Let Down Your Hair

 

(after Ciaron Carson)

 

 

Not yet the stage there with his mouth open in a silent roar for Stevie Dave O Hara

but only stints at DJ

Since his favourite songs were the blues, and psycho-trip-hop, darned at the edges with

a ragged chain-stitched garage-

Certain it was garage, had read Mojo, NME, imbibed nu-blues, and old, and for the record, had

Swotted up the lyrics of Dylan and Eminem, lip-synching in the glass booth on the Malone Road, in one or other of the day-jobs

That meant a tally of vehicles passing between the hours of 7-3, or a shift in the Robert Emmet Arms, illicitly breathing on

Glasses, polishing them with the roughly hemmed selvedge of a favourite denim

jacket, bought cut-price

From the cutting-edges of a web-site coded, confidentially alluded to in signs,

Like the scratching of a nose, when wearing your retro-nu-cheesecloth shirt;

ironic seventies sideburns looking

Nothing like Gerry Connolly, nothing like Gerry, who owned the club, nothing like Gerry Adams.

 

 

Some might have ignored her that night when she appeared like a newly minted legend

Stevie Dave imagined a time…

Fifty if she was a day, but hiding it, like the princess hid the pea beneath a mattress stacked with mattresses tough as stale farls;

Like a sleeping and, snoring, for all we know, Snow White, who hid the apple chunk

in the saliva flooded pink cave

Of her mouth. No, let Stevie take the spotlight, pretend to spin a glamorous LP, whose slight warped surface shivers,

Concoct a sound, a palimpsest, unheard of, music of the spheres WB Yeats meets John and Paul, Britney meets Bessie

Smith and right at the end, when you think the notes of the song are dying, petering out,

becoming unthreaded

there’s a cry, a scream under water?, a sigh under the sea? And Stevie’s proud, because

he’s inserted it like a billet-doux into

A velvet bodice. Meaning? Something lost. As if she could or would.

  

Before the night was out he knew she knew red wine would be blackening her teeth,

and her tongue would

Tease the cavities in her mouth; the lights would glare, and her shadow-stripped hair;

her streaming radiant cheeks

Would rebuke her in the mirror, and in the story, he would be the tower and she the window; or she the climbing vine

And he the old man-reality gets pickled in stories -in a hat that’s way too big, lop-sided braces, bad eyesight too,

Beckoning to the vine, beseeching the vine, singing to it, off- key, murmurous low, as if this could work a charm, he should have

Thrown money at it, scythed it with a Muddy Waters import, and all the time, the damsel was leaving by a back entrance having the last laugh,

And her cake and eating it. What Stevie meant to explain at the start was that he never

took that route to the

Stage, and appeared behind decks only when there was a gibbous moon, and a tide

that sagged and shook like

Enigmatic shopping because he didn’t trust maps, route-finders, expert tower -wall scalers , and will be darning into the early hours, no doubt, another patchwork quilt of song.