Irish Culture

If you ever left I think I’d kill myself / or move to Dublin

Only fuck girls for a while, dress as flamboyant as Oscar Wilde

In a world of Kennefick, Rooney, Hozier-Byrne

maybe I could be that girl?

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Do you think they’d notice, down at Marsh’s Library

that I read a lot of Yeats and Beckett and Joyce at uni,

that I thought of the city as a Shakespeare and Company

light: my French is atrocious?

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I’d drink myself to death, live in stereotype

romanticise swans in flight, morning light, a simple life

appreciate a place that feels foreign but close, and has arts-council funds

With you gone, I’d have to run.

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I’m no Edgeworth, I’m the coloniser class – though, I must say,

in Ireland (unlike India) I could slip in, unrecognised

with my family name and some expensive hair dye.

I could leave my life behind.

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This short poem was written as part of the ‘Alphabet Superset‘ programme: it is quick work and is unedited.