By: Enda Boyle

Berryman in Dublin

Thirty years later the Shakespearian scholar returned.
Sporting a Falstaffian beard in search of a diffrent shade
The city of his liteary idols became the ideal stage
With which to perform the role of the wisecracking
Drunken, firework-bright doomed American writer

The Dream Songs swelled in his imagination’s reservoir.
Until they burst through his dam of formalist reticence
In a blast of bawdy free verse ragtime vernacular spectacular
Belted out to shellshocked crowds at the Shelborne hotel.

At least that’s the story as it’s always been solemnly told to me.
In a country where artists calcify into caricature gossip is gospel
Visiting the city for a long weekend a found a city were poets
stuff themselves with sweet hot paprika chicken on sourdough

Zigzagging across the southside we weaved a tapestry of antidote.
Passing O’Neill’s, we called in to playact as mid-century intellectuals.
We raise creamy pints of porter to the man who ventriloquised Henry
and shadow-boxed though the fog of mid-century American malaise.

Not realising that between the burrito bars and quirky vintage shops
A dishevelled yanks ghost in a three-pieace suits stalks unnoticed
Unheard yet still shouting in an irony-soaked bark decries credulity
in readers drunk on second-hand stories ransacked from tabloid biographies.

From Mesopotamia To Memphis

We have both been blown home from work by a summer storm, bedraggled
and exhausted we microwave the last of the lentil and barbeque bean chilli.
While you towel off, I make tea neither of us feeling the need to say much.
Later we exchange anecdotes and stock complaints the daily catechism.
of jammed printers, snail pace commutes, canteens stinking of day-old prawns.
Retiring to bed we stream the latest peer-group prescribed Netflix series.
as the third episode plays, I notice the wheels of boredom whirl behind your eyes.

An Anthropologist by training your mind has a tendency to undertake expeditions.
and your interests are wide enough to encompass the whole of human experience.
This evening for instance I notice by your bedside table an atlas of ancient civilization,
you read aloud from it informing me of the importance of rivers to early settlements.
I relax and imagine following you down all the canals and waterways of antiquity.
From Mesopotamia to Memphis down to this city sitting on top of the Farset Delta.
You carry an atlas inside of your mind, it maps out territory richer than any other I know.

The Pub Singer of the Underworld

A manilla envelope with slightly too few coins
and a free glass of Nectar at the midpoint break
seems scant reward for not flipping the bird
to the shade who (once again) requests Free Bird.
Another Saturday night, the same stale set list
the usual crowd of flat-footed glass smashers
stomp-jiving across the makeshift dance floor.

At her table Persephone stirs the pomegranate
in her passion fruit martini, it is almost empty.
Foreboding, regal she patiently awaits a top up.
While at the bar a clay-hued Hades is swearing
His Ithaca Express card has been declined thrice
with face-saving bravado, he scrambles onstage
to try to join in with the second verse of Lose Yourself.

In this pub even the gods abandon all dignitary
and the waters of the Lethe are a top shelf item
too expensive for mortals who died unheroically.
So sling your lyre and play Don’t look back in Anger.

You’re a three-cord mediocrity, a born covers artist.
The perfect featured act for the cosmic mediocracy
of the Asphodel Meadows. Maybe next century
you can audition for the choir in the Fields of Elysium.

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Enda Boyle was born in Derry in 1994. He was educated at Ulster University and Queen’s University Belfast. He currently lives in Belfast and works an office job. In 2023 he published the Back Room Poetry chapbook Love Songs of The Precariously Employed.
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