A resurrection in Charlesland (An Extract)
From A resurrection in Charlesland
All the golden nest-egg rows changed back to brick.
The hoardings’ painted sunrays sprouted teeth
and claws.
In the online brochures the blue computerised skys
were recoded
as nets that are
thickening over us.
We’re webbed up in debt
and domestic addictions.
Our white-walled kitchen loneliness
is great
and always hungry.
Force-feeding ourselves Dan Brown, valium, parox,
Gerry Ryan and angelology,
we repeat the neo-liberal prescriptions:
staying in is the new going out
and there is no such thing as society
and we swallow down the lot
with a supermarket own-brand plonk
that unmiracles to vinegar in your mouth.
Morning after after morning after
we look back
while we’re hanging
fur-tongued and possibly still langers (why not?)
at the up-arrow years
when developers spiked us
with a hyperstimulant called greed
with no known antidote
or comedown cure
but death and disaster.
Estate agents casinoed our existences
spun a wheel with only one bright number on it,
Looking-After-Number 1
kept plying the line that everyone
was guaranteed to be a millionaire,
for starters,
till we were hot-cheeked with money lust
and then they swayed their magic keys in front of us
like hypnorapists goofing us
for all possible advantage.
Bankers brought the kinky costumes and equipment.
Adpimps supplied the glitterdust and lube.
Channel 4 filmed every oiled up inch and second of it
flatscreening it back to us
as we squatted
on the chaise-longue for years
to watch ourselves being screwed
while being screwed
on the chaise longue for years…
and most of us knew what was happening
and some of us truly were hoodwinked
and nearly everybody wanted it never to stop.
Thus were we rightly sodomed here and dumped
two million life-indentured gimps
stuck without an exit plan
in one of time’s bogged-down pauses,
history’s less-interesting amber phases
dream homes become burial mounds
in which we just about get by
most of the time
without killing
ourselves or our loved ones
square metered cells in dolmens of brick
subsiding nanometrically
in a slow motion earthquake.
but one day we all know the cracking open will accelerate
the falling down around us will be far too fucking quick.
Because isn’t it obvious?
Our imitation terracotta roofs can’t wait to collapse on us
cave in becoming overnight poetic and mysterious
like all the slumped stone cottages they’re jealous of
relics of so many oldsung irish hells
that memorise the bitter twisted centuries before us
and that we wist on whizzing by in cars or trains,
lulled to a deep-thought serenity
by their silent exterior stillness through the window-glass,
as each of them weakly yet perceptibly
returns to us reflections
that our inheritance is the mirror of our legacy.
Here let me put down my stake:
I bet you all posterity- that bingomasters’joke-
that far far future tourists visiting our formerland,
as they flipper through the shoals of broken glass and
the corals on our underwater weathered brick,
will paddle lyrical about our mystical decrepitude
our enigmatic spirituality,
our rough-hewn fortitude
in phrasings no-one now alive could hope to understand
and they will be delighted not to have the chance
to know what you and I
actually felt,
because sensation is what truly dies.
Brick and even word a while survive
but pain
has no remembrance.
Pain is now.
Pain is all the stretched out moments
you must just go on
living through
while your middle years
are being sucked
into finance’s bodiless hole
and your swinging retirement is hauled off
in a secret convoy to a noplace
for disacknowledgement
an offshore no-address
somewhere west of Easter Island
with all the rest of the lost lottoed lives
and forfeited futures of Charlesland.
A no recoverable haven.
Think! Memory!
The globe of time spins round upon
a carousel of catastrophe.
Our joust is coming round, again.
Who will ride and who be ridden?
The million damn-blasted cottiers
paragraphed in your textbooks
are not just your ancestry.
They are your childrens’ ravaged shadows
catching up with
and becoming
your children.
Our grandchildren’s days
will be worse
than our nightmares could dream of.
Dave Lordan’s debut collection of poetry The Boy in the Ring (Salmon 2007) won The Patrick Kavanagh Award in manuscript form in 2005. In 2008 it won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for best first collection and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. It was named as a book of the year by RTE Radio 1’s Arena show in 2009.
His first play Jo Bangles,starring Mary Mcevoy, enjoyed a sell out run in Dundrum’s Mill Theatre in February 2010. His second play ICE, will be produced by the newly re-opened Focus Theatre in Dublin.
His second poetry collection Invitation to a Sacrifice will be launched this summer and accompanied by a national tour of readings alongside Elaine Feeney.
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Comment by: William Wall
May 15th 2010 at 17:05
Brilliant. A slice from our Great Hunger.
“and most of us knew what was happening
and some of us truly were hoodwinked
and nearly everybody wanted it never to stop.”
Thanks Dave, and thanks ILR for posting it.
Comment by: Pope Epopt
May 15th 2010 at 22:05
A fine howl, Dave.
The last few stanzas are nail the horror and guilt of what it is to watch children grow into these times.
Comment by: Noam Chimpsky
May 22nd 2010 at 16:05
Outstanding - this surely deserves a place in Pseud’s Corner.