It minds
With its own peculiar watchfulness
That wants to know and not be noticed.
The gentlest of flies watches me too
From the bureau, side table, everywhere I go
More pet than pest,
Like a long-dead poet checking in.
The victims of Industrial Slavery
Are camped out down the street.
Such is the legendary self-loathing of the Irish
They're happy to let me in to their misery circle
But only if I accept the karma
Like I'm a stand-in, all eyes on me
For what's been done to them ...
Even the bath casks say Karmic Ritual
And the rebel music is in English still
Without a need to re-enact the battle
When the Irish tongue has been freed
In the young, and on every street corner.
The fly doesn't want me to venture outside
To be accosted, say, by some card reader
With no boundaries who offers uncomfortable truth
About my Egyptian past lives.
It only hurts when I laugh, or talk
Or stand blindly receiving the city's energies,
Its ghosts, including it seems blind Joyce himself,
Still prisoner of the Knights Templar Bar.
But the River Gods finally came through the pipes
To get in the last and only word
In the voice of my late wife
Whose Irish kindness belied her Viking stock.
She seemed surprised to hear
She had ever blamed me, had ever
Thought of me with anything but gratitude.
I am forgiven ... Ah karma, let it go.
