The Luck of the Irish
Had a dream last night; ...felt like a dream, but with edgy manic nightmere sidetones:
...I’m walking the beach, seems like a stretch of Ocean City beach or the like because I’m moving south and there’re dunes to my right, I can only see the top halves of the industrial blight & hotels as the sun is going down behind them. So I’m walking and there’s a lot of weather in the sky and air, the wind is up a bit and chilly...but the surf feels warm on my calves. I’m wandering & just looking south, and the farthest I look...the strand seems to stretch-out even farther on the horizon...exaggerated...like looking backwards through binoculars. I see a great whale breaching off to my left, not sure what kind, a humpback I think. ...THEN...my feet sink...floor dropping out...into the sand down to my waist...and the tide is in around me, the surf lapping at my chin...as I look up to see two circling red tail hawks and hear mustangs running up from behind along the dune-line & pines. I must be on...Assateague Island now, circa 18th Century,
...I don’t see hotels anymore...& these are mustangs, not ponies.
...a breath...a flash....
Now I’m lying on my back on cool semi-dry sand with my head towards the ocean, feet towards the dune...where the mustangs are now standing in random lines & looking out to sea. The breakers breaking, ...sounding in my ears like the inhale and exhale from perfect lungs in the warm center of my best friend and lover...when my face is pressed against her chest; the tide reaching-out to just a foot or so from my head & then withdrawing. It’s near dusk and now only one red tail hawk is circling above as the sky becomes fire & billions of flickering speckles of light. I hear a ground thunder building...fast...like a Southern California earthquake but not the...purely chaotic wrongness! & the ripping jagged non-rhythmic grindings, wrenching & hammerings of the Northridge quake. More of a yawning bittersmooth rolling & rocking oscilloscope wave of rhythmic deep-shuddering-tremors like the one in the earliest hours of the morning a couple years prior to the Northridge quake, ...along with a heavy build-up of pressure in the air and a pulse-pounding low subwoofer bottom-end rising in crescendo from deep under the beach into my bones.
THEN a huge whoosh of pressure and the sand underneath is yanked back like a rug beneath me and a breaker wall the extent of the firmament is curling in a great arc over my head, high and close, covering me in an overindulgence of slow motion ocean mother animal fury and anti-peace euphoria.... I’m gone, buried, ...covered, over and done with, no doubt...this is the moment of my drowning.... A horizontal wall of ocean ceiling three feet, now two feet above my face and everywhere, like the vertical wall of ocean in the special edition of The Abyss, ...the pressure of the moment ringing, metronomic thrumming in my being with a resonant frequency in the key of E........
...then freeze-frame!
...All is quiet, as silent as the insides of empty luggage stacked against boxes behind the closed door of a closet. The enormous horizontal wall of sea is stopped, not frozen, still fluid but halted two feet from my face and all down the shoreline, as if I were on a carpet remnant under the drive shaft of a Corvette on blocks at midnight and there is no flashlight. I feel the pressure and the weight of it ...and I feel a cool blue light coming into focus, ...ocean mother hand slowly turning a dimmer switch clockwise...and the monolith of shimmering wall across my face is shades of black and crystal-blue light...still a terrifyingly calm silence...as I await the final enclosure. It doesn’t come yet.
What comes is music...heartbeat quiet from a distance west of my feet, ...and the sound of the mustangs hoofing, nickering & neighing. Then the vocals begin to build and the song that evolves is The Luck of the Irish by Lennon-Ono; ...why, I haven’t a clue because this is a song not often in the mix...but recognizable. ...From way below west of my feet I begin to see that the black in the blue is words, ...lyrics. The lyrics are panning from below my vantage, west to east, on the wall of blown glass ocean overhead...like the opening minutes of Star Wars...but different. As the song plays from every direction carried on the best 5.1 surround sound & better, ...black lyrics in Times New Roman font on a blue background are scrolling by my eyes from gut to forehead and onward to the east, the voices of John & Yoko...& the melody...& the neighing of the mustangs in the distance; ...the depth of the ocean behind me...the immensity of the moment...the song and the words..........
...& I recall the subtitled scenes in the lodges of the Lakota while John Dunbar is learning the language & the best notions of the plains people in Dances With Wolves...& I’m thinking how beautiful those people were, I’ve always thought how beautiful those people were...and how they could have saved all our souls had they had even a hint of a chance to live-out their lives in an ideal early American scenario....
On the stilled torrent of ceiling, like an IMAX screen inches from my eyes,
...the lyrics are scrolling over...
~~
Ok, one, two, three, one two, three
If you had the luck of the irish,
You'd be sorry and wish you were dead.
You should have the luck of the irish,
And you'd wish you was english instead.
A thousand years of torture and hunger,
Drove the people away from their land.
A land full of beauty and wonder
Was raped by the british brigands!
Goddamned!
Goddamned!
If you could keep voices like flowers,
There's be shamrock all over the world.
If you could drink dreams like irish streams,
Then the world would be as high as the mountain of morn.
In the 'pool they told us the story
How the english divided the land.
Of the pain and the death and the glory
And the poets of auld eireland.
If we could make chains with the morning dew,
The world would be like galway bay.
Let's walk over rainbows like leprechauns,
The world would be one big blarney stone.
Why the hell are the english there anyway?
As they kill with God on their side!
Blame it all on the kids and the i.r.a.
As the bastards commit genocide!
Aye! aye!
Genocide!
Okay!
You should have the luck of the irish,
You'd be sorry and wish you were dead.
You should have the luck of the irish,
And you'd wish you was english instead.
One more time!
You should have the luck of the irish,
You'd be sorry and wish you were dead.
You should have the luck of the irish,
And you'd wish you was english instead,
Hey, yes, you'd wish you were english instead.
~~
...then the song ends and fades to blue for a bright flash and the wall of ocean closes its starving mouth over sand and man...breathless...& I am gone....
....
........a breath &...floating on my back, ...arms splayed out & I’m bobbing on an easy breaker, ...the sky is lightly clouded blue and the two red tail hawks are circling above again, the sun is low in the east and the water is chilly.... I roll to a crawl-stroke and ride a wave in until moving sand is beneath me and the dunes rise in a low wall past the beach and the economic sprawl of hotels and construction is there beyond, north to south, along the shoreline....
~~+~~=~~~~~~~~
So I did a little researching-around to quell heady thoughts
...and found this link, which is interesting enough to share:
http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/john_lennon_irish_roots.htm
Hey, I don’t have a clue why...but I figured it couldn’t hurt to share it.
Stay gold.
