Today is my Sixty-Ninth Birthday

Also my First Day as a Sculptor.

I offer my first work as a birthday greeting to myself.

Only Sixty-Nine yet. Three Score and Ten is far beyond the foaming shore seen here in the distant background.

Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada 2

Wurra Wurra: The Night of the Long Brooms (Part Two)
(translated from the Irish of Micheál MacSolamh “Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada”)

In the press there are days folded like clean linen
waiting for the dirt.
Inside the closet
a clock keeps ticking
and they say it is only a matter of time.

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

And then three women, naked and wild as the storm driven wind in the chimney’s breast stepping in on this Night of the Dead and of all the Holy Saints stealthily, rag-haired, broom-clad, besom-handed, bucket swinging, brush proud. From the black shadows they drove the ciarógs and the clocks and the millipedes and the wood lice and the silverfish and the daddy long-legs and the black spiders, herding them silently out of this sad and dusty bachelor gaff and off its surface of unswept regret. For this is the echoless hole of entropy that a connubial extraction leaves behind. Since our separation it has been mine.

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

In the press there are days folded like clean linen waiting for the dirt.
In the closet
a clock keeps ticking.
and they say it is only a matter of time.

Works in Progress 3

Wurra Wurra: The Night of the Long Brooms (Part One)
© Mike Absalom 1 November 2009
(translated from the Irish of Micheál MacSolamh “Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada”)

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

I am not yet three score and ten years of age. In spite of my piercing gaze which has the diamantine glitter of a snake’s eye, and despite the silver halo wreathing my skull in eleventh hour blossom like a thorn bush that doesn’t give a tinker’s curse it has missed spring, but extrudes flowers like sausages willy-nilly all over the place whatever the damn season, I am not yet three score and ten years of age.

The skin of my skull is wrinkled with savage furrows that make me look as wise in ejaculation as a puffball on a lawn trampled by children.
I am not wise at all, but that is neither here nor there.
I am not yet three score and ten years of age either.
Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

The Old Testament says three score and ten is my sell-by date.
But I am not there yet and so we have no earthly reason to speak of Testaments. Or panic.
Broomsticks I saw first
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.
I will not deny though that a birthday is upon me soon,
but it is merely the three score and ninth.
As numbers go I have no problem with this one. It is depressing, but only vaguely so, like the idea of caterpillars visiting my library or an invitation to play a round of golf in

winter.
I would not call the number 69 an apocalyptic statement.
Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

The Booty of Poetry

The Booty of Poetry

The booty of poetry
for him
was always girls.

Laurels were secondary.
He enjoyed the taste of words. He enjoyed mouthing them.
He enjoyed the intimate touch that came with their transmission.
When the coffee break arrived
the sweet taste of enticement was still in his mouth,
like the sugar around a donut.
There was no stopping it.

The booty of poetry
for him
was always girls.

It worked of course.
That was the beauty of it.

Dead Instruments and the Scent of Flowers

A blind man jumped over a cliff towards the scent of flowers.
Is this retirement?

Only half blind
I felt the weaker pull.
I put up my fiddle
and pushed my harp into a corner.
It looks good there.
Its polished black walnut skin
displays my dust collection to a T.

I am often woken in the night
as yet another string snaps angrily in its sad redundancy
and gives up the ghost with a crack.
Gutless harp.

Although not quite.

During the day if I pass by absentmindedly close
the viper teeth of string ends nip playfully at my flesh
hoping I will catch tetanus.

Like the blind man I jumped over a cliff.

As I fall
the scent of flowers is not getting any stronger.

The Whitby Dracula 1977 (Halloween Nostalgia)

Dracula Whitbyiensis (The Whitby Dracula)

By the light
Of the silvery moon

I importune
Pretty maidens, who swoon at what I'm doin'.

Then off I zoom

to my room with a tomb.
Just popped out for a bite.

Did I give you a fright?

I'll be back again soon,
By the light of the moon.

By the light
Of the silvery stars

Outside the graveyard I pause

With someone's throat in my jaws.
(Oh! Let my dentures dent yours!)

Singing this refrain

In a jocular vein:

A drop or two of you will see me through;

Can you lend me a spoon?

By the light of the moon.

In my cloak and hat
With my little pet bat

What an aristocrat!
Who can guess what I'm at?
(Assault and battery that's what! )
As I flit

Across the moon I'm well lit:

I had a little haemorrhage

I've been keeping in the fridge!

I'm going to croon

By the light of the moon.

c. Mike Absalom 1977

Works in Progress 2

Skeleton Pods

In the garden
the scrag ends of lupins
with skeleton pods rattling all around me
remind that
the tumble towards something awful
never stops.

However,
strapped to a chair
in this garden,
on this lawn,
among these flowers,
under this bottomless sky,
I will probably fall
for ever,
and avoid it.