Peace in a Crack Den

Wandering around a childhood home,
Lost in the transition with time of its features,
Visiting an old place in search of solitude,
It still contains the essence of past affiliations,
I see myself throwing stones now eroded at the river’s bottom,
The island of pebbles moves beneath my feet as the water flows freely around,
Once it moved beneath our feet.

The not-so-secret escape is now littered with society’s excess,
Cans and crates hanging from bushes and bobbing on the surface,
The filth forms in pools at the island’s edges,
Four Ducks swim through, in search of clean food in dirty water,
While a lone Herron stands frozen on a rock,
Watchful of the currents while taking in all that the dusk entails,
The peace is dying with the sun, but the memories remain.

But it is not time to retire to the indoors yet,
Not time to succumb to the television and a three-in-one,
The blue door of a home from home is ignored in favour of a new venture,
To the park, with its enclosures and open spaces, backways and hideaways,
That harbour none bar the birds, rats and mosquitoes during the day,
Save those of curious heart and incautious mind,
Light is fading, the chance to find something with it.

Up a steep slope, fighting gravity with tired thighs,
This is the nearest thing to a forest I have ever seen,
An almighty alcove amidst angled trees,
Broken branches and stumps of fallen family,
Hiding the ruins of a hoodlum house,
With the slogan ‘Crack Den’ branded in blue and black across it,
Strewn with the burned out buds and smashed bottles of schoolboys.

Yet odd trinkets lie here too, those fitting of a household,
There’s an ashtray, stained with the ashes of half smoked cigarettes,
And a plastic cup from Prague, brown from the muck of the ground and now stomached cider,
And smashed plates, floral patterns broken, no dinner on them anymore,
And bumpers from cars, as well as tires, doors and wing mirrors,
And even a full outer shell, burned and rusted,
No need to be driven anymore, so let’s spark a fire and brighten the sky.

And there are bones here, fossilised, like in a museum, real bones, calcium deficient,
As well as muscle, skin, soul and entirely life deficient,
They belonged to a person before,
And there are clothes bundled up and hidden in the bushes,
Or buried beneath the grass, but not buried enough,
A pair of skinny white jeans catches my eye,
Torn, cast aside, a broken pink phone smashed next to them.

A peace is here, but it is restless,
Birds fly from tree-to-tree, not singing but muttering,
Eyes piercing my presence, despite clear signs of human habitation,
Their lack of comfort stems not from my sheer being there,
But from their unfamiliarity of my life story and previous haunts,
And the vermin join in the condescending chatter,
It is always nice to be welcomed with open wings and borne fangs.

The blunted blades lie shrivelled, yellow, lifeless,
Charred in places where raucous flames roared, tips touching the sky,
Bricks lie broken beside the remains of the walls they once formed,
Glass and branches crunch and break simultaneously with every step,
While the uneven ground coaxes you to fall, hiding many pot holes,
They open up and swallow your leg whole,
Wishing you to trip just to see your blood spill on its balding soil.

And a shudder runs through my body, reverberating in the earth,
There are nothing but dead ends here.

(ah, the poem from which the blog title came - I wrote this poem after traipsing around Clonskeagh one evening in the summer of 2009 and all the things in the poem I actually saw and all the deductions I made about what must have happened were made from the things I saw whilst exploring the heart of territory only frequented on the weekends, and it got to a stage where I thought I would find something I didn’t want to find, so I stopped and turned back).