"When I die Dublin will be written in my heart."
~James Joyce

MONDAY, 10:00pm:

“Oh, a storm is threatning
My very life today
If I dont get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away”

Mick and the Stone’s Gimme Shelter squeezes through
the littered doorways and broken windows
through the winds and the sheets
down the streets, the night, between my skull
I don't know, maybe
should it be anything, anything?
This punk's poem; like a mirror or a leaf
fallen from a parking lot tree
a dumpster behind the railroad tracks
an abandoned car in the back of an off road
w/ the silhouettes of three dead bodies
inside those tenement hinterlands
somewhere as close as the sewar-rat smells
a dead car, a dead dog, a dead cat,
church-bells tolling the morning prayers
rats scurrying going nowheres, just to get somewhere;
how many dishes can you wash before the end of your day,
the end of the world? Down the sullen highways,
the dead-end alleyways, sideways and bent buildings
like used coffee and cigarettes...

You hear this cowboy-rock music that blares out from
a busted dirt-ridden ‘97 Chevy pickup,
“Ain't but one way out baby,
and Lord I just can't go out the door.
Cause there's a man down there,
might be your man I don't know.”
I ain't never been down to Texas or Mexico,
I've never ridden a horse an I don't care,
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery,"
James Joyce had said
But I thought of life as more of a simple design
like we are all butterflies, zebras, moths, hurricanes
waiting for Hell to happen
our Christian-chrysalis memories
remembering backwards
all these painted black mirrors
holes of oceans as wide as
the Foxwood's & Mohegan Sun Casinos;
Darwin archipelagos or Indian totem poles.
Yea, I learnt a few things along my way;
but we all get tired before we ever find the truths
fallen out of cars, fallen out of windows,
off trains and out of trashcans
so many ways
drunk in dented taxi cabs, shivering in the cold subways
waiting for another fight,

Lit up
like so many gasolene dreams
we make all this up as we go along
pinball games, video junkie Washington Street waves
selling drugs outside the old Opera House
where the whores stand in the pouring red-light rain
heroin or amphetamines in our bruised vampire veins
(scarred and scared as a mouse)
even if it isn't junk, it's just another kind of
pain, be it paint or pins or piano wires;
television ganja voodoo, computer cybersex affairs
games sweating off wild back-alley frontiers

WEDNESDAY; Midnight:

Remembering things that never happened,
rememberinig riding on a bike as a kid
ringing tinny bells in Chelsea's fogs
remembering being told you were born in '71
on that Sunday, that Bloody Sunday
a day of rain and blood, no sun

THURSDAY, 12:15am:

Years later,
remembering Saturday nights when you were ten years old
throwing molotov cocktails
through Italian, Spanish and Jewish windows
lying in the glittering gutters
because, like Oscar Wilde dreamed,
you wanted to count the stars
from the trash
but you were too fucked up
hell, i don't know
maybe I’ll just go see that new Rocky Balboa flick
get front row seats and eats a lots of popcorn
toss them at the black kids behind me
(we were so ignorant and full of prejudice,
I could feel God's dice waiting to roll my bones)
after the film i'd get into a fight, under lamplights
on a streetcorner for the boys
yelling 'till i cannot recall my own name
maybe then I'll get the respect i really never deserved
"shit!"
"fuck you, dick-head"
"your mother-"
"yea, what about my mother?"
"she's got my daddy's prick up her ass."
"we're brothers, you idiot."
"oh, right."
"shit-"
and then the police sirens would scream
making the crazy dogs howl like wild things
coming out of from the wet night
down these mean streets,

This was suppose to be a poem, feels more like
a half-ass lunatic rant.
I should’ve been born on a fucking farm, on the green Island
not this stinking asshole city.
Can't say I didn't say anything,
and there's all these stray cats hanging 'round my ankles
like the jazz from The Blue Club 'round midnight
all these cats, black ones and white ones...
and then this loud music from a passing limousine
playing some Irish Punk Rock song on the radio
not The Pogues, it's
The Dropkick Murphys
 “I'm Shipping Up To Boston!”
So fucking perfect, that song
down here in old green Southie,
watching the "Bawston Sox" on a small flickering screen
flickering lights and too much alcohol
O'Malley says I "should've gone home years ago"
but only now its way past my bedtime,
so far past that weeks have passed and my mother,
bless her Catholic soul, she prays every night
but I aint ever going back home
this here's my story, my poem,
my green, my white and my orange
and there are never any endings to Irish poetry
back on the island they are called Nothing Poems
like the way Shane MacGowan breaks his teeth on stage
with beer bottles and the mic
singing Lou Reed's "Perfect Day"
and then there's that punk Bono
made it to political celebrity status
still waving the Irish flag!
saving seals and Africans in the name of "Pride!"
"so what!"
he don't know me, he's more American Apple Pie
so close, so far away
now, anyway-

Sure, you laugh when I say that 'cause I was born in South Boston
just another Southie messed up punk
"Fuck it!"
just gives me a quarter so I can add it to my many others
and by some white cocaine blow
a gun, some bullets and do this final job,

SUNDAY; Evening:

But not after I meet Cara by the docks
She cries, "you don't have to do it, Sean!"
I tell her we’re all born into our own rhymes
and the sonnets have already been written
just look at Hamlet and Ophelia, or Titus Andronicus
the noble Roman, General against the Goths;
a bloodthirsty fucking circus!
Yea, so, I know a few things 'bout "the Bard of the Brits"
Tragic shit, if you leave out the comedy
and the comedy is just the mirror of the darker masks;
I kiss her hard on the mouth while she cries
and I stuff thirty thousand dollar bills in her black leather jacket
that she don't know about
and a note telling her to go West, as far as far can take her
out of this place: I hear South Cali is fine, Cara love... S.
“call me tomorrow!” I tell her
but she already knows there is no tomorrow, no more tomorrows
not for me, “Don’t go, Sean.”
as my lips leave her lovely face for the last time
"Please, don't go... Seanie."
But I’m already gone and the music is playing
stuck on inside my skull like a knife-wound...

“Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away”

This night i die, with twelve bullets between my eyes
but I take down that mother-fucker
who works against us on the inside
i walked into that Charles Street bar
like it was a Martin Scorsese film
I pictured the Mark Wahlberg rat in this guy's rock’s glass,
drinking whiskey like he was somebody without a Devil
"Here's your sympathy, fuck-head!"
and the bullets and glass and booze
and flesh and blood and cash went flying
like tiger moth butterflies fracturing through the wet,
dirty red neon mirrors
splintering pieces of fractured memory
(and that music still playing on
somewhere far behind my dying blue eyes;
my mother loved my eyes...)

“It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away”

I saw my face bloodied and a mess like a torn rose petal;
I thought of Cara like a poem, and I smiled
our unborn child with her, and they'll have a fresh new start, now
I know she'll go, 'cause she knows i'm not ever coming back home
I saw my face bloodied and a mess like a torn rose petal

TOMORROW, Nowhere:

These are the things the departed don't know;
I fell into the gutters,
I know.

-----------------------

[ This work is purly fictional, and slightly inspired by the film The Departed. All characters are fictional and any suggestions of extreme prejudice are not the author's views. This is, in part, a character study. In fact, I have about as much Irish in my blood as a tall can of Guinness; but I do have some of that blood and have been in the streets of South Boston often. South Boston is an extremely tough place to live, it is a predomanitely Irish-Catholic neighborhood, and it does have it's cultural history, some great old buildings, etc. Thank you. ]


Lyrics throughout this prose/poem
by The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter
The Allman Brothers: One Way Out
and The Dropkick Murphys: I'm Shipping Up To Boston!

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