The Balcony of Europe

THE OLD SCHOOL IS CLOSING

 (Orangefield Boys High School RIP)

 Dr Lacan’s verterbrate
 Is chattering like a dove’s brain
 In a blue cyclopean dome 
The tish and tash of mewing polyps. 

Foaming among evolutionary junk 
An embryo flicks back and forth 
In the depths of a vitrine 
Crackling lightning burns on the water. 

The old school is closed 
The auld school is closed 
Then a lasting look 
As the ceiling hovers and hovers. 

THE BALCONY OF EUROPE

 Here are German twins 
With heaps of string 
A trainspotter’s agenda
 Books of burnt umber 
Overlooking the river Elbe . 

Here’s Humpty Dumpty 
With a copper nose, 
He’s observed the moon, 
traced out its vast craters,
onto a Berlin U-Bahn map. 

Here comes a poet 
The black sheep of the entire 
Black sheep family, 
He’s holding piles of bible black books 
And a tarnished ring. 

Here’s the entire famous world 
Waiting at the river 
For the Huns to burst 
The barricades, for the Goths,
their marvellous horses. 

For the Saxons in the east
(A beer-friendly people) 
For the crowds of St Pauli
For the Faust des Ostens 
For the Seven Deadly Sins. 

Then the twins record 
The number plates of cars 
The relative lengths of trains 
The serial numbers and times. 
Then, only then, Europe moves on. 

A WHITE BUS WITH WHITE STRIPES

O Romeo the heart's a bone. 
Desire's a man of sorrow 
like the painted sailor. 

O primitive Madonna 
actual paint inside your sarcophagus, 
street shudders. 

O moonrise portray
the lacklustre rotted iron hope
on the shadow fiction of madness. 

O Filippo Brunelleschi 
give me a dragon's egg 
within Dante's Arno. 

O two strokes of a paintbrush 
doleful eyes that gaze downwards 
into a passing stranger. 

O the enamel heart 
Of a dome's construction, 
O your lion-hearted last romance. 

O pitiless murderer, 
O cruelly slain 
on a white bus with white stripes. 

THE BLUFA LADY 

Van Helsing flirts with his intestate bride. 
Hides from the police on Hampstead Heath. 
He’s becoming a vampire or vanished 
Into the waves of thievery that’s also London. 
The Justice 
Is already thrumming his fingers 
The grotesque sentence is that you 
Van Helsing become a character. 
Every cockcrow waves of nausea, 
Odour of garlic, are you really a doctor? 
A louche, declined would–be scientist
Possessing a route map to the north 
Passing the declining sun’s last bitter rays. 

Interminable icicles, time’s manacles 
Fixed upon the Spaniards inverted 
Taximan’s map of Jack Straws Castle.
 I walk towards Hampstead Heath 
Towards the thwack of those manacles 
As they open and shut on the tomb 
Of poor Lucy who managed 
To die in a certain key 
But didn’t dread eternity 
Just the waste spaces 
Of that ice nightmare castle 
That sometimes appeared 
Like a blue vein composed 
Of the merest river of silence
 In a summer’s decomposition. 

A Transylvanian meteor 
Plumping up the skies, the laughing spree 
Of our dear monster who packed 
Flowers and garlic, white headed blooms, 
Into Lucy’s mouth, who cut off her head 
Then languidly slashed up the street. 

Paul Murphy