Song for Sinners I Hope the Good Lord Allows into Heaven By John Doyle

Dreams are this tapestry 

a fading horse drew from dust

made limp in the Arizona rain, I see it creep all over me -

I am immune to such things,

but each night I pray to Jesus to rid my rib of guilt

is a night closer to a church perched on dawn’s succor;

the music Poseidon maybe made

through his drizzle-blur despair dwindles

though my sorry hinterland, standing

excused by lightbulbs smashed on floors of

boys whose fathers named them names of men

Jesus said were leaving redemption behind

in a garden

sinners painted whiter than a eucharist.

Penises and sadness along a water coloured sidewalk -

these mean nothing to a man who pretends everything is everlasting.

Heartless blue and water-cool windows

are a reminder of letters moaning for their words

on that white line they said they’d follow - follow

'til that jet landed and the planets imploded in alphabetical order.

The man in the short-sleeve mildew shirt

rivets his polystyrene pants around his simple carcass,

he has yet to die, yet his decay

climbs viciously up my nose,

watching him nudge his car onto my eyes

and beyond

a stinking horizon; a wingless sparrowhawk - a brother-in-law’s lawless funeral

every time the sun dared me to rise,

drugstore keys that wailed a jackal's pleas on his belt loops, and I watched

his inoffensive car plough through his cataract mirrors

like a small bullet-circled lamb

silver promised me would never wither in to gold,

88 kinfolk down at County morgue - dead-end chronology strangled in a trash-can newspaper -

guess they're cracking down on boxcar riders,

their Christ-yellowed skin

my horoscopes patch into lyrics for a dobro's darkest song.

Poetry shoots like asteroids.

New Mexico's

lightning symphony for midnight's flashing embers

feigns purple darks of rain-dribbled night,

a bloodless horse of passion the wild-lipped son of God

choose to trample dandelions in the dirty snow.

I prayed that February sundown, in the trembled fawns of 1980

as I prayed all that mongrel month of May, its ivy haunting 1974;

"Lord" I hollered, "take care of our bonny brother Ronald", his head like a 

viper choking on the gearstick's wilderness.

When he skipped Freo’s bulging wrecks on wheels that spat cold-blue lightning

I knew a hundred prayers couldn't match those one hundred and one

we'd set aside for the daughters made daughterless 

by a bone-emptied man's song of Winter's failures.

Rusted truck who slumbers in a field near Mandan, North Dakota -

sing for us a decade of the Rosary

and a song that sparkled like diamonds

when a fat-face tourist tugged at his sagging shorts 

and an avalanche crippled the souls of his children.

The hyenas have savaged the elk now, nothing speaks of a dreamer's love

more pale than morse code hammered on its carrion,

nothing tells me the city will someday burn

more than blood climbing on its subway tiles.

All these things mean nothing - or at least have a limited lifespan of relevance,

the script's an empty room of a dead person, 

who died the day before I started painting walls in the hospital;

looking across this piazza, an hour's consideration's

sweet and gorgeous like sunrise illuminating a peach, 

pigeons gathering in peace at a European church-spier.

The pink shop-front walls on the gorgeous eternity are black and limitless

for me,

driving home from all day shifts

life is a clutch of warm-brown dandelions Merton glazed his toes upon

 

Half man, half creature of very odd habit, John Doyle dabbles in poetry when other forms of alchemy and whatnot just don't meet his creative needs. From County Kildare in Ireland, he is (let's just politely say) closer to 50 than 21.