James Joyce

This is a site for ReJoycing. For all things Joycean.

Monday, August 20, 2007

The Hat of Straw

His chest did smell of man. The hair tipped into my ear and tickled there. I cannot know how it became that way, all inside like that. I wondered what had become of the day. How it knelt before us like that, arms open and melting towards noon. Nothing quite like that white light.

Your feeling and feathery fingertips under my ears. The lobes feel like baby toes. Did I see a little down at your cheek? I drank from a puddle once and it tasted of pebbles and see-to-the-bottom. It was cool and like no other drink on this earth. It tasted of foot-fall. Pool and before it even had water in it. Where did you get such a story?! Oh, the lies you do tell.

I carried home water in my shoes to show my mummy. Drippy brown leather and one sock all black and grit. Tippy red knees with blood and a tiny robust bitty right in the broken skin. Where I'd knelt to grin into the splashing puddle. Lippy drips on the chin and nightmare wobble reflections of toothless smile and when will they grow? Tie up at the back the hair that would later lead to all sorts of unearthly trouble and handfulls of pull-back and look at your neck!

Piles and piles of it lay on the floor as it was hacked off. You don't go telling your lies and puddle-drinking! Look at the state of your shoes!

Toes pushing out of leather on one foot. In protest. Little Molly there, by the white tub, all hair-shorn. She littlegirl. She lost. She in the puddle there with her reflection. One sock down.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Jumping in Neon Dublin

I didn't want to see the Book of Kells round that corner there. I just wanted to see MOLLY in neon pink on the corner of the street. I thought Jimmy would put my name up there one day. After I had hiked up Howth Head and nearly broken my ankle on a stone that jutted out, I swore and shook my knobby bone at the sky. I just didn't want to be a tourist. I sat at the top and hugged my knees. Looked at the ragged lips of the skin where it was torn open. I poked into it with fingers. Rubbed, slutty blood into white skin. Malted freckles took on the hue of ripe cherries. Somehow it would be ok to be covered in blood when I undertook the cliff-strides down the raw edges of stone and then onto solid ground past the cottage. Say hello to the where and who lives here.

Two trained rivulets of blood that had formed and hardened at my heel. Liffey drips. Two torn lines of skin. Stop for a cool drink at the bottom and no, don't wipe it away. It looks new.