caked into her guards while I was off
and running, ever forward, adding guards
to my guards till I saw the earth was round
when home appeared again, on the horizon.
(Vreemd, of misschien niet).

Later, decked in a fur coat of fine snowflakes
that clung to your form while they melted
off mine, you appeared as blank canvas
before a river to skate away on, like she sang,
once, in a city that was not this one. Funny,
what sinks in and what drowns, even light
can fade into the wrong water, even water
can remain on solid structures as icicles.
Some things cling on while others slip away.
(Vreemd, of misschien niet).

Round that red bricked bridge we rode,
a decade of being Dutch, (how long?
Ik weet het- vreemd, toch?), thinking
I was only stranger and the road my home,
but those were the days when the wheels
spun in circles around canals that turned
back on themselves. Maybe that’s how
we learn to come home- spinning in circles,
on roundabouts or her carousel of seasons
that went round and round.

She was called Éireann, even in Holland.
Maybe the answers to all I was looking for
were already there in her name.
Misschien wel!

Maybe some things take a cycle to sink in.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

WHEN WE COME TO PRESS THIS TIME UPON THE PAGE

/ deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

 

Come friends to gather at end of cycle
Spring is done and summer will have new song,
Time will tell of when it all went viral
Of distance that reigned and hold that was wrong.

Come friends to pressure pen upon the page
Thoughtless is time if man won’t leave his mark-
Sing of the stars we’ve lost upon this stage
Yonder moon’s slow to rise so night lies dark.

Come friends as we stand with light between us
Our fighters are saviours in this war’s ward,
Hold a lamp, a candle, come make a fuss
This hope’s not hungry for soldier or sword.

Come friends, let us sing, apart, united
Night is long but dawn will not be blighted.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

DON’T COME TO TAME THE CAT

/ deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

 

Red sun burns below a blue moon
and the tiger rips through trees
to escape the cat. Sometimes
small things need to be as sharp
as an icicle even when the sun
comes to burn red beneath blue
moons while she sings of those
crazy cries of Havana’s love.
She sang of Paris once while
somewhere else and California
while in Greece. She was blue too,
like that moon, while in green
and again with those icicles
and no baby for birthday clothes-
letting go’s a bitch, like moving on,
even if you’re just a fearless pussy
cat and the tiger is too scared
to fuck with you. Earlier, luxuriant
leant in, hissing all over her
manicured lawns of blue pools
and strangling centrepieces.
Always the blue below that burning
sun and those picture-perfect settings
as if to foretell of all that will follow.
Red sun burns below a blue moon
and pussy purrs alone while the tiger
takes cover beneath the shade of
the green cactus tree with phallic
spikes that look like limp icicles.

   

All words and drawings by Damien B Donnelly. Some thoughts inspired by the music and lyrics of Joni Mitchell

SIMPLE

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

  

Love is a simple thing-
a jaded house waiting
to be resold, to be a home again,
you knock unexpectedly
and I utter Enter, please,
much like last time,
already setting the table for two.
Love is a simple thing

fragile and foolish and forgetful.

Love is a simple thing-
a game of tennis,
a juggle of balls back and forth,
the hunger to have the control
of love and all its advantages
before it’s match point
with a set of side-lined backhands
played below the baseline.
Love is a simple thing

blinded by the sexy shorts and those tight strings.

Love is a simple thing
like the heart-
it needs oxygen to survive,
like any organ-
it needs the right fingers
to play it perfectly

Love is a simple thing-
find your oxygen before
laying the table or crossing the court
or reaching for the note
you were never meant to play.

   

All words and sketches by Damien B. Donnelly

WHEN IT WAS THE TIME FOR GROWING OUT

/ deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

 

We took the train, one day,
a Sunday that a photograph
suggests was set in summer,

I remember how the wind
wound whimsically round
the wilderness of our youth
as we watched waves crash
currents upon crushed cliff

as we came closer to watch
those tides slip out further,
pulling from us the laughter
we’d not learned to control

and carrying it on to places
we didn’t know to imagine,

each of us an island uncharted
yet to pin our point on a map.

Three cousins, coming closer
to the shore of those decisions
and a mother, watching us
laughing, learning, growing,

swimming and moving. Out.

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All words and some of the photographs by Damien B Donnelly

SOME THINGS ARE NONSENSE AND FOR ALL ELSE THERE ARE DISTRACTIONS

/ deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

 

I was tall, when I was a small child,
but stopped later,
somewhere in between adolescence and giraffe.

A giraffe would be impossible to sit behind
at the cinema.

In the cinema, in Amsterdam, people talked
like it was a cafe with an incredibly large background TV
and didn’t seem to nonsense from the hungry mice
beneath the low lighting.

Light can often distract decisions on how to dress
in the murky fog of morning when the mirror won’t help explain
who you are.

I helped a passenger on a plane, once-
I placed their bag in the overhead compartment and felt abused
later when they claimed the total width of the arm rest
as if I was only too willing to be a servant
to their sovereignty.

A king in a castle is not always as fulfilled as a man, quiet,
in his shed or the kid reaching down to grab a hold of happiness
while growing up, somewhere in between adolescence

and the astonishment of a giraffe.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

AFDRUKKEN

/ deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

 

I found you in Amsterdam, weet je nog?
Natuurlijk!

Somewhere on the Overtoom, in the summer
of my slow 30’s when home was a broad barge
on a narrow gracht. Lijnsbaansgracht it was.
Weet je nog? Natuurlijk!

I wonder how deep the things we’ve held
are carved into our core- like all those letters
you once housed that formed words, that gave way
to structured sentences that someone then pressed
and printed and someone else, sitting far away,
read and wondered

or does it all fall away, natuurlijk

when we ourselves slip from the canal that held
a barge, that housed a home where a letter press
rested against the port wall and I wondered
what it once held.

Weet je? Natuurlijk niet!

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

AL LAST

/ deuxiemepeau / 1 Comment

 

Shoes thread lightly
over freshly stirred soil.

Seeds are no longer singular cells but shoots
and this hardened carpet no longer compliant
to cover up.

Sometimes we plant with the dream
of discovery.

Sometimes we dream in the hope
of being woken.

Sometimes
light begins in the dark

where roots rumble in soil, now stirred.

Green grass decides, at last,
to admit that being buried

was only the beginning.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

BLOOMING SHADES

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Everything is cyclical like sunlight and seasons
and hair styles and hemlines. Everything is cyclical.

I found you at the first turn- a pencil line on a blank canvas
by an academic of fine fashion with a fringe of falling violets,

it was the back side of the Botanics, at the later side of winter,
all grey, even then, back in my untasted youth, even there,
surrounded by all that should have been blooming green

but I just saw the shadow between the black and the white,
the empty bench in between the bark, not the blossom sitting
a frame away, left side, across the bridge, more to the main path.

Roads, wood and diverges and me-
always looking for another way out.

Everything is cyclical like creation and country and going out
and then coming home again and again. Everything is cyclical.

I found you recently, again, on a green day, later, when my hair
was greyer but my soul a sway more centred towards the violet.

I stole a piece of you, this time, on film but when I looked back,
after coming home, I noticed how I’d caught you in that shade,
that former shade found in between the black and the white.

Everything is cyclical like births and blossoms and sometimes
belonging and sometimes colour when it’s blooming grey.

 

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All words, drawing and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

OWNERSHIP IS NOT ALWAYS THE ONLY CONSIDERATION

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

 

Squirrel scuttles across the sea of grass.
Stops to my right to consider someone else’s acorn.
Mouth twitches to mimic tail before I’m noticed.
Embarrassed by my presence he adopts a still stance
as if that might make him invisible.

Don’t worry, I whisper, I can relate.
Once I found lips too sweet to miss and kissed them.
There in the open. Knowing they were not mine.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly