calling the ghosts up

I remember her as pot-pourri. She is one of those dolls with the knitted dresses they sit atop the toilet rolls. She is apple-scented shampoo. He is mintoes – those mint sweets with chocolate centres, and the smell of garlic tablet farts. I have to catalogue them somehow, and sometimes doing it by name or by crimes committed against me or favours done for me seems unfair.

Conjuring up ghosts is like blowing smoke rings held inside from the moment they disappeared behind the curtain at the crematorium. Yeah, and sometimes she is a heart-attack; he’s an embolism; she’s bowel cancer; and he is brain tumour.

Depending on whether the memory resurrects itself through the sense of smell or some morbid hospital shadow of memory, they come to me as the figures they were before the illness, or the decimated remainders they became. One I like – the other is less pleasant.

I like photographs. I like kid’s drawings – presents for grown-ups that represent both a child’s state of mind at the time and an insight into what he perceived as necessary to communicate something to an adult. Innocence can peel away the latterly achieved carapace forged from layer of disappointment which dull the patina you should have.

i dream of a perfume that captures a life; a taste that lingers on the tongue and plays a symphony upon the palate. to imagine that i am crafting something for a deafblind person with whom there is no other form of communication than the olifactory sense. i wish to craft a joycean engine from which my own dublin can be reconstructed. each poem, each story, each book is a bottle of perfume.