Love Day

Last year I was sat outside the disused Bewleys Coffee shop on Westmoreland Street flogging my love poems for two euros a go. It cost me ten cents a sheet, and I rolled the printed copy around an inch and a half plastic pipe and sealed them with a wax seal I forgot to pay for from Reads stationers. I made 150 euro, wrote a poem to order for a guard and another one about a charity worker called Linda who was prancing in front of me.

That day last year was the first time I met Jame Anthony Kelly, a local legendary Kerry character on the streets of Dublin, last of the wandering bards, who travels across the island attending all manner of fleadhs and festivals, and can be seen selling his chapbooks on the streets of Dublin.

And when the goats and sheep are sorted in however many years from now, he will be remembered, perhaps, for possessing an integrity publicly unremarked upon at the time by the cultural professionals and literary careerists only too happy to never mention his name; until his voice is no longer living.

At which point, no doubt, as in the case of Kelly's comrade in Dublin street poetry, Galway linguist Paddy Finnegan, they will all start publicly speaking of his legendary doings.

I thought it fitting that the day I started selling my stuff direct to the public I met Kelly, as I had been hearing about him as a local legend  since first arriving in Dublin to carry on post-graduate research into the twelve year bardic filidh curriculum, nine months earlier.

One of his constant refrains about some of the more high brow poetry do's is

"There's precious little poetry there."

Mairead Byrne, the Langpo queen and long time poetry professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, name checks him in a poem she wrote, and which I heard her recite at a "Meet The Beats" event at Mother Redcaps pub, September 2004.

But this one was written in 2003 in the final year of my tertiary BA studies. The evolution behind its arrival is documented here, when chatting with the Hungarian British poet, George Szirtes, on the process of live and literary practice.

LROVSE

Underneath it all
we talk
over and above what is;
so why not stay a while
and let me dream
of life with you?

I will not make a hollow pledge
of empty words
which promise something
I can’t give;

the wind
the sea
or starlight’s shimmer
on your hair.

The bond I undertake to seek
exchanges comforts
found from understanding
and being understood;

although
when I gaze upon your form
I see emotion as a mirror

you, the one love
who will never truly stand before me.

Your flesh can be only touched
in dreams
when reality comes alive
in epic tales, played out nightly
or in that half snooze state
we sometimes get to fool around in;

a world where my desire for you can be indulged