Seamas Carraher- A Poem

POEM ON MY 39TH BIRTHDAY

i try to dance

but i'm stabbed by my bones.

They knife me just

as i am about to fly.

i am a bird with my joints

hacksawed,

a butchered bird with a song of starving.

i stumble thus into my poor body

this bag full of guts and terror.

i crouch in unbelievable poses.

What can i call this dance?

only the dance of the Human

Being? Dissolves

in this sharp skinning space

like a scream

severed

in these pieces

that then fill the room of my life

both particle and wave

so i am nailed to the floor

in a flood both of love and stoning.

This is the dance of the body i was.

A severing dance, a dance springfull of ruptures.

The being i was!

This is my fall without limbs,

the fall deeper than the hollow of my bones

where i hid.

This dance is the dance of

my battering bones,

the dance of my butchering

though no one is here.

Who caused such carnage?

That these crude claws

tear my face from its mirror?

Such a question shakes the strings of my

life.

This faceless me in the sack of my dimensions

reminds me of

falling once

long ago

like a bird or a child

dismembered in flight.

So all the parts, my beautiful parts,

flew on, flew on,

(each one like a philosophy

for what had become of the other?)

On my 39th birthday

i danced the dance of my broken parts

plus my head who was

vomiting at the sink

(like a woman pregnant with the ghost

of a child)

puking on the potscrubs and dishcloths

that threw up my flight like

a blinded creature

tunnelling without light,

what else, in my downward descending,

from the belly of the beast

but to dance myself sane in the shivering light?

Oh, this is a dance that is less than a dance

more a war in my electrons ‘til

i see the light.

More a falling from the sky

to a crowded memory

of hands and feet and tongues

all beating and lashing and grinding,

that claws my spirit from this poor body

like paper shredded into leaffall,

at wintertime, all darkness too.

So i never stop falling, down

this motherless tunnel towards the night.

No matter how many corpses i wrap in wool

in the screaming black voices

saying "you're dead, you're dead"

like my face in a fright

and all the ashes are cold and what of

this puke in a sink?

It's my soul i leave hanging on an old coathanger

with its arms jointed and ready for flight

and myself wrapped in this cloud of a night

so i still tried crazy

like a wind in my eye

settled softly on the ceiling

on my 39th birthday

to dance:

watch this flock of

fearful birds

in howls twisting

rise the walls

the sky, the earth

into a shape uplifting

like a gust, or this tear in my eye,

that might well blow me human

again.

Somewhere far from here,

O my great great great great starving grandfathers,

and this father who rapes me with

the blinding in his eye.

Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He survives on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, Ireland, at present. http://www.seamascarraher.blogspot.ie/