FLOWER MOUTH

"Style is a function of theme
Style is not imposed on subject matter
But arises from it
Style is truth to thought."

      ------------

Aoife shouts words but Kathleen rules
her world, and the brown leather robe

draped across the chair
tucked in beneath the table

contained within this locked box
is mine

June cries
coming through the door of the
occupational therapy room where

Aoife sits listening to angelus
bells peel havoc at the hill top.

~

Hear angelus energy share
consciousness with them and have the

sense to look for meaning where none
dare peek for fear of being

labelled mentally unkempt, as June
was before she died a derelict in a
loony bin

opined to be beyond all reach by the
boss head doctor of a city's top

psychiatric hospital where she lived
in nineteen ninety nine when professor

Aoife O'Brien gave injections from ten
to eleven

depending on
depending on...

If there is a cow in the field and
a machine out of order.

~

June is on-ward and in role play
draped upon the chair and chuckling
freely at the table.

The machine is out of order.

June continues

Within this warm room Mick is nowt
but four letters of evidence
of an afternoon's reading

Does June now flit with the big
fella's shade

       in books

deconstruct schoolchildren
from shadows in caves

and tower over oath bound men
to find a simple mountain grace

     written

at life's end?

~

when Yeats ruled a world of words
his imagination rolled fairly from

her tongue pouring forth to write
prayer, fable and a nation's tomb.

~

Me me me me me more than he it was
back when June gobbed off

and got on with the business of
being la la. Nuttying it up for

medication and a cosmic life
of ticking boxes and flapping

wings across forms Aoife's boss
Kathleen the chief executive read

before triggering the only option
on offer for sister June.

~

A barmy woman whose one tribal self
became air worthy ether.

June knew Aoife's way was a leather
restraint belt, and the moniker they
used

Kathleen

for her daily jacket.

will be where the morning lit
mountain's phantasmagoria and shades

leisure long with the ghost of a man
who shot the one who took draughts
of demands to London.

~

Demons came and taunted her in the
telly room until her mind vaporisd

and she disappeared during the angelus
bell, silently faded and went instantly.

Will Kathleen tell?

~

She never spoke
once the initial disolution instantly

dissolved any questions lingering in her
bonce, just got stuck in a box after

her long dance with his reflection at the
grave, where a well of time returns wild
spring flowers.

~

An answer blown on ageless dumb
stone and these eyes fell upon you

Kathleen, who knew what went on when
my heart beat alive and I breathed

being driven through the breeze to an
ambush that night

when the windows got shot threw
and bullets blew open my skull.

~

In the immediate aftermath his
ghost appeared, quivered on a track

leading back through a bog to the past
of that night until

the phantom glow suddenly paled and
withdrew as its light flickered out at the
foot of mouth flower rock. Mick’s shade.