I'd sat on his blue carpet for two hours and listened
to that recording of his song, 'I'll Be Waiting'.
I never expected he'd walk in.
He seemed to fumble his way like a lost ghost
reading the aertex walls like Braille.
I was drunk but he was more so,
gold cross hung down his chest, medallion man,
soft as an eiderdown.
Back home, they called him The Dublin Desperado,
he was a legend in the stories men
told over their dreary pints.
The leather-jacketed nights and sublime stars
relished him as roved, Rottwieller at heels,
through hard Clondalkin streets.
But then, he laughed alone, as he punctuated
each account of his physical abuse with a punchline.
I could see why he was too often their firebrand,
why his speech too often forged into fuck yous
and his beautiful hands seized into fists.
This being deserted in a strange land wasn't anything,
he could easily survive that.
It was his marrow deep distrust of humanity
that ached in him right then, but deeper still,
some loneliness, nurtured in the interludes of fights,
in the stiff silences of a broken home,
this life support machine mentality of family survival
'because there was no other option'.
It wasn't being deserted then but being deserted always.
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Submission Name: Hardened Fragility
