a carnival with naked lunch

Welcome to Carnival, a colourful little bar with collage walls in reds, and greens, and blues. Poets sit inside here twitching anxiously by candlelight waiting for naked lunch to start.

Naked lunch is not some sordid afternoon debauchery but a wonderful amalgamation of poetry and music, mixed together to keep you constantly in a dreamy euphoria with no time for brain freeze or boredom. Poet after poet dropped beautiful bombshells,musicians ached missiles and we lay in the debris with grins on our faces feeling a little better off for all of it.

Living in England among publishers I still manage to get in my dose of poetry, reading books in my small attic room to avoid the big brother hysteria below; but something was missing, there were no voices.

When I visited ailbhe in London I demanded poetry read out loud, she lied and said she had none….I told her I wanted lions in the living room so she sat me by her computer with a willing john and a poetry Ireland cd and let me listen to some audio files while she and gareth got drunk on stories outside. And in wexford last weekend I joined the boys, hiding from the sunshine with their beers in the living room, and produced my lions and told them they had to read to me. So Sean took on the role, begrudgingly, and I sat there grinning as lions ate my soul for decades. Mark read us into a Norwegian depression and finally I read to them about fingerprint on pillow cases, then we sang some songs until I was evicted.

It was the accents that made the naked lunch experience so wonderful, the country poet who wrote about a girl with a face like a whore, the American who made me feel like my brain was tripping all over the gaf and the beautiful dubs, wonderfully mispronouncing words, dropping letters and giving them all the more character.

I miss Dublin and it's voices and it's cruel sense of humour. I miss the political incorrectness, giggling over things we shouldn't and insulting each other in new and inventive ways. In Wexford I was shocked to silence when I teased darran and he replied in his quiet and polite manner "you know clodagh, some people might say it's rather needy of you to come all the way from England to spend a weekend with people who don't really like you" then his voice took on a puzzled tone and he continued "do you think you're still part of the gang after a years absence". It shocked me to hear lovely old darran turn mean, but the weekend got meaner still with mark dubbing it "freak out clodagh weekend" and Stephen making inverted comas in the air everytime I used the word "friend". And Stephen with his lovely sarcy dub accent imploring anytime someone mentioned books or poetry "you got an English degree yeah, you went to college".

But still my friends who hate me and tell me so in the most wonderful accents took me to a bar where Aoife Mannix, the featured poet of the night, cut out words with her beautiful dub voice, hanging up all her animals and letting them dance within this carnival. I sat on a high seat like a child, grinning away in my multi-coloured dress listening to her weave clothes from everyday things and torture her young brother though he sat fully grown in the audience. After 12 years of living in London she retained her Dublin charms, sounding more dub than I ever could with my silly voice I must have picked off the back of a milk cartoon.

Afterwards I found Timmy who informed me only protestant girls were allowed to use call him Timmy, and Kevin Desmond who runs the monster truck poetry nights. Timmy told me about his pilgrimage and tried to explain why he had to leave a part of his church(they let catholics get holy communion) and join a stricter one while I giggled at him and abused his sweet sensitive nature.

A few years ago, in Café Enseine, Timmy accused me of being a sociopath; Aidan had related a story to us about a girl meeting a boy at her mothers funeral but then losing his number, a few days later she killed her sister and we were all asked why. I said that that way she would see the boy again, which was apparently the answer sociopaths gave- but timmy took the whole thing all too seriously and accused me of being genuinely mad. Well last night I turned the tables and accused him of insanity and he informed me quite seriously that he doesn't worry about going mad anymore because he would have done so already at this stage. And he speaks insanity, looking at me with those imploring genuine eyes that say "it all makes sense" but the eyes do not match the words or the crazy nature of our beloved Tim. His eyes laugh bashfully like it is I who speaks crazy and not him with his fresh grown pilgrimage beard and strange thoughts.

I walked back to town with Kevin Desmond who talked a mile a minute about poetry and how to make it, and how ailbhe and I are his flipside, irish poets moving to England. And he tells me that we have talent and we are pretty enough to be poets which makes me laugh a lot and remember poor Stephen- the giant boy child who in trying to be sweet one day informed me that I was pretty and smart enough to be a poets wife; but he goes on and on about photographs and videoing readings and the importance of live audio. He says that the monster truck montage of readings was spliced in such a way to take the word "fuck" out of ailbhes poem but that it's spirit hung there, the residue of removed obsenities still hanging visibly in the spirit of omitted words. And he speaks with such energy about writing switching from thought to thought with very little to connect the strands together. When I leave (something I regret doing) and insist on getting Timmys email address, he informs Tim that this is what ailbhe and I do- collect people for our galleries but then never return.

And he is right in a way, but it is not people we collect but experiences and to return to such things, to relive a perfect memory can often make it imperfect, tarnishing the original, it is holding onto something that is no longer there, living life like a tape stuck in a loop. We went to the monster truck gallery, once, and never returned- but we will do again, just not so often that it becomes stale for us. If I had not agreed to meet non-poets today I would be out there peopling my gallery with more carnival animals, cutting voices and lyrical unfinished words.

Mentalists in the Attic

I have bats on my brain. They squawk at me flapping their arms, concealing carnivores beneath their jumpers, threatening to publish me and stitch skin into thick volumes to print their demented tales on.

Leroy 'the big easy, oven bake' L'Haine, aka The Publisher tells us about his Paris adventures, of how bats nibbled through ceilings eating their landlady and forcing him to take drastic measures against the neighbours to prevent knowledge of their walker crisp, croissant and human flesh eating ways from becoming public. We smile and nod, he is mad and one day will be incarcerated in a chuck palahniuk horror story.

Ailbhe visited me for a bit of culture, but we can not be together too long as we become combustible, leaving a wake of charred brain cells and broken glasses behind us. My housemates giggled at the madness of it, but I wonder if they would still giggle if they knew just how far we can go and have gone and will go in the near future? We had the delight of bringing a tall dark mentalist on our trip down logic lane, singing of the wonders we met along the way but he added nothing but paraffin to the mix and it all went horribly wrong. We got on it, off it and giggled the weekend away.

We tumbled through oxford looking for the white spaces in art, and drinking grotesque cocktails in the QI, free wine in the turf and more fun things in the grand café… Eventually we ended back in my house where ailbhe and I licked eyeballs and dusty noses, drank pimms and got told off for dancing on Mathew langthorpes bed.

Finally we all lay in shambles in my little attic room, blowing bubbles and giggling. As we recover with coffee and sunshine Leroy relived his days working for O2 customer services, shouting in a gruff voice that he is batman, bats, batty to the core. We become an oxford gang with me as a mustached punisher, and mattie tells me he would be attracted to me if only I grew one for real. But eventually, as the sun grows dim and Leroy sees a sign shining in the sky and leaves us we are so sad we curl up on sofas and watch 'batman begins' giggling with glee.