Pets on Leashes Near the Custom House Quay

He licks floors sticky. Newspaper ink bleeding into a piddle puddle. Gibberish people talk at blooming volumes. He leans up the quay so his collar’s tags jiggle like Mr. New Bone.

He isn’t the only one here who wants to pluck a pigeon off the street, feel its kibble-y heart flutter under the city-gray feathers and snap its willow neck while he projects his personal feeling of panic into its black eyes.

In the dawn-ish fog along the Liffey, Dublin is a cloud city. Floating. A hermetically sealed pocket atmosphere that condensated concrete, wrought iron fencing and yellow buses shortly after this sky-born mass of water vapor abandoned gravity in an attempt to blot out the sun.

He hopes we are in the sky so he can justify this sense of falling. And so when we do come plummeting globeward, like a damp newspaper, the destruction will be so total that the Dionysus statue reverts to gravel in his stainless steel bowl.