‘There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t yet met.’*

I thought you were on my side (they taught us
one half-side of you) so
I thought they were too – 
those men
who praised me and asked me upstairs,
or shamed me and asked me upstairs
to discuss my work.

I loved you.
I worshipped your portrait, your sorrowful face
on the wall of the Imperial Hotel,

until one night
you flew in my window, a vision
in shadow and tweed, and I saw

that you were a dancer (or a dance, or both?) in a show
I would not be admitted to see, that

you were a mechanised bird I could never afford, that

you were a ladder to another bedroom, that

you were the Irishest kind of circus animal, that

you were a list of derivative metaphors about a poet
I both admire and hate, that

you are not your work – that you are, 

however, your words (what you said about Gonne, 
what you said about Wingfield, what
you stole from Gregory) – 

that you are daring me to write 
that white hypermasculine Irish poetry
is dead and gone and with you in the grave, that

you are no longer what Irish poetry looks like (your
sorrowful face has been taken down), that

you are the day in every week when I open 
another anthology full of men’s words, that

you are no longer my inspiration, that
you have tainted the pen in my hand;

I woke up and wrote this poem. 

*quotation widely believed to be misattributed to W.B. Yeats


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