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Two Poems
By
Mark Ley
Dear Diary
Dear diary,
Do you think it might possibly
Be time, at last,
To stop thinking
And start living?
What became of our friends,
Whom we loved and laughed with?
Some died of drink, some of broken hearts,
Some drowned in puddles, some in seas,
Some went in search of glory
And never returned,
Some stayed at home
And only dreamed,
Some found religion,
Some found God,
Some found nothing
But themselves.
Europe is mythology and killing:
See it in the face
Of every stranger in the street.
The weasel on the inside of my skull
Is digging his claws in.
A sick animal
Without philosophy or direction,
I sweat weird fevers,
Climbing the walls of my mind.
Requiems of snow are falling
On this city,
On this world.
Infancy
Piloting paper aeroplanes on the thermals of childhood,
I survived a thousand crashes
To cross the Atlantic and circumnavigate the globe.
Certain Irish summers of my infancy reverberate with me now,
still, and always, -tumbling and chasing over the grassy
dunes at Bannow, above the dazzle-strand, toasting the sun
with pink lemonade, among the starfish and seashell days...
Go ahead, play below, behind and beyond the notes,
And ignore the critics who say you just play out of tune.
A memory, a curio:
A Devonian trilobite, its eye lenses
Exquisitely preserved for hundreds of millions of years.
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