A Poem by Seamas Carraher

In my dream i can't touch you

In my dream i can't touch you

for the telephone line's twisted
and the world between my fingers'
softer than a snowflake
in my sleepy membranes
and all the balloons are blowing away.
Still i hang on the line
and the silence is like
a hammer
cutting the inside of my head
from your words
where they hang from the trees
like Bosnian corpses
in an ununderstanding of war.
There's no way ever to understand this.
There are things
harder than this rock inside my head,
this rock at the heart of the world
i inflate at dawn
with the galaxy of your goodbyes
i never accept,
and my life's only a membrane
like a window
onto these parts of my self
i'm rowing in air and river and desperation
with no sight ever of land.
In my dream the phone goes dead
and i have been here before because
i could never leave
in a misunderstanding of that other time
long forgotten
when i am like god
a bit beyond the speed of light
an unvoiced air of presence
descending
and after all my journeys
i am dropped
between her legs in a confusion
of water and blood
searching through my eyes and fingertips
for a clue to these crying lungs
to the light long lost
to the question forming
in the cold of a dark January
where i will never be a bird again
at the shore or the seaedge or cliffedge.
And my eyes no longer leak
the memory of how
there is no one here
not really,
how we are all born
over and over,
all falling down
in a downpour of miracles,
this multitude of ghosts and me,
and my thought wakes
and i realise for the endless time:
sometimes
i am so lonely
i almost
cease
to breathe.

Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He survives on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present. Recent publications include poems in the Rusty Nail, The Camel Saloon, Dead Beats, Red River Review, Word Riot, The Junk Lot Review, Dead Flowers, Pyrokinection, Dead Snakes, Carcinogenic Poetry, Napalm & Novacain, ditch, Bone Orchard Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, the Anthology of Irish Poetry and the Irish Socialist (newspaper). http://www.seamascarraher.blogspot.ie/