THE TOWN LAND OF KILLARNEY AND THE VIPERS - JOURNAL ENTRY NR. 1

In a tiny church not far from the town-land of Killarney, they presented me with the label ' Michael Francis O' Rourke'. I recall looking down at the baptismal fountain, then staring up at the church ceiling, forgetting why God had insisted that I be certified under such an evil looking statue of The Mother. I stared at my own mother, who by that stage was so worn that I couldn't distinguish her eyes from her face. I got a feeling all was not right with her, that there was a huge gaping hole in her reasoning. That she, like so many others of her generation, had been given the finger by those who should have known better.

At that very moment the statue of our lady hissed like a startled viper, her tiny red tongue covered by a black mole, her neatly arranged teeth joined perfectly together like a French Jumeau. Her white eyes turning black as a badgers nose. I began weeping for my mother, then for the others, shuddering intensely in my white cotton blanket. I was only two weeks old, but already 'Sold' was stamped just under the serial number on my already defective Soul. Four hours after the exchange with Jesus, I was thrown into a tiny blue cot by my already drunk father. Left alone in a haze of insecurities, wondering intangible equations, mesmerized to the point of being patronized, stunned at the facts as they presented themselves before me. My life would never have any meaning until I crossed the hedgerows of my youth, entering a place I now call Sycamore Gates, somehow limping down the road to adulthood, into my fifty-sixth year, where despair and denial have become my staple diet of choice for breakfast, dinner and supper.


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