Dogtooth E-Book

Fran Lock

• Herausgeber: Out-Spoken Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 49

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment. It's a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion. It's about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do.

Leseprobe

Dogtooth . Fran Lock

Published by Out-Spoken Press

All rights reserved

©Fran Lock

The right of Fran Lock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance to section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Out-Spoken Press.

First edition published 2017

ISBN: 978-0-9931038-7-2

Design & Art DirectionBen Lee

Printed & Bound by:Print Resource

Typeset in: Baskerville

Dogtooth

My friend wants to know what the book’s about. I don’t know what to say, because I never do. And the catch twenty-two is that if I did I wouldn’t have needed to write the book in the first place. I don’t like being put on the spot, and she’s looking at me like she’s trying to explode my head with her mind. I bite my nails and squirm in my seat and blurt out the first thing that comes to me: It’s about ghosts. She is – perhaps quite naturally – confused. Poems about ghosts? She’s picturing something akin to Pet Cemetery gloriously reimagined in Iambic pentameter. But that’s not what I meant, and this is the problem inherent in trying to reabsorb poetry back into ordinary discourse. Something’s lost in translation, something does not quite compute. What a poem means and understands by ghost is not what is meant or understood by the rest of language. I try to convey this and founder hopelessly, but after about twenty of the most socially excruciating minutes of my life I arrive at this: Yes, ghosts. As in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. But also as in the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment. It’s a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion. It’s about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation. There’s folklore in it, the current that we carry and which carries us, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do. So yeah, ghosts.

Uplinked real-time nonversation

The view from here

Saturday, South of the River

Rise and shine

Postcode lottery

Storm is coming

Border country

Cam

On small towns

Under the boardwalk

Bucolic

The street where you live

In the biopic of your life

In Louth

Carrickmines

Beloved monsters

Superpowers

Welcome home

Cop car, burning

Ghost fancier’s ball

Poem in which there’s a ghost in the snow

Panpipes

Achieving zero

On being still so young at heart

My social media presence

Big Fat Gypsy flarf

The ghost in you

Dogtooth

Your presence, dear

Cohort

Uplinked real-time nonversation

Your sister’s wedding is an Animal Farm,

you said. Nuptial cultists. Fuck buddies.

Your father, sanctimonious and horny, in

sombre self-important disarray: Semper!

Semper! McGuiness and other exemplary

bastards. Old Men getting glassy, wonked

on shots. Prominent rascals catching-up

on commie goss. And cousins bronzed in

Monodon daylight, pissed-up in Primark

on second-hand sofas. Goddaughters

glitching like microbes, cybertising Brides

of Christ, textperts savvying word blobs

with swasticky fingers. The gang’s all

here: feral prelates, pit-bull dogs. Ford

Cortina is a Spinning Jenny – a moody

ethnic relic, phospohorating green. It isn’t

good enough, you said, you say. A rustic

namesake; the unanimous human science

of murder: No ceasefire in the class war,

boys! Tiocfaidh ár lá la-la-la-la-la-la, I

can’t hear you. Bobby Sands and Amy

Winehouse. Our day will come. Such talk,

classrooms, glass ceilings, the terminal

husbandry of graves, a race horse with

a baby name. Not good enough. I cannot

focus, and you are lapsing into travelogue

and séance, taking the piss. Your sister,

runny, white as a poached egg, and doubly

yoked, looks like Codename Little Boy,

skirts blown backwards over her head.

Here comes the bride: billows brace

in mainsail rococo; an adlibbed bulge

that gathers the air under it. Her face

is grey, snowed to a paranormal

understatement. She is disappearing, into

aftermath, remnant-excess, improvised

sanctity, being a wife. Dose of medicinal

defib and you’re getting nasty: Marble-

mouthed bitch. Bourgeois reformist

shit-bag. I give as good as I get. An Animal

Fair, you said. Glad back gardens bathed

in rain. The screen teeters. Ghosts move

with the urgency of paramedics. Memory

fades like a temporary tattoo. Your slur

lengthens into the need to sleep: Adding

insult to Ian Drury. What? I have to ask

you to repeat yourself. Your father, arch

anachronist; macabre Chaplin, his

pantomime pursuits all sign heart-failure

for the deaf. An arsenal of fingers for

promotional fuck yous and the philharmonic

barrage of ooh-ah, up the Ra. A speaking

clock. A public service announcement.

This pig-swill limes the mouth. Proto-globalist,

talks about Palestine. We do not mention

your brother. Not even when whiskey

is tenuous Pentothal. Not even when

temper, temper talks in tongues

and reception lags our dubious dubbing.

He’s coming through, though, in patches

like rubbed brass. He’s coming through.

It hurts. This vivisected kinship. Not

being there, being there, and all

the capslocking slanguage in the world

won’t bring me home. I’m YouTubing

tyre-fires and hurt in the heart. The smell

of the air, iodine and petrol, and you

say: War is what we are entitled to.

What we couldn’t live up to, you mean.

Those peat bog mummies, spooning

like cutlets, young boys with broken

noses, slit in the throat. Too much

history. Your sister’s wedding

is doomed, you said. Ambient lather.

Her voice like a creaking hinge.

Keyed up. Scuffed steel-toes strike

kerbstones. Percussion for parochial

disgust. Gesticulate a decimal place:

Just a small one. Home is a blockage

no Heimlich can remove. Gone, you

know. Gone. And Old Acquaintance.

And All True Hearts of the West.

The view from here