In Driving Rain, Winter Evening, Roscommon Street, 1967

                                                  

Fifth door.

Beatified in neon glow, barber’s neat hands spume

around farmer’s haycock. 
With kiss-smacking scissors

hitting rhythm, he tum-te-tums rivulets down his window.

Third door.

While cleaver dives solitary in ribbed abyssal caverns,

butcher sings whale-song 
through hulking skeletons

to distant splash of housewife on a sandy shore.   

First door.

Set of skin-bones fingers lurch, grab rope, Guinness.

Beneath 60 watt light 
hums Jim Reeves vaguely Hawaii-ish;

sound of distant thumb-tacks hitting ocean one thousand miles away.

Passing

We change,

time moves us  along.

Our loves change like trees,

like fires,

like buildings. 

They become our old books,

categorised.

The catalogue lists fond memories,

disasters,

deaths.