Universal City

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
— James Joyce

Welcome home.
Your flight touched down in morning mist, drizzle soft.
Grey light lingers in streets, neon flickering from the lost night before.
You step through arrivals, a stranger to your own reflection's stare.
Dublin, is it? Still? The state of you. You're barely there.

You messer, bold as brass.
 Ye're half gurrier, half god—pure class.
 City stitched of stories spun, rain-soaked dreams, river-run.
 Sure look it, it'll be grand. You walk.

Rivers merge and spread: Liffey, Limmat, Seine, Thames, Tiber—
 all their channels overhead.
 Digital streams. A current cast through panes of tempered light.
 Ghost-bike couriers skid through puddles, vanish into night.
 Nothing stands still. Not here. Not anymore.

The Liffey moves.
 Anna Livia sings her silken sway,
 whispering through mirrored towers.
 The Spire looms—a Babel beacon, piercing pixel-clouds.
 O'Connell Street hums: busker beats, billboard blare,
 voices weaving, jostling crowds.

A pint of plain—“sure it's your only man,”
tavern-half-truths, sipping through stained-glass-lies.

Your phone buzzes.
 The city knows you're home.
 They've built Cities Unlimited now.

Past uploaded, overlaid, overwritten—
 compressed into livestreams, light-speed echoes.
 Want nostalgia? Hit subscribe! Watch the show!

Dublin remains grey in ghost-lit rainstorms.
 Zurich's snow falls, silent, slow, certain.
 Rome's marble cracks beneath careless clicks.
 Trieste tilts toward the Adriatic's edge—
 Balkans blurred on a salt-lit horizon.
 London's gaslights flicker on selfie-screen-smudged reflections.
 Paris still laughs on the Left Bank,
 where bouquinistes stack spines no hands will hold.

Streets are paved in unread emails, unanswered echoes.
 Buildings rise on glass bones,
 a pacemaker for progress, a pulse for the future.
 Neon floods the quays. Joyce glitches in the algorithm,
reshuffled into endless doom-scroll. Finnegans Wake still unfathomable.

Welcome back.
 Exile is different now.
 Did you even go?
 Or were you always here, half-caught in every city's after-glow?

A Dublin voice breathes through Cockney clamour.
 A Jesuit exile waits in Fluntern's shade.
 Would Narcissus in Lake Zurich stare,
 his own face pixelated?

Latin buzzes beneath pop-up prayers.
 A pilgrim's gaze, blinking, burning in augmented reality.
 Joyce knew cities like a friend knows a past self.
 Here, streets still mispronounce your name.

Holograms beg on digital doorsteps;
 crypto-coins scatter like scraps in static streets.
 Dystopia is dressed in soft design, in coded space.
 Smile. Act the maggot all you want—you're in the interface.

Somewhere, a hard drive hums with Joyce's laughter—
 the laughter of cities, loved and lost.
 The Colosseum's ghosts gather in analog ruins.
 Wolf-raised twins guard firewalls.

They've digitised the Dead—
 and sure, aren't we next? Every poem is a product.
 Every voice, an archive, an afterthought, an unsent text.
 You're never alone—but never fully here.

Step into this perfect mess.
 Trieste salt-songs tangle with Temple Bar's tales.
 Absinthe still swirls beside the Seine.
 The Spire, the Colosseum, the Rue de l'Odéon—
 history rendered in megapixels, dusk till dawn.
 Utopia, rebuilt in code.

Would Dedalus still cast nets, seeking home and name?
 Would Molly still say yes, I will yes—
 or would she swipe left through shame?

Did Bloom's Dublin maze ever end,
 or is it still buffering?
 "History's a nightmare”, isn't it?
 We still click and glare.

Half-awake, we scroll.
 Somewhere beyond these mirrored frames, a city waits.
 Its streets still suffocate, still breathe, still belong.

But Joyce—
 one-eyed, prophetic, laughing—
 rewrites it each night.

Yes, he says.
 Yes, this is progress.
 Yes, this is loss.
 Yes, we said yes—cos what else would we say, love?
 Yes, we said yes—because there was no other way home.