SIDE EFFECTS

Back in the slanting, tilted days

we tore great chunks off each other

and then crept slowly apart, not looking back,

like sidling crabs over cooling sands

and wrote with bloody fingers on the walls

words that still drip down to acid puddles.

I wish I could cry in my sleep

and wait for the dreams to come,

but I’m none of those thousand phantoms:

not a prisoner in love with his jailer

nor a blind man married to an angel;

just a broken rung on the ladder,

a handful of scattered shells and driftwood

when the teasing tide recedes,

as if stuck by a hotel pool

two steps from the bar and just a drink from Hell.

SINCERITY

I wrote love poems

on the back of my hand,

always meaning

to put them on paper,

but the ink wore out

or was washed away

just like the emotion.

CONSTANCY

Some things a woman says are bridges

raising grief over happiness.

Once, I could only be satisfied

if she was always there, then just a touch

was enough, then the sound of her voice

and finally just the thought of her.

A face can grip your mind like unrelenting tongs

and wipe out everything else,

like a barrage of hail strafing

your gently swaying fields;

you wouldn’t find fire down a well

or dew on a lightning bolt,

so don’t hope for something more.

THE COCOON

I found a cocoon made of twigs

somehow stuck together in a lattice.

I don’t know why, but it never opened

and many years later I went away

leaving the cocoon behind on a shelf,

while whatever creature lay inside

never learnt what it truly was.

 S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in more than a hundred magazines around the world. His collection “The Colour of Extinction” (Renard Press, October 2024) was The Observer Poetry Book of the Month. “An Ocean Called Hope” (Downingfield Press, May 2025) is forthcoming.