Happy 4th of July from The Muse and I…
JONI MITCHELL
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 15; TURBULENT SACRIFICE
Mama was an unmarried mother
at the end of the summer of 75
as Joni hissed of the snakes
in the gardens of complacency
where ignorance was still very much alive.
Mama was only a girl in the growing
and possibly no more than just 18
when she bent down and placed
a kiss on my cheek and whispered
goodbye to her own little green.
Mama is someone who I’ve never met
aside from the dream I once had
of her life in a kingdom that ruled
you could not mother a child unless
at first you were a legitimate wife.
Mama was an unmarried girl one winter
in the arms of a man barely stretched
from a boy, her trust in the throws
that left little to believe in and a pain
that pulled on the strings of goodbye.
Mama was once an unmarried mother
and bursting with thoughts her shape
couldn’t hide, but helpless and hopeless
were not part of her form and so she did
what she could when you can’t be the bride.
Mama was a childless woman
when winter that year came cold with its calling,
and the tears started breaking
and the leaves began falling
like the water that had broken,
like the hold that had not held,
like the hope that was drowned,
and the hand that was expelled…
too short, too quick, too hard
too much to let go for good
and the snakes started hissing on the lawns.
Mamma was the unmarried mother
who gave me the greatest gift
that anyone could, of growing up
knowing that what she had done
was to give me up for a greater good.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 14; TWO ROOMS IN THE LAND OF THE FROGS
In days now distant we were back side, one-up,
apartment dwellers whose viewless windows
enabled us to see more through the darkness
than the light that might have deceived us.
Tambourine Therese tapped her tunes of truths
not yet tasted, sweet tumble leaves freshly fallen
from the trees in the apple orchard with the pink
ladies and golden greens begging to be bitten into,
we were innocence eased into a micro mini
of voluptuous velvet and the brown eyed boy
already broken on blue, we were scavengers
seeking the scent of salvation on the shiny streets,
saving up to buy into beginnings we could cut
cords on, we were lyrics yet to be licked
looking to Mitchell as muse; we were wild
in the old days and covering Carey and cases
of whoever might come calling on the Casio
in our little corner as we careered through
the no longer muddy marshland in search
of suggestions to rise in us seductions, thirsty
for tattoos to plot paths along our pale pinkness
so we could track our trajectory. Gone
from the garden we were growing into city,
held up at first in a hotel, hostages of homelessness
were we sang songs in the ignorance of our sorrow,
sweet birds of youth busy building nests
in the confines of concrete, blind to the battery,
we were born for the bloom but forging
that famed forever on a friendship
that failed us like the lie of a lead balloon.
In days now distanced from all that was once dream,
I have found form as lonely painter on a canvas
of winding words, the connoisseur of cutting cords,
often curt and callous, in the challenge to manage
the malice, trying to be fateful only to the fate
that awaits but caught at times, by cords
that cannot be cut, whose curious concerns
come a calling from cold corners I’d considered
closed. I hear you on the wind sometimes
still tapping those tunes I thought I’d forgotten,
as veins rethread the trajectories already taken
through my skin, no more so pink, no more
so fresh. Fruit fades but we find ourselves
reformed into fractures of what once was,
fragments unfinished, like filigree too fine
to unfold, like a dance as yet undone, a song
we had still to sing in this city I’ve now returned to
while moving on, slipping forward through shadows
now past, still building nests, still seeing better
in the darkness and touched, in that half-light,
by the purity of your sprite, once so fair, one so rare.
We fell so fast to finished and yet, as she sings
of the songs like tattoos, I’m reminded
of that one flight up that can never be diminished.
All words and photo collage by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 13; CAPTURE BEAUTY
Beauty is breathtaking
where breath is less
and beauty is all.
Beauty is breathtaking
before it’s been taken from you,
then we are no longer bound to blind
and breath is less and less and less.
We breathe in beauty
in excess
as if it were endless,
as if we were never bound to be less and less and less.
We are chalk
marked for a rainstorm.
We breathe beauty with every breath,
with every kiss caught from lip’s press,
we press beauty into flesh,
flesh fresh on beauty that is fleeting.
Kiss him back,
Kiss her again
before it’s gone.
‘Kiss me,’ she whispers with eyes eager
and he kisses her eyes
and her lips grow eager
to feel the beauty that is breathless,
that draws in each breath, less and less and less.
We are not bound to be endless,
we are chalk
marked for the rain storming in the distance.
And so we press more and more and more
falling into the fragile fold
that holds beauty as it is falling,
for we are falling
into life,
into lust,
into love,
into loss,
into all that will fade
when the rainstorm has fallen,
for we all are fragile.
Capture beauty
before the breath grows less and less and…
All words and mini college by Damien B. Donnelly
All poems/visuals in this series are inspired by the artistry of Joni Mitchell.
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 12, APPETITES
Down
in the dungeons
of men’s minds, below
the dance halls and the giddy
galleries, deep in a declining darkness
holding no pride over permanence, appetites
edge on apps to ease entrance as dogs eat dogs.
These are no longer the days of Wilde’s wit
and wicked word play, temptations are
no longer teased from tongue
twisters but twisted from
tongues in the darkest
part of the night
where dogs prowl
the popper pool, sniffing
out stimulating stimulants,
playing with prey, praying for applause
to that great god ground down; credit card cuts
of white lines that can’t quite cut through
these savage times. Digging deep
in the dungeon of darker minds,
men make moves too difficult
to swallow. Dogs eat dogs
and I realise I’m more
captive to caviar
than canine.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 11; CORRECTING CORINTHIANS
As a child
was I thoughtless
or just thought less?
Less taught.
Less to think about?
Was there really less to see,
less to love?
For life was never loveless.
As a man
I have given so much away, I guess,
less love left,
less to give,
more gone.
Does it grow back,
like children grow
and learn and know
before becoming thoughtless again,
before taking more of their share,
before leaving less for the rest?
Less to give. More gone. What rests?
But I am not a noisy nothing
because I have emptied love
into other hearts,
hungry,
happy,
heavy,
hard..
But now, with the knowledge
that I no longer know less,
I know this:
I am not less than the child
who once thought less,
I am not less than the man
who once loved more.
I see
in the mirror, dimly,
and sometimes clearly,
those pieces that have parted
and the person that remains,
someone between child and man,
somewhere between innocence
and all the light that is dimmer after its loss,
somewhere between the thinking
and the taking and the being taken,
I am
somewhere
between it all,
looking back, reaching out,
holding up the faith that has fallen
and regarding the fate that is waiting,
reflecting the hope that the child sees
and the one that every man needs,
holding
up the love
that will always be
at home in my heart,
whether or not I am
framed by someone
or single, just me.
just one.
For even if it is just one
it is far from none.
I am not nothing and never will be.
This I used to know in part
but now I know in full.
All words and pictures by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 10; THE SUM OF WHO WE ARE
And we are all a sum of circles…
spinning, spiralling,
circling something,
orbiting our own atmosphere,
seduced by our own stratosphere, (oh, how we smell)
chasing our own tails;
can circles have tails or is it just dogs?
Although Plato portrayed us
as circles split apart;
restlessly looking for the rest of ourselves,
worrying the best half
is the other half that was snipped away.
So are we circles
or just the unfinished sum of a circle?
Are we accounting or just counting our own charisma?
Fragmented fractures
trying to add positives with only negatives,
semi circles circling the greater circle of life,
some all seeing, some all knowing,
some too wrapped in the self to see the shadow
and oh how the shadows can settle over the oh so indulgent.
And she calls
and she cries
and she sees
nothing and no one as needy
as she caresses her own concerns
and she combs
long shining strands
of sustained soliloquies
over the silence, shivering.
And he sleeps
and he cries
and he needs
all and everyone to see how suffering
stifles his strength to see beyond the self
and he breaths
his burdens over brothers
he believes are blind
to his behaviour.
Oh the poor ones,
oh the pity,
pretty girl,
pity boy,
how they want you to see them,
to see how hard it is
to be them.
Make way for the music;
see the swines strumming the sinew
as the crows cut through callous cords
and the vultures make violent overtures on the violins
and cut to crashing crescendo!
If only fortune
could free them
from the self satisfying shackles
they slip over themselves.
Shackles too shiny
to ever enslave.
And she calls
and he cries
and they see themselves
as singularly central to the circle
and not just a number in a sum of an incomplete equation.
All words and wall hanging by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 9; A MUSE ON A ROUGH ROUSE
‘You gotta be what you want,’ that’s what they say,
‘You gotta be what we want,’ that’s what they mean
and, brother and sister, they can be mean.
But we can’t all be compliant in complacency, we can’t
all be kept compartmentalised into your conditions,
I have my own conditions. Cotton Avenue has come a calling
with its shiny beat on a changing street and this is the just
the latest edition, fresh off the press and it’s less and less
of before and more and more of more.
So come see me, if you feel it, in the morning light
when I’m musing bright and rough and ripe for the fight
but that reflection will have taken flight by the evening light
when I’m straddling the moonlight naked by your bedight,
twisting temporary between thighs so tight that make us feel so right.
Originality’s been ostracised without being obvious, like wolves
now wet as pets, fractured and folded into fickle formulas
customers can get their claws into, accentuated with sugar
to sooth the jaws into silently submissive but still we can salivate.
But you were always looking for the other side of obvious,
breaking down the fences, flipping the B Side to the A side.
They felt you fitted into folk, at first, fragile filigree as a woman
should be, caressing concerns of the passing of casual companions,
the woman’s champion you never wanted to be and so you grew listless
within the laurel and the labels, and turned from the men’s measuring
tables that pulled down from up and turned to rocking restless,
seeking out a new way to swing, but you swayed so far from
their familiar so they dared to deny you, wanted to tie you up
in your old strings of sorrows and musings from the midways.
You had leapt electric and they stood stoic; confused in what they
considered too eclectic. Jazz, like poetry, is the puzzle rarely pondered
by the populous! They hated your hissing as if you were pissing
in your own park and couldn’t pardon Don Juan from this darkened
daughter who was merely looking forward to see what was to follow.
‘Stay true’, they say to me and you, but through to who? Wild things
run free, you cannot cage creation even as breeders of a nation without
a notion of what’s possible in lieu of the lie that’s much more popular.
I turn to the TV in the impermanent ‘pop-up’ plot by the parking lot
and tune in to see tales twist and spin as CNN flies with fears
and fragility in France, where terror has taken over tourism
while I’ve been in the park in Paris with Parisians still proudly
playing in their paradise. Terror, Trumpers, is tapping on your toes,
a cannonball of chaos careering through your school halls,
and your gun clubs and the bold bravado of your right to a riffle
like life was a raffle. France has fallen to foreign fears and we feel
the tears burning and the eyes watching as metros keep moving
cause commuters have commitments but in your homeland,
in that brave land, Americans are killed more by their own hand
than by any other hand and still you stand and sing
‘land of the free’, ‘home of the brave’. ‘
Political is now popular but god forbid if you try to popularise
being political. Remember; we all have our positions people.
France is fool to its own folly, as the cast-outs camp out
in cardboard boxes they’ve crashed into, hoping for help
and hand outs from the common men because the political ones
are busy building domes of duplicated documents
they’ve demanded you deliver even though they are decades old,
documents that are difficult to keep track of when your home was hit,
your city in shreds and you ran for refuge.
Ireland, oh Ireland, it’s a long long way from home,
not sure I can still drink a crate of you but happy I am
to dream you from the distance, to reminisce of your better days
you are now getting back to. Back to basic, like you needed to,
coming closer to the craic you’d cashed in when you had all that cash
to get lost in, the greed that grinded down the greatness and cut
more character from the classes than faith and famine killed the masses.
Sceptical still as to whether racism should be ruled out,
religion is racing towards relic but feet still flow to the masses
like in uniformed formation, as if in some sort of heightened
migration, a hypnosis from on high even if the brothers have abused
and battered all hope of ever being saved and the nuns no better
in their neglect for a nation of unmarried mothers who became
unpaid servants while their babies were left to swim in still waters,
that were far from blessed. Maybe you were right; God must be a boogie man!
The green land, the homeland, how time has loosened its hand
on our hold, age informed me while youth had veiled me
from the force of your females eager to remind your males
how they were made to be their meek; men moulded into
money making and quiet keeping. The motherland, indeed,
where the hens hold the cock clenched but I have things to say
just as much as those clocking birds running headstrong through
the homesteads. You can’t shut me up and just talk to me.
That’s not how it’s gonna be! I have options and opinions
and others versions who I’ve yet to be. I am changing sides,
slipping, like she did, the B side to the A side and will not
be pushed aside so perhaps that’s why I’ve taken off to the other side.
Cause I gotta be what I want and not what you want to see.
You see?
Gotta be free to muse,
regardless of the roughness,
for this is the justice that the just deserve.
All words and picture-collage by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 8; TAXI DRIVER
A constant darkness,
the future unfolds like the road;
route unknown,
the past ever present
but kissed goodbye;
my lips still taste of yesterday,
my hips the heat of your caress
that has since slipped from these sheets.
I was always bound to restless,
to rest less and less,
I am creature creative;
a constant recreation concerned more with shadow than light,
more with what I don’t yet know
than where I have already been.
I am taxi traveller,
I will take you with me
naked under the sweating sun,
tender under starlight
but you are only fair;
you are the hitchhiker
along my highway,
a distraction on route to destination.
We are not destiny,
no two are designed alike,
every soul a single sojourn.
I am city when you are desert,
I am sand when you are stone,
I will have dried up
before you learn to open up.
I will meet you
under moonlight,
by the gaslight
already flickering in the morning light,
only the stars will see us burning bright
for we are stars;
rising in the darkness,
this constant darkness,
I will drink you and then discard you
when the dawn calls me back to destination
before you break me,
I will set off before you slow me,
before you show me who you want me to be.
I am everything and nothing
in your eyes, all lies,
we are only reflections,
projections of hope and hurt,
How can I be all you want
when we don’t really know who we are?
We are starlight, like I said,
already burning out before begun,
drawn to distraction
and drawing on our own dust.
But I am constant, now, to the calling,
am free to flight and fall,
I will love you forever
and yet leave you
before you’ve even considered it
a compliment to concern yourself with who I am
because all we have learned
is to look for ourselves in each other.
And yet I am other. Another.
No other,
bound to no body and everybody,
at home in hotels
that hold me for hire,
every stop another station in the formation,
every sheet another burn as we twist and turn
and then, in twisting, we turn,
we are roads constantly crossing,
trying to get to the other side
to see if the darkness is lighter, brighter,
but this darkness,
this constant darkness
is not a dark abyss,
this constant darkness
can only be conquered at the check out.
A constant darkness,
we are all travellers on a road
making moments, making magic, making mistakes
believing the future is forever.
But I am not concerned or consoled by forever,
I am here now,
running reckless along these roads,
seeking sustenance, seeking solace,
and occasionally a comfort from the cold that comes a calling,
(I will give you what I have willingly
if you promise not to take it unevenly)
seeking satisfaction in things temporary,
leaving a part of me in everything I touch,
hoping it’s enough,
hoping you will remember
the scent of my skin
though we were too thin to be true,
too fragile to be anything more than a fickle tickle,
trying to understand the sweet sorrow,
the ebb and flow, the hope and the hurt.
Goodbye can be a greeting as warm as hello.
Good boy, I am trying to be a good boy
burning through this constant darkness
and smiling as I soar and sizzle.
A constant darkness
so we can gaze at the stars in their glory.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
I CAME TO THE CITY, PART 7; THE HISSING IN THE SUMMER
Summer
as the city
slips into slumber,
after last night’s thunder,
as skin slides from winter’s
shawls and shackles and pitches
itself proudly in parks where not even
dogs bark, where shadows have sunk
into sweaty
soil as feverish
fingers smooth skin
with soothing oil. Summer
in the city and temperatures
are oozing over bodies, all tease
and no breeze to appease. Summer
in the city and the music mellows as fellows
fold frowns
into bottom drawers
with winter wishes and curate
concerns toward sunset kisses. Summer
in the city and she unfurls her curls like foliage
finding form over greedy grass, and he goes green
with envy and furrows his frenzy as the fountain flows
with full force, unabashedly, and he grows as greedy as the grass
while her
curves caress
his consciousness
and he wilts in watchful
wantonness while I wait for kisses
caught on Spanish lips that creep along
the current of sweeping storms and sensual
shifts, we are ships crossing under starlight, snakes
slivering over sheets, I am not his, he is not mine, he is not
hers and still not mine, we cast concern into the ripples that sink in ocean
beds
too deep
to remember and
too cold for concern,
ripples that are arousing now
beneath these fountains now flowing,
in the park, in the sunlight, in the summer,
in the city. Summer in the city and babies are sleeping
in buggies buried under bushes while nannies dose and daddies
delight in their sweet blooming rose. Summer shines on the city and
streets slip
from worries
and rushes to brushes
with light and lazy, humming
hazy harmonies like he once strummed
upon my strings a serenade sweet enough
to sweep us to older days, other days, days of revolution
and voices that shone as bright as this burning sun, and on
to simpler days of lemonade and laughter. Remember laughter,
back before the pitter patter of drought and disaster? We are just people
passing
through parks,
looking for stars
in between the sunlight,
looking for fleeting kisses,
treats that are never free, saints
and snakes all hissing across lawns
in summer. Summer in the city but somewhere
out there, beyond the sleeping stars and the deep blue sky,
someone is probably crying and another, senselessly, about to die.
All words and paintings by Damien B. Donnelly
Audio version available on Soundcloud:
Damien B. Donnelly 