COLM KEEGAN
Colm Keegan lives in Clondalkin, Dublin. He writes poetry, short stories and screenplays. Since 2005 he has three times been shortlisted for the Hennessy new Irish Writing Award, for both poetry and fiction. In 2008 he was shortlisted for the Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition. He is currently working on his first novel and a collection of poems, due out next year. He co-runs Nighthawks at the Cobalt, a monthly arts night in Dublin, and occasionally reviews poetry for RTE radio 1.
Ode to the Coleman
From the black and holy heart of Dublin city
Your legend was born in whispers
Flickering into life around the flames
That fired our knacker drinking
Taking flight in drug brightened
Raver’s eyes on dawn strolls home
Tales told of the alarming way you’d frighten
Huddled jack-the-lads, appearing
Like ol’ Nick himself or the Candyman,
Taking their two litres of cider from
Their shivering all-cops-are-bastard hands
We heard stories of explosive power
You throwing a swarm of culchie Garda
Off your leather-coated back
With a swing of one ape-like arm
You escaping as they chased
In a fleet of marauding shitvans
By leaping the too-high pointed fence
Of Sundrive Park in a single bound
‘The size of him!’ we heard,
‘The sound of him landing
Would make your ears bleed.’
You smashed into our lives
Like superhuman feet on concrete
I saw you myself in the monsterflesh
One rainy morning on Wood Quay
Towering like a berserker, screaming
At the paperman and me, waving
Your caber-like staff at the diamond kissed cars
A wild black dog on a rope beside you barking
You could be the stuff of Black Pitts
Legend, like Bang Bang with his key
And Johnny Fortycoats
From Clanbrassil street
Characters as big and bohemian
As the Liberties themselves
But no. How could you be?
Your’re more like the city than they
For beneath the myth and the lie
Hides the darker truth.
From the torment of your seventies youth
You lashed out and blinded a friend
The spikes of your shattered pint glass
Ate his face and tore out his left eye
Why? The why is lost to time.
But not your return
Not content with damage done
Too insane, too dangerous to let a dead eye die
You traced your way back
To the townlands of that slaughtered friendship
Two decades on when the blinded man
Was dead in the ground from drink and loneliness.
With him only a few days gone
You planted your heavy booted feet
Outside the twouptwodown that mourned him
And with a cackling roar, you hurled
A flaming bottle though his front door
And left his Guiney’s curtains,
His vinyl records, his everything to burn.
Your legend lives on.
©2010 Colm Keegan
Author Links
Keegan poem in the Sunday Tribune: 'Cheek Cheek Chin and Nose'
Uiscebots: Keegan's blog
'All for Emily': Keegan story in Horizon Review
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