Where The Streets Have No Name

I’ve lost my way again recently. I’m not afraid to say it. I put it down to too much routine and not enough fun. Too much institutional boredom at the expense of personal freedom. Too much of the mundane blocks the creative brain. So much potential slipping through my veins. I can feel myself shutting down. Zoning out. But not in a good way. I’m out of step. I’m out of town. I’m so frustrated I want to scream. I want to shout. My fingernails scratch to find a way out. The heartstrings stretched to breaking point. It’s a dirty day as the rain hits the window pane with a petulant smack. I turn on Spotify and choose a tune to take me out of this place. I hear the melody rising to meet me. The Edge’s guitar clashes with Larry’s drumbeat. I want to run. I want to hide. I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside. Words that cut through the greyness of another weekday morning marked only by its deadening familiarity. I open the door and step out into a world I find increasingly hard to understand. The enemy within sucking up what’s left of our dignity, these men in suits who have brought us to our knees. Greed is their calling card. Power is their name. Their drug of choice is cocaine.

I’ve always wanted something different, apparent in the magnetic pull that I have felt all my life. Something pulling at me from deep inside. A flickering flame that refuses to go out. Fiercesome in its resistance. Lonely in its unfaltering patience. Determined to see this life through. It’s made a pact to turn up even when I don’t. Hope is one tough motherfucker. It has to be. Despite everything that’s been thrown at it, it’s still alive. And kicking. Somehow. Call it what you want. Call it what you like. Spirit. Humility. Intuition. Gut feeling. Resilience. Knowing. Trust in the bigger picture. Flow. An inner belief. It’s in what I write. It’s in a roomful of people who make my heart beat quicker. It’s captured often in the effortless rhythm of poetry and song. It’s characterized by a desperate yearning to cross over the threshold of what’s possible into what seems impossible.

In this special place, people take hope for granted. It is here I arrive at a place beyond myself. I want to go where the streets have no name. The rigor of school, education, church, alcohol, and state is tossed aside as I listen to what is inside. The real ego running wild. The one that knows what is best for me. A different kind of place. A place of beauty. A place of love, and only love. Compassion. Empathy. Joy. Common sense. A place anchored by goodness, kindness, and respect. The kind of place that Ireland could be if we really wanted it to be. But for some reason, we don’t. Even Joyce, Beckett, Geldof, and Behan had to leave these sheltered shores to shine, to be free of the ties that bind us in our history that have made us an iron-clad society. Not for breaking. Not for changing. Too set in our ways to have anyone explain that there is a different way. A better way. It seems we’re not ready yet. The thought of change is too big for the little minds running the country. The wild geese who got out knew what it would take to be themselves. The shake of the Irish Sea was enough to set them free.

We are still falling religiously into line whenever the state raises its voice. Do this or it’ll be even worse they say. History presses down on our need to be ourselves, to frolic naked in the sea of our passion, our humor, and our pure desperation to be who we really are. We’d surely be sucking fucking diesel then. Dancing not just at the crossroads, but at the main junctions too. Our beauty lies in our contradictions and our idiosyncrasies. The melody, the song, and the beat meet with the poet’s words to tell a story of what’s finally done. We’ve washed our hands of it and shaken it down. There’s nothing to hold us back now. Not even ourselves.

Our creativity rhythm is our currency. It’s wrapped up in our landscape, in what’s come and gone, in the waves that wrestle with the shoreline every morn. The little things we’ve lost along the way. The famine of our hearts left us to pray for forgiveness for sins we didn’t commit. The anchor that is in our hearts restless for something new, the soul that still lives despite everything they’ve done to it. It’s why we’re melancholy a lot of the time. We are simply ticking off the boxes and falling into line. We divide ourselves along the lines of similarity. We wrestle with ourselves rather than the real enemy within. our minds caught up in the chase.

To have a creative mind is to be blessed with irreverent restlessness. To ignore it leads to depression, to a retreat within. To dark places. It is here we try to find the answers to our collective psychosis. It is here that our conscience asks us why? it is here that the real inspiration lies. This place of plenty. It is here that we search for the conclusion so that we can begin again. One step forward equals two steps back. We shoot ourselves in the foot again by always patting ourselves on the back. Another opportunity lost to our naivety. Our youthful innocence, breaking on the shores of our grief, is scattered to the four corners of the world where we shine a light we cannot shine at home. Wouldn’t it be great if our political class emigrated in mass and let us be?

I can hear the silence still. We are more than we know. Our greatness lies somewhere in between. It’s in the pain we have endured by hugging it for so long with laughter and with song. It’s the coldness in our hearts waiting to be warmed up. It’s in the stories we have yet to tell. It’s in all the things we run from and it weighs a fucking ton. It’s why we drink so much and take drugs to beat the band. It’s nothing that we’re not. It’s the fever in our rebel yell. It’s in the kiss and tells.

Now more than ever we need our dreamers.

And if you listen to the whispers of the past you might hear the wisdom of Pearse and Connolly, Ceannt and Seán MacDiarmada, McDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett, and Roger Casement, saying that it’s just like Easter 1916 all over again, only this time with a happy ending.