Pretending to be Taoiseach
Pretending to be Taoiseach
Nearly all politicians are
dummies and mimics,
as are most junkies and drunks.
Also in nature predators
learn off their roles
by long-settled rote
and so do their victims.
Dissent is a kind of seeing deformity
that shows a way out.
This much I’m used to and sure of.
Last night I strolled
the Liffeyside boardwalk
being reminded, as usual,
by every new scene of cackling debauch,
of the clear-sighted canvas upheld
to the hellish medieval grotesque,
(That triptych of self-mutiliation,
passed-on oppression, interior rot.)
by artists like Brueghel and Bosch.
I wasn’t all that affected
by the scores of drunk addicts,
some of them children,
reciprocally miming sewer-pipe mouths,
canine grimaces, anteater snouts.
Nor was I more than expectedly saddened
that each had the same
or similiar names and nicknames,
like Chloe,
Ryan, Bonzer and Jayzee
and that each had these same or similar
names and nicknames
of dead infants
and partners and friends
scribbled in prisoner’s ink
among epidemical scabs and scars
torn out of their Hep-yellow flesh
by needles and blades
on their bellies and forearms.
I didn’t find it occasion
for chuck-up or freak-out to watch,
wriggling from all of their noses,
those short, pale, corpulent worms
that lead a suspended, blissful existence
at the bottom of bottles
of tequila and absinthe.
The thought that last night surprised me
was this:
round here the brown river
muddies the sky
and carries it off
and the sun only rises
out of corporate towers
so it’s joining the dots
and stating the obvious
to say that these terminal addicts
who rot on the boardwalk
like the trays of unsellable fruit
in the tips around Smithfield
are the bottom familiars
of the contagious filth
at the top.
Last night on the boardwalk
I watched one drunkjunky pimp
pretending to be Taoiseach.
He was your absolute image
sketching you out completely
on the very edge of the Liffey,
ten yards from O Connell Bridge
on Batchelor’s Quay.
This drug-addled lunatic
mimed so precisely
the unsteady condition
that everyone’s heard
you ever so occasionally
might get yourself into
at, to take only one out of many,
a sinister off-record networking soiree,
ending-up like Amy Winehouse’s birthday
at four in the morning
in your showbander bedroom
trying to satisfy the unsatisfiable
with the remains
of a very rare steak
carried away from the banquet
beneath your wine-spattered shirt.
Well, after only two minutes
in charge of the totterer’s nation,
faith swooped in like a wrecking ball
to crush this parroting citizen
(just as the gigantic wrecking ball of time
will be slamming down sooner or later
upon the culture of apartment blocks
and shopping centres)
and the poor demented animal crumbled
into the tarflow of the nightriver
and then straightaway another one-
there is always straightaway another one,
the aping of sovereigns unstoppable here-
struggled heroically paralytically out
from under a soiled duvet
and had a go at doing you when,
four or five hours later,
you’re stranded like your own amnesiac ghost
in the plasmic aftermath
of a blackout
naked and quaking
like the smartphone’s on vibrate
and you’ve downed it like a toad,
trying to whip into line
the chaotic neuronal gloop
a-whirl in your brain
and rev-up that unreliable throat
(praying then that the rest of you will follow)
by shouting half-recollected
ancient gaelic oaths
into a cloud of steam
in the bathroom mirror
inbetween repeating
another day’s scrip
for the war on the people.
Watch out though, look!
I bet you the Easter Rising
and raise you two-thirds of the future
that it’s your hobo doppelganger
forming up in the optical mist
in that mirror.
You simply do not know
in your twisted, tormented condition
if or how, going forward
-rather than your natural
sideways or backwards-
you’re going to get it together
to last
til the one or two little sips
your handlers allow
to settle you through
the mid-afternoon
or how you’ll keep a straight face
through another ten-thousand
delirious, farcical minutes
of counted-down lies
that you are going to spend,
whether you like it or not,
in the grip of an irrational
and eventually overwhelming
goo to get totally out-of-it
like the rest of the chronics
on the Liffeyside boardwalk
whom you poisonously envy
while signing orders to persecute.
Whenever you hear
the disposable gods
of interchangeable talk-shows
blunderbussing on the airwaves
for a round-up of the scumbags
your blood cells,
like a choir of slaves in a galley-boat,
cry out in instinctual sympathy
for a fix or a shot
and while your fellow shades
upon the boardwalk
are dropping
like the flies
that are
dropping
on them
and, in your imitation,
suppering on the national scapegoats
sure you’ll struggle on
towards your cosseted downfall
but all along you’ll be nowt
but a mime and a dummy
strung out and doomed
and vainly attempting
to clear the unclearable gravels and tars
that are clogging and sliming
in the sewer of your throat
in the wasted highways of your mind
in the empty estates of your soul
in the incinerated rubbish of your heart
and pretending, always pretending
always always pretending
because there never ever was
and there never ever could be
anymore than pretending
in this pastiche of a lush we call taoiseach.
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 latest collection of poetry is Invitation to a Sacrifice (Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, 2010).
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Comment by: William Wall
Sep 29th 2010 at 15:09
The spectacle of an unedifying spectacle making a spectacle of himself neatly captured in this poem. It raises the awful spectre that Brian Cowan is, like God, a creation of our own need to worship a gouger.
Comment by: Pope Epopt
Sep 30th 2010 at 11:09
“at four in the morning
in your showbander bedroom
trying to satisfy the unsatisfiable”
&
“pastiche of a lush”.
You got him down pat there, boy.