Yesterday and today, when cycling up Dame Street to Lord Edward Street, I saw an elderly man I used to live in the next room to, when I was a resident at the Iveagh Hostel on Bride Road, pictured above. He is a schizophrenic with cancer, and has deteriorated significantly since I saw him last. He doesn't look like he has long left.

He is one of those people who we know to see but have never spoken to. Like in any town, the people we have known by sight from childhood, but never a word passed between us. Strange, and yet, entirely human. A common experience.

I lived at the Iveagh from July 2004 to June 2006. It provides direct access accommodation in single rooms for 70 single homeless men with low support needs and there are 125 single rooms providing long term accommodation.

I moved there after finishing university in England, in the basement for the first six months, where the 70 short term homeless men are housed, and then on the first floor for a year, where the man I saw on Dame Street yesterday, has been living for many years - as a lot of the other residents there have. Some have been living in their ten by six room for forty years, and happy to call it home.

I moved there with a romantic notion, that I would test myself as a trainee poet in Dublin, whilst living with society's worst off. It was a practical solution to my housing needs; as though I eventually got educated, I am in the same boat as all the men I lived with for the first 18 months of being in Dublin. On the dole, living week to week.

I moved out after Brian, an alcoholic in his fifties, on one to three bottles of Jamesons a week, discovered he had inoperable secondary cancers throughout his body. Brian was a really nice man, who everyone liked because of his pleasant nature, and at this point, I instinctively decided it was time to move on. The Iveagh long term is not ideal for healthy living. The food is not the best and, if I am honest, I couldn't handle - what proved to be - his short lived terminal decline. He was dead within weeks of being diagnosed, after going to the doctor with excruciating headaches.

Before this however, I found the domestic arrangement in the Iveagh offerred a perfect balance to my writing. The writing kept me sane and the homelessness helped me keep a balanced perspective when sporting online with poets at the various talk sites I stumbled across and began writing on soon after arriving here.

~

When a well known poet dies, there is a brief outpouring of condolence, but not for the homeless men in the Iveagh.

The poem below was occassioned with this man as the human agent propulsing to life the fictional Sweeney of the title. And on this day of all days I think it appropriate to remember the forgotten men like the one I saw yesterday.

SWEENEY ASTRAY

Sweeney spat flakes of monologue
to an invisible foe in room 108
before he took the plunge.

A flyer of thought
who'd lick round corners like a knife wind

sweep up shined steps
and cyclone through swinging doors
of the red brick kip called home,

trailing an underbelly aura of tramp glamour
through the smell of pine-fresh floor polish
lining corridors like the yellow smoke
of Eliot's Prufrock.

He'd wake to reality's nightmare
cursing in a feral wheeze or grunt
and shout about

"cunts....bastards....lazy wankers dying of cancer"

then bang a wall with his fist
and start the day dissolved in tears.

He never socialised
or idled with others

just the one time of a long chat with himself
in the communal area, before Oisin complained
to a warden, who shut him up,

stuffed him back in his dressing room
where he worked on the final scene.

A plasterboard box left whistling
as he stepped onstage at the shelter
deep acting
at 8 12 and 4,

dressed in a drab bundle of grey rags
clutching a mug

with a look to no one
and none to him.

What demonic cause sucked his life
away behind the eyes
and forced his lips to pucker gumward;
curdle twisted words in his mouth
and draw sweat onto the one shirt
he ever wore and never took off?

Years of liquid cosh and ECT
beat and drained Sweeney's blood bound scrap with life

nuked his mind and buckled his passion
on an anvil of despair:

razed thought to a desert, where a phantom's whisp
frazzled his nut to the brain baked recipe
a guard scraped from the pavement
and time scrubbed from the memories
of fellow residents the day of his exit.