Omagh Bombing part 3

He sleeps, depression stilling the heart, better than digitalis. I keep flowers to paint the tongue of the eye. Bris mo chroidhe, to break the heart, at the chance of happiness, shrapnel in the heart: self defeat at the hands of pessimism and confessionals, as if one's deepest fears were indeed the truth.

"O'Neil, a name more in pride than to be called Cesar." – Sir George Carew Elizabeth's foreman, foundered in a Munster bog.

Brave Hugh who fought with my ancestors at the battle of Kinsale in 1604, the Earl of Tyrone and Sean the Proud living beyond the Pale, tormenting Elizabeth.

The wild Rose is the one that has no thorns, but it has no need to draw blood to color its petals. What can ease our tribal pain? Disappearance and death is our inheritance. Europe absorbed the Flight of the Earls. What tongue survives the O'Neills of Seville ? Don Juan, or Sean. Unconscious tally stick carried into exile, into battle, about the necks of our ancestors.

So much pain suffered at the hands of a culture older than Greece or Rome, vanished without a trace. English legislation and diseased potatoes banished a tongue. Say the syllables of your own name in the ancestral tongue. See how it caresses you like a lover? But to use it as a weapon against the oppression—that's the final rub.

Greet me in the old tongue, if you can. In the lost syllables of an ancient order, and the rogue words for which the English could find no substitute, no sychophant. Say glamour, say tawny, say iron, keep the old tongue alive in my mouth, sweet kisses devouring speech that even the cock gives voice to in the night, not of the denial of love, surely one of the unwritten sins, but of loves speech, the integrity of whose tongue in my mouth?

I tried to dissolve denial with alcohol (an Arabic word), slipping from home with the stealth of a cat, escaping the tyranny of denial, and depression, for you cannot slip off the yoke of your ancestors, content with the inheritance of failure and flight, from what is good and whole, for a misguided notion that to suffer is to love.

Suffering becomes the bread God of dailiness, when to love is so simple, but complexities seduce you into the region of glacier and stone.

I trace your holy war, your jihad against the self, against the truth of the heart, into the fishes' belly. What is restored onto you? Jonah? What ancestor lost for you the way back home to the heart?

For you cannot blame your family, so you choose the women of your youth, the red whore of betrayal; the exodus from the self is easier than to lay blame square on the shoulders of naivety and youthful folly.

I know of your struggle, but I've not let the scar tissue weaken my heart, and turn it to stone so that the cromlechs and dolmens of the fields can block the true speech of the heart.

Why do you choose the path of war so willingly like a bride, when you know that white is also the color of death, the procession to the graveyard, the purity beyond death of the self? Words you'll never read because they exist outside the realm of your suffering, your true bride who knows the sound of the wound makes.

Scar tissue, weaker than the flesh. And the loneliness of stones. This bitterness inherited from the self-hatred, a placename, that rough soldier that seeks the noms de guerre.

Are you willing to risk sorrow for joy, why not sacrifice it instead? I drink my whiskey neat and prefer the Irish spelling to that of the Scots. And yet it backfires, hiccups a reverse order of guttural nuances seeking syllables for the words I am not able to utter to you, for you must find your own way out of the darkness of your prison. which is still shrouded by grief. And the clinging love of sorrow and pain are as addicting as the latest fix of the welfare junkies, You're destroying the temple of your body which you try to keep so pure, is destroyed. And the tighter you cling to its steps its altar, the more riddled it becomes, until we can't tell the cosmic joke from the punchline.

Talk to me of twilight, the rough magic abjure pain and alien import, for the cosmic joy of the Celtic heart. It's as if you had taken the eggs from a wild bird's nest and broken them, smashed them against the stones of your discontent.

"To worship or to destroy the beauty of your discontent." Of betraying love love to harm.

You ask if I can go home again to live alone in a bee loud glade, as if you'd coined the idea of loneliness and stored it in your cold banker's heart for the famine years. Morose in your discontent and desire to see love's end at the tunnel, robbing yourself of safe passage into the uncertain darkness of the future.

Spring has abandoned you, and the only thing keeping you from yourself is your self—that raw discontent of your raw inheritance of your life. You're like the farmer who sells his cattle to buy a statue of a swan and you want to put to put in your garden so you can assimilate the culture outside the self, for the self. Instead of the self. A substitute. Because you have no garden.

You have traded one for the other. You replaced love with suffering because that is what you're most familiar with, and familiarity breeds such contempt. The clouds darken on the horizon.