Will it be in the leaves with two fags in the pocket and an expression of old mornings and unsent letters?

Or in the snow like a piano tinkling dirge pulled out late at the last holy swig?

In an old car left at a wall, disappeared and not able to count the change anymore?

In the diminishing returns of a staggering forest walk, with all types of worm staring up through the windows in the ant-piss ground.

Ah, the enigma of the self-punching man.

From the bus window people feed the cut-throat, bastard swans at Mullusk, wearing brine soaked shoes home to love, embarass or defeat each other, finally. The return bus with the good old vomit smell, looking into the back of the driver’s mind. It’s all in there, you know — from tip to raging toe in all of us, just hinting to come out to drink coffee and see the golden ticket, at last. We could live in a hooded house among the smashed records and crazily carved up photographs — the frames burning in the grate. We, the absolute obsolete. Total winter at 3am and the pull of the underpass.

That’s the best place around here, with the angry traffic up above. The only sign of modernity for seven miles in each direction. A yawning, ugly, fifty yard street that burns its lights all night, every night. There is graffiti about cocks. Or there is the rock in the fields a near mile from any house. A man can strip, scream or both, but always one. I make sense there and can see useless lights in useless places all around. The rabbit burrows are for bottles. The idea of a cairn of bottles was toyed with, but littering is punching the mighty gut of the whiskey-hills.

After a throat carving scream, the useless lights dance about and a fine blood rush to the head shines a piss-light into why you did it to begin with. Magic wearing cow-shit feet. I like to think the awful sound carries across the fields, through gardens and cartooned curtains and causes soiled beds for the slumbering hick-children of this parish. It’s a distress signal from the muddy, sodden tugboat of True Doom — a rum-fuelled flare from the good ship Sprawling Black Vista. Starts and knowing looks across living rooms between parents. Whispers over hard won, weekend Smithwicks.

”Jesus’ holy mother, Peader, what was that?”

”It’s likely that oul nutcase down the road. He’s always trampin round the fields drunk roarin.”

”God love his poor parents, he’s not nearly right.”

”Ye can see the flashlight down there the odd time from the kitchen winda.”

”Oh Jesus, be quiet. I dont want to hear anymore about him.”

”By Christ, if he was mine, I wouldn’t be long straightening him out! A good days work would put the drinkin and roarin out of him.”

They would like to sellotape and torture each other at most times in their lives, but unite briefly to join in wonderment as to what exactly is wrong with that beard they see on the roads. That awful Talibanshee.

Where is a thirty-two year old man or woman who can’t smash and twist their mind at will; who can’t roar in fields or underpasses and find sweet rejection and ejection at local parties; who can’t launch fleets of stinking sniggers while choosing their weapons at the rural wine counter; who can’t sit on the wall of their house at 6am just to see the cars and lorries hurtling towards the banal and the income tax; who can’t tie a tourniquet to see in their arm a purest purple; who can’t spit across the room at Bowie’s face when Let’s Dance accidentally begins on their muddled internal jukebox?

He or she who has forgotten AM or PM knows.

The man or woman who can’t do these things is in The Box. The Crowded Box. The walls are the splinters of punched clocks and donned suits, and the soundtrack the blue cadences of family and that most vulgar of four letter words, Love.

Forget this box, brothers and sisters. Find your own underpass or better yet — your own rock in the fields. There is no need to wipe your feet. You are home. You are by far the most loved and astute here. You make sense now.

They are asleep now, and you are awake — raw-throated, naked, cold and smiling at the pretty label in the black, between the ditches.