Peter O’ Neill is currently doing an MA in Comparative Literature at Dublin City University. Since the mid nineteen eighties he has written hundreds of poems. He lived and worked in France and enjoyed reading Baudelaire, Beckett, Rimbaud and Proust very much. He had written some poems in French and now he is learning Italian. Dante is also his great love.
Five poems by Peter O’ Neill
Leo
It is raining on the flowers like a funeral.
When it stops the vapour will arise like smoke
on the road in the sunlight.
There is an old man sitting alone inside an empty bar.
His thoughts are spinning inside his mind
like pennies upon the counter.
Memories are an irritant to him as a dog is to a flea.
He scratches them with his tongue
and the words pour out of his mouth
as graceful as a dictator’s pas de deux.
With them he brings to the floor a forlorn stage show.
The muppets appear before you in single file,
you can see them all so clearly that you accidentally bump
into the wardrobe lady.
They are all made up of old hair and skin
and some of them are sewn up like old battered teddies.
On this particular day they are all to be found dancing
outside The College of Surgeons.
There is an accordionist playing Freight Train Rock.
The stoker fuels it all with vodka and red.
The Local
Under the suspended lamps like manifold moons
the all encompassing locality hits you like the sharp slap
of an unintentional elbow to the face.
Here,
conversations shift like the breeze.
Once opened,
rows of solid entities
may cause the further assessment
of the transience of all matter.
Fiddle and banjo pull to the strains of a singular life.
And the sole measure of certitude are the pints,
on that everyone is agreed.
The Ninnies
for Jerry Higgins
In public bars old men cling to their spirits,
god’s tears of laughter, like children with toys.
The clocks on the shelves announce tedium with a tick
and all manner of danger with a tock.
We are always, despite ourselves, in the realm of the divine.
I knew his voice. The passively dominant tongue,
mind like a crab scurrying beneath the waves of memory.
The claw of the words clutching, always in defence,
for all his life hasn’t he lived in fear?
“Accept anything but blows! My mother used to say.”
And there he sits in the snug, probing the listener’s face,
with those intense eyes, while the other sits there with the patience of Job,
punctuating the monologue with shovel loads of
“…yeah…yeah…yeah…yeah…yeah…yeah…”
Head bowed by the weight of the words (he is supporting history)
for this is no free for all, nor is it conversation,
but rather a slow and steady annihilation;
as continuous as Morse,
or rainwater.
But, yet… he waits for a lull,
full of optimism,
balancing in his mind for the right moment
to STRIKE OUT
with a quick, lightening offensive,
which could possibly paralyse the other
into a kind of momentary, awakening.
The 108
It was a Saturday morning.
There was not one woman in the place.
Everyone was in full voice.
It was not a pub or bar, but rather a saloon
and the atmosphere was one of club, or kindergarten.
Grey hair and hardened skin, glasses and twelve o’clock shadows
reigned.
Stools, upholstered in old red leatherette,
were lined up at the counter
awaiting the more worried
or overtly anxious to claim them.
An old man sat in a corner cleaning his ear with a pencil.
A young father entered and admonished his son to,
“Sit down there now, and behave!”
Two retired business men argued like schoolboys
trying to piece together the events of the previous night
over coffee and fizzy water.
I sat amongst them all
imagining god looking down upon us
like a child would with his favourite, old, broken toys.
The Barman
for Paul O’ Neill
My customers,
tortured by various infidelities,
sit around the counter
drinking and smoking,
some alone reading newspapers
or working,
others alone staring at the walls
mouths agape
struck once again by the enormity
of their own self-imposed exile.
While, the lucky few,
in quiet groups of twos and threes,
break the silence with their laughter and guffaws
consciously joking at the utter stupidity
and ridiculousness of their daily lives.
While, I pour each and every one of them
another chance or possibility
in the form of this liquid gold.
The Galway Review 