Poetry: Catherine Noonan

Cling

Look up, close your eyes,

Imagine what is not there

For the stars did not come out tonight

Outrageously they hide, crouch in their constellations knowing full well that you and I are not

Legend enough for such brilliance of show and yet starless,

We carry on. Trot the mundane.

For shame!

Our starless condition not even concealed

But humiliatingly sheer from that lacklustre beginning

Still, someone will envy us

Some high-to-low lover crave the steady drill of our no need for

Hugs efficiency

Our tax and insured good night’s sleep

Kisslessness

Fun Fair

A mile off the ground and upside down suspended in this twirl-scream

Feels, like some kind of home.

And we will never be as free as we are here in this oval cage.

Up, around and down the earth thumps into view and the

Squares of the big wheel’s gondola frame

Howth Head.

Up, around and down.

Low to the ground, then blue to the sky

In this; our three euro, six minute,

Amnesty.

Bare

Now that I know you in a better way

Learnt your mornings off by heart and five pm recitals against the world

I am more bored than worried.

For nothing, I’ve discovered saturates quite like your dark rain

Not even the six o’clock new with its horror and atrocity

It, at least breaks for sport and weather.

No sunny spells here in this Dublin flat!

Just rants, fake madness, as you belt away in effected paranoia

Testing the strength of my fading compassion

Seeing if I’ll snap on your behalf.

Christ! It is not even frightening, this well thought out psychosis

There is none of the release of normal worry.

Yet who am I to blame this bad?

And who’s to know really the difference?

Playing mad is mad in itself but I can’t

Rise to sympathy

I, am more bored than worried

An Evening Meal

Nothing is ever anything compared to your loneliness

Which sad-angry and military-silent begins to march making the room not so much

Uncomfortable as real.

This, this is your talent making a room real

Staring it down sober with a super-ego that is, -I have come to accept-

As much mine to demolish as yours

For perhaps after all it was me with all my ineptitude and imbalance

Who threw you out of the now and into this lie.

Gently, then firmly I try to take you, as the saying goes

Out of yourself, a clear mistake, for the more I layer my anecdotes

The further out I wade in ill-prepared concoction the more

Jesus Christs you spit before clicking the bill and glaring me home

Where I sit in a gale of roars inferred knowing full well

That this is where the whole course of the evening has been travelling

To these one hundred gratuitous degrees

And yet I know how this’ll go, you’ll grovel, come curling and

Reducing me to a fool, an unpaid and unpleasing performer who is

Always at hand for your cowards-dark.

Oh someone jump up and down fool me,

Someone clap-chase me into a circus

That is louder and greater than all the noise and importance of your solitude.

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Author’s statement: these poems were written prior to life with her wonderful fiancé.