RAPE IS PEAR SHAPED

For Germaine

              

Reinvent intimacy, so says Germaine Greer.

What’s wrong with the feminists, what do

They fear. I won’t step in on your space.

Women have to find a voice to tell me

who I am, your son, brother, lover,

don’t leave me out here confused, signed another.

Rape is pear shaped sisters, brother. I don’t know

Where I stand, because I can’t stand erect, we need

To start loving again. This is insanity

What ever happened to humanity.

As my mother used to say, its not hard

To be civil, I have never forced a woman

Against her will, please don’t tar me

With the feminist brush, I’m confused

Why is it them and us.

PLACEBO EFFECT

I find it very hard these days to focus on positivity

Alina Feld said in her study of melancholy, 

“the self knows it’s light only by knowing its darkness”.  

My darkness it seems is projected from within.

I live within the state of melancholy, but I hope 

this essay shines a little light in the dark.  

I am not coming to this essay trying to shove some-

thing down your throat.  I have searched and searched 

for the answer, but even in my hours of near-death, 

I found the same answers as you.

I believe I have been given a second chance 

for a reason but I'm not asking you to believe 

in something that fundamentally contradicts itself. 

I believe what I believe, it’s just that I call mine poartry, 

you have another name for this mystery, let’s leave it 

at that, a mystery. Mysteries are named so because 

they want to be left alone; if we find out what 

the mystery is then that's the end. Like poetry, 

you get something from it, then leave the rest 

alone for another day. 

You will receive something else from the same thing 

don't bury it and kill the mystery.  It’s about 

you and how you feel today, everything you receive 

depends on your mood, how positive and negative you are.  

You have the power to change your life for the better but 

it’s up to you. The power of positive thought is an amazing 

determination; tell yourself you can do it. At the minute 

I'm reading the book “Purpose Driven, What on Earth am I here for? 

“I’m looking for the answers like everyone else, but no self-help 

book will give me the answers.  At the end of the day 

they are Rick Warren's (author) words, it’s the name 

he places on it, it’s his answer but who are you, 

what's your name and most importantly what's your answer? 

  It’s in you, look at yourself!

When I was in the embrace of death there 

were always questions I needed answering. 

I remember waking up one night in a cold sweat 

from a dream. There was a crowd of doctors around me 

administering drugs. I thought I had died and this was 

my hell, but I came to realize that heaven and hell are 

the same place it’s how we think of them, they both exist 

in your mind but it’s up to you how you paint them, 

positive or negative.

I remember, many years ago, being kicked to the ground 

in Lurgan one night with seven around me and a beer 

bottle in my hand. I thought of smashing it over the ring-leaders 

head but instead I threw it away, I rolled up into a ball 

and took the beating. If I had smashed that bottle over his head 

I would be dead, not here now writing this essay. 

It’s up to you, your life says what lane it takes. As Robert Frost 

said, “Always take the road less travelled by.” Life can be affirming. 

It’s up to you and what you bring to it, so paint your picture 

with a beautiful sunrise or sunset and you can’t go wrong.

A good friend asked me to write this essay. A searcher like me, 

she and her son have, along with others has been instrumental 

in my life since the stroke.  They are the ‘road less travelled by,' 

they are the sunrise and sunset of my life, they are my 

positive thoughts.  I wouldn't be here without those people, 

they were there for me. It's at times like this you realize 

who your friends are. Without them I would have become 

negative; instead with their power and my own 

determination I pulled through.

Alright I'll never be 100% the person I was, but 

I'm alive. I have someone to thank for that, even if 

it's me, my friends and family. I believe in them 

and they believe in me; that's what I call the power 

of healing the positive force within me. 

The beauty is not to ask people to believe in what 

you believe in. Whatever happened to diversity? 

Believe in whatever you want to, it’s your right. 

If it paints your day so be it, that's your positive force.

This past years has been the worst I have ever encountered. 

As well as recovering from a stroke which almost killed me.

The stroke came without warning. I was on the edge of the bed, 

then I was on the floor shaking. I didn't know what was happening. 

I crawled into my mother's room and asked her what was happening; 

she told me I was taking a stroke. She phoned the doctor. 

All I can remember is being rushed to Intensive Care.  

I had ‘locked in Syndrome.' I knew what to say but 

hadn't the power to communicate.

I was flat on my back and could only move my eyes 

I was so afraid it was uncanny. I thought everyone was out 

to get me, without the power to resist. I really did believe 

I would go out in a wooden box.

I remembered an experience from childhood. I was running along 

a pier when I slipped on seaweed and fell into the water. I was trying 

to get out of there. I feared I would die but when I looked around 

it was beautiful in there; the seaweed was dancing 

and for a second it was beautiful.  An American tourist dived in, 

pulled me out and pumped the water from my lungs. 

Since that day I have never met him but thank you.

It felt like that during my stroke, I was lost walking 

around in a field, then I woke up with friends around me. 

I don't let on to know the answers to life, I am just like you, 

a searcher of the truth and lying there in that hospital bed 

I realized that there is no great light that I'm drawn towards, 

just the people who loved me for their own reasons not mine.  

Someone once said ‘Never judge your enemy, it clouds 

your judgment.' 

The power of positive thought is everywhere, it’s what they see 

in you. These are the positive thoughts I have produced.   

I'm not looking for sympathy or pity you can keep it. 

All I ask is that you read this and determine your 

own answers, not one that's shoved down your throat, 

I hope this is your placebo effect.

 

  PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE

Adrianfox.org

My father was a republican hard -man

From North Belfast. My Mother was

A humanist from Dublin, her Father died

In the civil army uniform aged just 27.

My family is steeped in the blood of Ire-

Land. I am a so called Catholic who

doesn’t want to be so called, born

In England living in Ardoyne.

For sixteen years my father told me

Where to go and what to do, aged

Sixteen I hit him a dig in the head

and ran away to London. 

Priests, Teachers, police and army got

A dig in the head too, I was an angry 

young man , we have to run away

From this regime, we have got to break

This cycle of violence and hatred that

Runs through our veins. 

We have to tare down the peace walls 

In our minds and just h ave peace. 

The walls are hemming us in, I can’t breath, 

I can’t breath, please my name may as well

Be George Floyd, this is a Lives Matter.

If we don’t tare down the walls in our minds

were on another brutal crusade. I’m Irish-

English writing unwritten graffiti,. I’m dis-

Abled trying so hard to get through this life.

The walls are in our mindset, break free.

Woe

Woe be gone, woe be-tide, 

be tide of woe be gone inside. 

The current sea washes over me 

melancholic feet of poetry.

The poem fathoms deep and wide

The river of forgetfulness is mine

and found it flows out of me.

I have been blogging for over ten years, as I don’t have memory recall, I tidied this up.

THE OTHER HALF OF EVERYTHING (REWRIT)

METHOD ACT 1.

  

He woke in a tiny bed-sit in Reading, Berkshire, England. 

An image of his son's face falling away from his eyes like 

a rainbow drifting into the filthy walls.

The drumbeat rippling with the hummmmm of his land lady 

doing her washing on a washboard over the bath. 

The tune handed down from her mother’s mother like 

a tribal lady washing on stone by a river. 

In a dream state of confusion, he clambered into his clothes 

along with the three flights of stairs he managed to manoeuvre 

in massive strides, standing on the cat that scared him half to 

death and jolted him closer to the front door. 

The fear of what that hologram of his son meant drifting 

through his mind. 

The Queen Lizzy pub was quiet for a change the drunks and junkies 

were asleep or still locked up in the cells after the dawn raid. 

He ran to the end of the street where the kebab van parks 

and sat on the wall awaiting the girl to exit the phone booth. 

For fuck's sake hurry up he told her silently, my motives losing 

momentum. He turned to the street and watched the creeds 

of the world clamber along, among them the lost and the lonely 

released into the community, the mad ones, the real people. 

An old lady with a white painted face shoved a shopping trolley 

along the middle of the road the rush hour traffic swerving to 

miss her.

 Elvis in a sequined waistcoat posing for a shout-singing Love me Tender 

across the street. A man in a long black coat who never spoke to anyone 

just walked around with a scrunched up ball of paper in his hand wiping 

crayons taken from his breast pocket across the page. 

He remembered meeting him once in the Irish cafe and like a tourist, 

he bought him a cup of tea and asked can I have a look. Without 

a sound and half a smile, he handed me his sketchpad while another 

appeared instantly from within his coat and he began drawing the scene 

outside the window.

Only he could see what he was drawing his back was to the view he watched 

him draw half a man, half a car and half a street like the aftermath of a blitz. 

The other ones, with crayons, he said and he took the ball of paper from his 

pocket and rolled it across the artificial marble Formica topped table. 

As he unfolded the ball of paper Monet’s, Lilies, Van Gogh’s trees and Vermeer's light filled his eyes, he looked at him and saw in his eyes the other half of everything.

METHOD ACT 2.

He rushed past the girl and shoved the coins in the slot his heart beating wildly like electronic codes gathering in his head, a dead tone. He took the rejected coins and shoved them home again and again only to hear the same dead tones ringing like a thumping headache, she must have changed the number, he thought as he returned to his little room. 

Feeling caged like an animal trying so hard to concentrate on a book but it only brought confusion. Unable to erase the sight of the picture of his son appearing like that hologram and the worrying thoughts attached to it. Your conscience is the prison of the mind, he thought no matter how hard you try you just can't run from it, oh how he wished at that moment that he was one of the dispossessed shuffling through life, oblivious of any moral obligations. 

He thought of his father trying to run all his life from his bastard past, each one of 5 siblings were born in a different town and staying no longer than a year in each English town. Belfast during the 60s and 70s being the longest they stayed anywhere then that it was probably one of the safest places in the world for him, what past would want to find you in Belfast during the nightmare of the troubles. 

When he gave up running from his past a secret family exploded after thirty-one years of marriage to his mother and showered down on us like emotional shrapnel, sending the family to the four winds to lick their wounds.  Killing my father and devastating my mother with five strokes.  He always swore he would never be like him and here he was in a fucked up town in England while everything is across the Irish Sea. He discarded the book Charles Bukowskis hot water music  with a vengeance into the corner of the room it left him as cold as ice,took his only coat from the only chair and left the still ordinary madness of the room and joined the frantic streets. 

It was warm summer's evening, which didn't help much as the town's grim sights clashed with the elements and his void. He called at the Asian shop and purchased a bottle of overpriced wine (uncorked), without a care for paying over the odds, anything to suppress his inner lament and to awaken his mind to simpler things. 

He walked south of the town intent on not opening the wine until he reached his destination. Beneath a filthy old railway bridge, he uncorked the wine and took a deep swig while in his mind he told the roaring train thundering overhead to fuck off. He passed the roundabout where the cars waited impatiently for their little piece of space in a mad hurry to get nowhere.

Dusk fell on reaching his destination, his space by the river, He went there often to clear his head of the modern filth. He sat by the river edge smoking and chugging the wine; a warm slight breeze blew with the river flow creating short sharp waves that gleamed with the red dye injected sky. A treat for his eyes after the usual week of air-conditioned factories, traffic jams and everywhere the sight of built up Grey areas filled with drunks, junkies, and perverts clambering the streets in search of some temporary nirvana. That vexed feeling came fleeting back at the sight of the riverboat pumping along unnaturally like filth on the river.  

I

It's cheap coloured lights flashing and cutting the reflection of the line of trees from the far bank like a chainsaw. Idling towards the boat where a train of swans at point was a beautiful white bird followed by four black cygnets, guarding the rear was the majestic male. Pleasantly they blended with the scenery, belonging.

The bright lights of the boats exterior and the lights within clashed creating silhouette shapes  that pranced around out of sync with the nightclub thumping beats. Man’s celebration driving like a nightmare on the surpassing river.

He recalled a night he was on board that very boat, The Princess, a cruise or so he thought and pleasure trip. One of the girls in work arranged it in anticipation he pictured the scene, relaxing on the starboard bow with a beer mellowing with the sights and the natural flow of nature passing by. Most of the people he worked with were assholes their form of chilling out after work was glued to the box in the corner that pumped garbage into their minute recesses.

METHOD ACT 3.

He was excommunicated, he's an oddball, they said because he couldn't make a comment on the latest goings on in the soap operas or who scored the vital goal in the football or give  his opinion on the lunatic on the news that murdered twenty-seven men and women and ate their genitals He liked poetry and literature they can keep their electrified dementia, I'll stay quietly insane.

He got a beer and left the swarm of people within, He sat on the deck ready for the world's natural flow. The disco beat pumped decibels of thumping sounds through the hull, echoing tremors through the river capacity. It's no wonder it's a good river for fishing they want to be caught and have their necks smashed on the nearest rock, he was so pissed off he wanted to catch the hook pull back on it and be hauled to freedom. He was starving wanted to hear classical and let his mind wander off to take it in then pour this experience out on paper. He tried he best to relax and push those stupid sounds away, just when he thought he had it sorted one of his fellow workers broke his concentration to talk shop. He had riverboat sickness, leaving the deck he returned to the madness and sat with his fellow used and the presence of beer and whisky flowed. The booze took its toll and he was no longer in control, letting it flow with the filth of the boat on the river. 

As the train of swans met the boat two silhouette shapes stood on deck drinking from glasses that flashed in the moonlight, pouring their substance from the glasses down on the flock, their strict security broke in shock. He yelled at the shapes, you think it's fucking funny, ya mindless wankers. In his rage he didn't notice the swan swimming towards him bolting onto the bank honking and hissing wildly flapping its outstretched wings. He stumbled back and ran for cover behind the trees with the echoes of laughter from the boat. He zigzagged the line of trees and by the time he reached the river’s edge again after finishing the wine, it seemed the moon and stars were out for his benefit only. Mellowing in solitude pondering his circumstance watching the shadows from the far shore rippling a picture for the album of his mind, until something caught his eye. 

He turned to see the swans silently coming along the river edge. He was about to get up and run when he told himself stall, relax, his heart beat wildly and shook with fear like the flowing river when the majestic bird broke the water with great ease onto the bank and idled towards him. The massive bird came strolling along the grass verge for a second we made eye contact before he lowered his head closed his eyes and braced himself. He felt the strength of its breast as it pressed against him, it's cold beak brushed his forehead and flowed to the nape of his neck with the affection of a lover’s touch and a sensation flowed through his mind and body, a new sensation.

Something he had only come close to experiencing seeing his children being born. It cleared his mind of every trivial thought he ever had. he opened his eyes, left the river and returned to the town, got his gear together from the corner of the filthy room and left. On the train, he thought maybe I should leave her alone, maybe their better off without me.On the ferry crossing, the rough Irish Sea political parties condemned murder in the TV lounge. As he sipped a pint of Guinness, It's winter in Ireland all things are dying, the rain and the sea spray cut with the coldness of steel but he held in his hands a picture of sons, the reality was pulsing with a rhythm he never wanted to lose. Returning to the news of his son taken to hospital with a strain of meningitis.