James Conor Patterson

Snorting some Coke with You

After ‘Having a Coke with You’ by Frank O’Hara




is even more fun than going to Dublin, Sligo, Donegal, Ballycastle, Belfast

or being sick to my stomach outside the gates of Newry Market in the middle of the week

partly because in your away Liverpool top you look like a fatter sluttier Kim Kardashian

partly because I take more than you, partly because you snorted some yoghurt

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before police and statutory

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as buzzkilling

as solemn as un-fucking-believably humourless as statutory when right in front of them

in the warm Newry 4 o’clock light we are off our boxes drifting back and forth

between pillars and bollards like a dealer breathing through his sunglasses


and the Instagram selfie seems not to have picked up our faces, just blurred lines

you suddenly wonder why in the world we would ever bother to take it


I look

at your arse and I would rather look at your arse than all the PornHub vids in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it has too much prick

which is a line thank god you haven’t crossed too often though fucking me wasn’t your 1st

and the fact that you move so violently more or less takes care of Sadomasochism

just as at home I pretty much always think of Co-Ed Sits for the Casting Couch or

at work a singles website with loads of girls called Leona and Michaela used to wow me

and what good does all their research into making First Impressions do them

when they never got the right person to chop out lines when the sun rose

or for that matter your cunt best-friend when she didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the cock


it seems they were all cheated of a really fucking good time

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m asking you to cut again




James Conor Patterson is an MA student in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast, whose work has appeared in a number of publications, including Cyphers, Magma, Wordlegs and Southword. In 2013 he won the iYeats ‘Emerging Talent’ award for poetry. He currently lives in his hometown of Newry, Co. Down.