Poetry: Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Comic 

 

A man can die on stage just as easily as in a hospital bed  

and the comic was struggling, his first time out. 

 

Slowly, he made some headway with the audience. 

The liquor was taking effect and things loosened up. 

 

But the comic was a desperate man. 

Living out of a suitcase. 

On the road more than half the year. 

Some sick need for attention. 

 

A failing liver and a failed marriage.  

The comic got into the meat of his act 

and the audience ate it up. 

 

They laughed so hard they could never  

see the hurt behind it.

***

 

A Personal Archeology

 

She sticks a needle in her arm 

and I think of a whale brought back 

to blubber, 

of all that blood, 

of how her face can’t  

stop sweating  

even though her body is cold 

to the touch, 

some trick of the thriving  

vein-hunted street, 

greasy spoon origami turning blue  

in heartless doom alley cookeries; 

a single overflow dumpster 

tagged by local gangs  

of bandana faces 

that gather in dark stairwells 

to share stories they wish  

were true.

***

Mercury Maker

  

Sniper tower compulsions are a hard pin down, 

that spotty gleek gleek distance record goes unchallenged, 

hyperbole in all directions, devolving mercury maker  

just a sweaty sweaty dram dram... 

What is a man to do but wring and rail? 

His hands just tiny clusters of poison oak 

while the stores and eyes and minds close early, 

and if you don't think Genghis Khan is insanely jealous  

that Coleridge wrote a poem titled Kubla Khan  

or that Kublai Khan is seething over that less common spelling,  

then you don't know your Mongols from  

your midriff.

***

Voiceover

 

The voice did not match the body. 

Those booming silken words coming from within 

such a fidgety tiddly-wink of a man. 

 

As though the chandelier of his days would break 

if you shook his hand too firmly. 

 

Most were careful not to touch him. 

I wonder how his lovers fared. 

Perhaps they were put in separate sound booths  

and never embraced at all. 

 

But that full richness of tone as he read from the script. 

A salaried man never out of work. 

And his voice would age far better than he. 

 

Rumour had it he had insured his vocal chords for half a million dollars.  

Gurgled saltwater to a very strict routine. 

 

Convincing millions to buys millions. 

Script after script until his voice was shot  

and they had to call it a day.

***

Two Ketchup Packets & a Catatonic from the English Midlands

 

His mother is catatonic, sleeping in late again he tells me as though  

she is just being lazy and the two ketchup packets I lifted from the fast  

food place last week have paired off in my right pant pocket and  

bonded; I will need them for lunch, a support system of flavour and  

questionable consistency in this lunchroom that becomes a big bag of  

teeth all chewing from the same sad hourly trough.

***

---

Setu, September 2022