Randolph Healy

 

Lá le Bríde


Bless all materials before construction.
Keep them damp.
Fold the second over the first,
turn, fold, pull through, fold, throw it in the bin.

Both girls wore thirty three
pounds, detonated remotely.

She did better, plaiting rushes
for a man who lay on the ground to die
which cross, corn dolly, god’s eye, was thereafter
supposed to protect from fire.

Let us forget
and look each other in the eye,
pupil, pupilla, little doll,
and see our own selves mirrored
in light-flecked convex darkness.

Whose image is in whose image’s eye
in a regress repeated beyond resolution
for whoever’s first to blink to disappear?



Vacuum


Are there easier ways?
If we plunged down an airless mine
piercing the Earth
we’d stop at the opposite side
to rise again
in forty two minutes.

Forget about heat.
There wouldn’t be a peep as we fell
and rose again and again
within a year two sets of bones
falling and rising
for what many would call forever.

Speculation is such flimsy shelter.
Hold tight my hundred trillion cells.
No one yet knows how you stick together.



Out-takes   


One must be limp a long time
not to mob the tanned and maimed.

Surround the de-nippled torso
arms out as if no one was more willing
unworked hands judged beautiful,
whorls spiralling beyond naming

then rubberneck a neck-wrung ex-sixteen-year-old,
Munch-gape made of meconium
as if she had shit her self,
or someone sat on her while still warm.

Don’t miss the Iron-age upper crust
who’d mussed a coiff with French pine resin,
to be attacked by nits and axe,
everything from the diaphragm down still missing.

A sign says they have no identity,
peat having leached their DNA.
Someone wonders how much they’d go for.
A woman who ferried the torso by car,
obsesses about arms
reaching to get her.

Finish with a pair of ex-male bonders,
de-cocked, de-noodled,
their own tripe as neckties
to exit as altered
as one who’s looked over
a celebrity pickpocket’s
wallet collection.



 


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