Elizabeth Anne Martina Ryan

Vanished day,
to strive for fame, to glitter in a marble pool
but lose the task
You sit among the virtuous weeding out life
Personalities sulk
...

Spongey beer shells the brain's late noon
Close the window on the tortured cats' feudal sex
The cash register below rings like a phone
The weather inside's cold though outside's blue
...

I throw in my lot with them
showing me the crashed lights they drove into
cold isolate Bohemians
My mind is filled with condiments
...

"I started out with a frayed and urgent lyric
I suppose it was a comparative poverty
then learning appealed to me, though the past scared
...

1.
"Now the teachers bore me
He passes, with his fallen interests
preaching what benefits, softened tyrant
...

I took them racing in the lime fast air
to hunt and run and kill
their prey, the lesser forms of old despair
in thrall to nature's spill
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1.
But now his boated smiles like a brother...
She glues through the shops' bare gift and drapes
Why decorate this wreck?
...

Admiring the neighbour's nutritious garden
and subdivisions of time, you eat dinner from a jar
and work and play referring to an ivory abacus
Your head emptied of levity looks to the topaz horizon
...

Your jewels and cut and my chopped dress
and awkward husband
in the lounge where he slinks
in a puff of
...

Emotion scoops the footpath's velvet edges,
estate agents' bluster calibrates the street's
livability, treeless, ajar with fridges
bunked out. Investors wave sheets
...

His sorceries are boo-hooing a teller,
what's spare's on the local trots
better than breakfast.
A win's the Seychelles or the gurgling Maldives.
...

1.

The fireworks of peace and celebrations go up in the harbour
above the warships. Sailors through town
adored to skint women who, for a job, will cheer their garish flag
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1.

Yeah cool. Some jape, like, totally bounced
One tic, he's fiddling with the cord
and then later, he's carked it
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1.

"I used to be like you, full of icey self-regard
but life monotonously catches up and culls you
and all the others' Things begin to glow
...

1.

Before tea I play Mozart on the violin
After, I walk my estate
Platonic friends I think of you often
...

1.

I heal the ramparts of the deponent tense
I am being loved and certain
...

When she remembers every chumpy thing
The baby weather hurts her, the sick sun
At home a dead blind flaps from its joint
She goes on,
...

1.

Unreal world I see from the cave with opinion, change and decay
and then the blinding forms
I wake up in a sty
...

America readies for its new corral
while elsewhere patriots kill their way to truth
One sticky flag guns down another
The flagpole sticks with blood
...

You live in the cracked avenues
arguing and warming a kitchen's generations
Last year wept but now the harrowed road
...