THE CLARITY OF WONDER (a slip of the tongue, oh fuck!)

 

‘If you find yourself in a hole at the bottom of a hole realising only writing can save you’.

                                                                                                                   Marguerite Dumas

 

 

Poetic words have become a more

spacious form, ever since my stroke

they have become my very being,

my creation life force.  I know this is

a bit extreme but I wake sleep, I even

dream verse. 

 

They have transformed me from

a comatose paralysed geriatric vessel

looking out a hospital window to a man

living an unadopted kingdom almost

independent life driving an adopted car

from my wheelchair.

 

When I woke from the blackness

of my stroke, I woke with a poem

being formed in my head my mind

had no form, I was unable to walk

or talk my brain was almost life-

less erased of 45 years of memory.

Short-term words began to slot

into place creating my space and time.

 

The brain is an amazing organ the way

it begins to create its own form from nothing

I couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy

And reality, all I had to go on was an exit sign.

If it insight then I was in reality, the drugs that

Kept me alive were making me hallucinate.

I took L.S.D but this was a trip like nothing

Else on earth.

 

A nurse opened the exit door and the green

Green grass of home opened in my mind like

A google map, for the first time I knew where

I was just off the Bluestone Road. The green

Foliage told me where I was at back of

The hospital beside the morgue I could see

It in my mind, memory was locked-in but

I could navigate my mind, my hope.

 

I lost all long- term memory like my 3 kids

Being born an 18 year marriage but I knew

Foxy was there. Tiny detail was giving me life,

then I was sent to the Royal in Belfast, I lived there

As a child so the google map in my head

Told me where I was and where I was going

That map is still in my head twenty years later.

 

You can’t remember but it’s as if it remembers

instances that spark of a time and a place that makes

you remember and so your life has only one feeling

to build up a bank of life you can invest in humanity.

 

Words of true conviction words of higher meaning

than you ever placed before. Everybody finds a source

an inner music to help them through, I suppose

I’ve been one of the lucky ones I loved my inner music so

teaching creative writing to others my inner music became

so natural I loved it and I think others did to I loved it

but that life is a locked-in-syndrome within.

 

I came to words like a fish does to water no one

ever wrote before me from my family so I never

understood all the layers of literature and levels

of ages like classical verse, modernist verse

and free verse. I came from the verse of the street

that's the only verse just a free confessional poet.

 

I knew, I had nothing or no-one to compare

to, no academic training. I was just very honoured

to be the first in my family of words. 

 

I loved Dante, Chekov, Carver, Keats, Kavanagh,

the classical the olde the free and the new it’s all

the blues no matter how you see it.  Poetic words

in prose or poems all find a way of cutting through

the levels and ages of class non-sense to become

the definition of the professor of poetry Matthew-

Arnold who in 1857 delivered a lecture at oxford,

in that lecture he stated that poetry was a critic

of life delivered in his form of modernism

his intellectual deliverance.

 

 

I was always trying to grasp the feeling of life but

I think as far back as primary school  as Patrick-

Kavanagh said I grabbed an education early.  

I hated school I had my teacher, the alphabet pinned

to the wall running around my head that was my teacher

I didn't see the point of the rest it was all regimental drill

sergeant bullshit just like being in the army. 

 

School was just a kicking shop where you learnt

to kick back and you fought your way through

the grades and learnt how to take a dig because life

was full of digs.  History art and English

were all that interested me you knew a kicked past

to know a knocked up future.  School was as regimental

as the army stand in line jump to attention and do as your

told I always rebelled against authority,  I spent my whole

life being told what to do. 

 

My mother with her Dublin naive wisdom was all I needed, just

one golden rule of humanity never to do no one any harm.  She

learnt that golden rule from her mum and she played it out on

the canals of Dublin, The dodder.

 

Her mum( my nanny) was the unofficial

midwife of Rathmines and my mother was

the unofficial woman of her day I will be

the unofficial poet of my day untaught

and ungrammared my favourite word in

life was fuck, I was asked by a born again

christian not to use the f word fuck, ok mate

I said if you stop using the G word god

around me and ill stop saying fuck, he

walked away, I never meant fuck to be

an offensive slang but they're tiny traditional

minds could not see that. I am a poet of words

that’s in my diction-ary, no alternative,

 

I always wanted to be the unofficial

some-one from some-where, it felt like

I was an orphan, and my fathers were

the teachers of words I met along the way

like James Simmons and Raymond Carver.

 

Imagine in 2007 I was sacked from my job

as arts officer for using the word fuck that’s

used in books magazines CDs newspapers

and I'm a poet trained to use words in

the shallow sectarian province of Northern

Ireland, were the saddest fuckers

on the planet ruled by traditionalism.  

 

Let us take the sting out of mere four letter

words like wasp, life, love, fuck, rose

and embed them without offence in the list

of humanity and wear them close to our hearts,

they might just save your life one day.

 

Poetry and words were swimming their way

through my life and i didn't even know it, they

were finding my current like the words of a poem

I wrote for Patrick Kavanagh and Raymond Carver

as part of my degree thesis,

' The clarity of wonder in the undercurrents'.

Words have become my spiritual source meandering

its current through my flow.

 

Albert Camus asked the only real question left to

mankind: how do we deal with suicide? and in the words

of John Berryman who went down that road to his

my blind brow.  he knew that the only way around this

problem was to find something within yourself and words

became his dream songs, so this was my almighty being

to help me over the last hurdle of life.  

 

I haven't believed in God since i was twelve on the way

to mass when I saw a man in a balaclava shoot three people

dead and raise his rifle to the heavens and yell for God and Ulster.  

From that day on I swore I would never again worship a god

that man killed for; I swore I would have nothing to do with

that god or the men that killed in his name.  

 

I am looking down into the abyss of disability been up and down

this footplate highway and all I see is these words, I'm laying here

waiting for my caregivers to come and dress me into a wheelchair

for the day and return tonight to undress me into bed and that's

my day every day, words are my respite.  Words have lifted through

the darkest days and are swimming now around my head, the only

thing that creates life building my bank of memory that finds its way

in and out of my locked in syndrome.

 

   These words have become my order of art, my modernism

in my essay of intellectual deliverance.