Nuns Having Fun

I have a dream

~

It is Sunday and I have just returned from a lesbian orgy in a convent, purely as an artist you understand; filming documentary-reality-show footage on a camera phone for an upcoming short film exploring the changing face of vocational life in a habit and how sisters are doing it for themselves. The film is an innovative new reality programme, provisionally titled Nuns Having Fun and I am currently in pre-production negotiations with Living TV and The God Channel.

It's all about nuns, riding around the countryside in Cork and Kerry, testing their vocation to the big fella upstairs by going on dates with hunky farmers. Hand and neck massages along with intimate hot-tub moments should show the TV powers that be that this isn't just another manufactured idea mining the depths of depravity and cultural debasement, but a forward thinking and educational show which will open up a serious debate in this country about what happens when hot sisters and scorching farmer boys get up close and personal.

Nuns are just like anyone else, they need a piece of prime time because they are underrepresented on the telly and they also need to modern up their image and show its not all about praying and playing with the vicar.

We did the publicity shots last week. The nuns were put in miniskirts and suspenders and the art director hired a tractor and had them drinking babycham on it at Stephens Green. Glenda Gilson wanted in on the gig, but we thought she would not be appropriate, as she would have given a wrong, too tacky message to our potential viewers. After the shoot we all went to Ron Blacks, and I must say, once nuns kick off on the bevvy, they can’t control themselves.

I left early at 11pm as I was up for an appointment with the social welfare officer, but four of them tried to get in my room in the nightshelter at 3.30am on Wednesday morning after they’d staggered out of Lillies after being taken there by Bono, who wanted to talk about saving the world over a few quiet bottles of bubbly and how the nuns could help relieve third world debt by doing some charity photo-shoots for Hustler.

~

I awake and write this poem about Biddy Early, a faery healer from county Clare. Born 1798, the year of the failed rising. It is titled

BIDDY EARLY

Seer
surface the end-name talisman
  of this shade's edifice
who lives in the other world
  above consciousness.

Brand the word-leaves
shimmer
bob fixed
turn the air psychic and extract
   a ghost
lulled from space by sheer desire.

Tickle the thought door
  splice open
and stick straight to mainline
    a soft
some say non-existent
   picture
plucked from Tir nOg.

Come
escape
stomp sodden belief underfoot

risk the frozen crushed fish
   tower above trout gut

let logic be mangled
and this looking glass
conjur a woman married four times

who cured gout-limps in
Clare's bleak mid-winter.

A white witch herbalist
living in Feakle
whose piston-sleek mind
unhindered
wrapped
or weighted
read an empty blue bottle reflecting light.

Her mind will steer this absurd straight track
and sense will depict

   - twenty yards from the Q Bar
 ten feet below the Liffey tide mark -

a cormarant perched on the foundation base
of O'Connell Street bridge
pulling fish from green water
as neon-struck rust-cans float by

to reveal a world lit
by the art of Biddy Early from Faha.