MICHAUX AND ME

In my shell, everything is empty

There is no form everything is in shade.

I’m not a Joyce, Beckett or Michaux

I can’t form another language.  I know

I suck the life out of lingo but what

Else am I to do, give up?

I’m compelled to write what

I feel, even if it kills me.  I’m

Like Michaux’s white egret that

Has essential organ’s missing.

I struggle, I have the feeling that

Nothing will come of this time. 

I am condemned to live in these

Properties and I’ve got to make some-

Thing of them even if they make

Nothing of me.

 The philosophy

of poetic peace merged-

singularity

 BURN YOUR BONES

I’m looking at the trees because

That’s all there is to look at

Existence non-existence, beauty

Is beautiful although their bare.

The sun shines through the naked

Branch and lights up my day.

It and I keep reaching higher like

A bud does in blue/grey sky.

I hear the blackbirds out there

Cawing nurturing nature’s way.

I can see the bottom/top today.

Nature has its way of showing it all

It throws a coin, nearest to the wall.

It shows me I have won just like

The blackbirds caw, there’s food on

That their soil, nourishment for

Another day to feast not to toil.

Roots they make me stronger

reach down ever higher, you

can burn your bones on this

funeral pyre.

 GIVE TO GET

consciousness creates

        being-being

creates consciousness

RECAPTURING MEMORY

Did I grip the mobile staircase and my
mother's hand, looking up to the massive 

steel bird, asking myself how will it stay up?

Shaking with fear, she heard and felt me.
she held me, our minds and hearts en-
twinned. my mother and I had a special
bond to this day I can't explain? 

Two sick bags later the plane taxied and I was 
kneeling on the back seat of a taxi watching 
the hills of Antrim. The poem has fallen just like 
the plane and taxied on this runway into its 
own form so, it must be true, the words merged 

to find this form like a poem within a poem.

 

My screensaver blooms, red, golden, see-through

green, pinks and blues. Hell-cell porridge protein

electric blanket stops me shivering inside. Clattering

my teeth my day is much like any other day save me

From my broken-breaking body, degenerative spinal

Disease. Morpho-gene-etic poetry, things are coming

Apart at the seams can’t go out in my wheelchair

the sun means nothing to me. Paralyzed down my

Right side. Half a man in half a body, the bed-bound

Bed sores are nursed each day one day soon I’ll be dis-

able to shower. Hibernating from covid for

over a year now. If covid doesn’t get me

Negativity will.

 

Like life a pome blooms to wither away, another

Bud to bloom. I have done my bit, three sons I don’t

Remember pomes galore for humanity, me and me

Alone. Solitude is my friend.

 

Death gives me life to live for wanting my self-feeling.

The blooms burst plumes that radiate. Sets me up

for boom bang in my head. I can handle you can you

handle me, shell like blackness behind my eyes.

The blackout eye dream snippet draws me out like

poultice from an olde wives-tale.

 

 A BLATTER OF WORDS

 

The cadence of my words, they rise to fall like my being, a disability searching for nature to find a flow state, aphorism. 

Words seem to be very flat just like 

my body lost of all stimulation 

my words seem to have lost

 The very essence, poetry, one word just like another. I hit and hope the pome works in you like a blatter of bullets from the past, 

bullets and poetry don’t go-no go-area. Confetti.

 

Words reload a rifle magazine, they miss

Their target, me on a dark lonely Belfast

Street bullets dancing at my feet froze

With fear to the spot a man I know as

 

Brian Smyth grabbed me by the scruff.

These are a blatter of words sounding

From the harsh causeway.

 

 My body is thin-

skinned almost translucent

negative capability 

1. DEATH GIVES ME SOMETHING

TO LIVE FOR PHILOSOPHY
OF PEACE

2. I DON'T WANT TO 

REMEMBER THIS BUT THIS

IS ALL I HAVE GOT

3.  BOOM BANG A BANG BOOM

BANG A BANG GOES AROUND- 

IN MY HEAD.