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T: “You swallow it, under your tongue.” P: “Pussy
cats even do drugs. My cat Marvin gets catnip and he’s like ‘yeah, let’s go pal’ they love it. I ought to try it myself.” LOVE A DUB Befuddled and swaying, there was something about the sign over my books which was giving him serious trouble, the sign which read: VIRGINS ONLY 12.30-3.00. Rising up, sinking down, slowly, forward and back, he focussed on the words for a long while and then he spoke. “D’ye see that bro… twelve thirty to three Euros…people’ll think that’s a time.” “It is” I said, flinging him back into his original confusion. After much more swaying, focussing, assessing and re-assessing he came up with his final judgment. “Well…ye want to put a p.m. after it” he said and moved away with a whole new confidence to his wobble. - Pawmarks on my Poems (2013) T: “Are you still writing Pat?” P: “I’m writing every day because it just keeps flowing.” T: “Are you writing a keyboard?” P: “Not anymore, only with a pen. I was writing a couple of days ago about a man falling faster than he’s ever fallen before simply because he flushed the toilet on a plane. His first thought is fuck that’s not supposed to happen. I don’t wanna fall like that and then you’d be hoping you don’t fall down a factory chimney and you’d be hoping for a suitably gigantic haycock without thistles, then you’d be hoping for the one unlikely million-to-one chance that you would miss the ground completely. And then I wrote one about a man who can never remember tomorrow, they’re still coming…are you like me Tom, same as you do a wee-wee?” T: “No, my process is to sit down and wait until beads of blood form on my forehead.” P: “Really, really?” T: “I wrote eight last year, that’s the speed I write at. After nine years, I have a new book, you just whizz them out. I remember sitting with you one time, you were writing at the time and I was thinking how does he do it?” P: “It’s just like doing a wee-wee, there’s no credit involved, it’s a bodily function.” The conversation veers past numerous acquaintances of Pat from John McColgan who invited Pat into learn how to DJ in the sixties before he took over the slot McColgan has just been sacked from, to Steve Averill who designed most of the covers for Pat’s collections “as an act of love for his friend”, to the recently deceased Michael O’Brien of O’Brien Press (“an honourable man”) to BP Fallon, “I was interviewing young people and I remember devoting a 24 whole page with the headline was ‘Let us be more broad-minded’ pleads BP Fallon.” Finally, it comes round to their relationship with the city now. UP AND DOWN THE STRIP (extract) It’s the tingle between your legs that takes you down to Leeson Street, down to the The Strip down to meet tight jeans tight thighs denim bottoms hopes high standing and sitting sipping the wine buy you a bottle make you mine and the Stones can’t get no satisfaction. Business men working late grey haired overweight white shirts club ties credit cards white lies cigar smoke bald spots big stomachs big shots wrinkles over rugby scars randy thoughts company cars and the Stones can’t get no satisfaction. P: “I miss it. To be such an intrinsic part, at pavement level, of real Dublin life on a daily basis, that is who I was and where I belonged. I remember sitting in the doorway of Eason’s on Westmoreland Street when the place was shut. I had my books there, the chances were the guards were going to arrive any minute to move me because I had no permission to be doing it and then a lad who was homeless used to sleep behind me because he was safe and I had a knife pulled on me once. I said, ‘you can have any book you want!’ It was just an amazing place to be. I loved being on the street like that and never worried about my books being stolen because I found it hard enough to sell books of poetry in the first place. “Lisa O’Neill used to stop, she’s like a young Margaret Barry. She would come and sit on the pavement with me and I loved her complete lack of desire to impress in any way. We were talking once, and I mentioned how I hadn’t seen her for weeks and missed her and then she mentioned how she had been touring the world with David Gray. I can no longer live with it and love it the way I did because it’s not possible anymore.” T: “It’s not the city that it was but I’m not the guy that I was. All the things that I liked are still there like the pubs I would go into from 2 until 5.” P: “All I hear on the radio these days is how dangerous it is.” T: “Perhaps it is, though I don’t encounter, but I am not hanging out on O’Connell street at midnight. I haven’t seen any crazy outbreak of madness but I guess it depends where you are and how you are comporting yourself.” P: “The Queen waved at me once… security was so tight when she was visiting. I was there to sell my books. She was stuck, there was no one to wave at. Then the following Top: A still from The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby Below: Pat’s Chat