Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Seán Kennedy is a twenty-three-year-old writer from Ireland whose poetry has previously appeared in the online edition of Porridge, as well as in online journals Dodging the Rain, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Bangor Literary Journal. He began writing poetry in 2017 after finishing an MA in English at Maynooth University; his decisions haunt him.

Common ground

A shovel of marmalade sustains my id –
marmalade and egg, poached, on toast –
and kills my nerve, pinched in a panic.

You’ve a hard-on for heroes, so you do,
and I’ve got a middling sense of style –
recall when this wasn’t the shit I pulled?

A nightmare, citing the teacher to her,
and she refutes. Refutes! Fraud, thief –
I shake, I piss like a chihuahua. Gimp.

I would be in congress with my selves,
not the pretty Italian, if I didn’t arrive;
we found common ground in the doubt.

It rains vinegar in Belfast, ever-folding;
I’d shower in this, the bitter hangover,
excess of a city in dialogue with itself.

 

betamale str8boi vibez

i. Motivation

Excuse me, this is custom St. Bernard –
fresh off the modernist runways of Paris
in one of ten brutalist tents on the avenue,
walked with panache, style, and humour 

Look dearest, it’s a truism, a swindle –
the fact of it is, you’ll grow a third heart;
no man will want the hacking sick of it,
a disease with nothing to shame or erase

Boys are boys will be boys will be beasts;
settle centre-right down, expect no hate,
aphorisms are useless, you can’t learn this;
take the breaks, the journeys, as they come

ii. Sell-by-date

Threatened conglomerates ask their demographics to elect
interchangeable, phallus-worshipping heirs of indifference,
who will dread the dollars, the didgeridoos, the drink-links

Friday purples and  Saturday blacks colour the melodrama,
a sense of self is indiscernible in those lights, those nights;
I wish I could say all this worry was worth next to nothing