·         THE HARD CHAIR ( a poetic short story)

                               written in 1989.

The house fell into the night’s silence, the grieving

family slept like innocent children with the aid of

the day's alcohol and fatigue from the stream of friends

calling throughout the day.

 

Peter Patrick was the only one awake, he abstained from

Alcohol not because he was teetotal but because

he was a sensitive young man who wanted to feel

the true emotion of his father’s death.

 

He sat on the hard chair beside his coffin. Light drifted

from the blessed candles like life itself drifting away, on

either side of the crucifix, the smell of burning wax

And the unreal odor of death lingered.

 

In a low whispered voice, he said, as if to a priest

In a confessional box, you’re at peace now

Enclosed in solitude, beneath the drapes of your peace-

ful home. More elegant than I ever saw you in life

In the grey suit you wore at my wedding.

 

Only now too smart for a wedding cleanly shaven

And made up like an actor playing his greatest role.

Within the brass handled casket, religion all around him

Sympathy cards lay with beautiful icons of the Virgin Mary

And Christ, rosary beads entwined in his clean fresh hands

At peace with the world everything seemed perfect still.

 

He looked hard at his face as if it reflected some wisdom

The imperfection began to show. Below his right eye

The blemish appeared like the pain and suffering of his past.

Showing through the make-up the bruise he made on impact

on the road when he fell during the arrest

that stopped his weak broken heart.

 

 

The blemish stood with a great intensity, and it seemed

To grow darker like a gap between life and death

A doorway into the dark. His mind turned into a vast

film projector showing archive footage like a Pathe

news reel revolving behind his eyes, the first scenes

staggered Into focus as if still memories like looking

at a family album and filing in narration of where and when.

 

The scenes reeled to him like an old silent movie

Showing the bleak streets of north Belfast.

Gas lights lined the street and made it more depressing

locked in a dim haze like a Jackal and Hyde movie of black

and white London.

 

An ice cold rain fell from winter skies. The street was

Deserted cobble stones stood like a giant’s causeway

as if created by the harsh elements or risen from

the bowels of the earth by some evil force.

 

The darkened figure of a woman entered the street

Pushing an old black pram. He couldn’t make out

her features, she heaved the pram across

the cobblestones and joined the pavement, passing

the unlit window of the two up two down terraced houses.

 

She wore a long black coat and dark scarf tied under her chin.

The dim light penetrated through the closed curtain of one

of the houses, he noticed her complexion was pale but she was

featureless.

 

She trudged along like a lost soul in the night, stopped outside

one of the houses with a blood red door and pondered like

someone unsure of their bearings. Leaning over the pram, she

disappeared under its canopy and reappeared with an envelope

in her hand.

 

She raised her hand and hesitated, placed the envelope in

the letter box and raised her hand to the door knocker

and knocked the door with such a force it thundered through

the empty street, echoing with her footsteps like some wild horse

being released into the wild, she disappeared into the night

Of unknown freedom.

 

A woman with bedraggled hair appeared from behind the door

she stood with a bewildered look eyeing the note and the pram

she read the note and her face creased with confusion looking up

and down the cobbled empty street for someone or something

For an explanation, then she and the pram disappeared

behind the blood red door.

 

The unknown memory of his secretive fathers past lingered like

a blunt saw through the delicate tissue of his mind.

He seen him then as a scruffy boy in a school playground.

Heard the cruel chants of other boys who taunted and laughed

at him. Johnny lost his ma and da and doesn’t know where to

find them, leave the bastard alone and he will come home wagging

his tail behind him!

 

Then it was a damp day the blanket of grey and black cloud hung like

a barricade against the sun. A gang of boys with a mischievous air

about them throwing stones into a large pond an oil like substance

lingered on the dense stagnant water.

 

Its shoreline was a thick black murky mud, bicycle wheels and old

discarded frames emerged like the devils unwanted playthings, an

old mangled clothes mangle stood on the bank like a statue or memorial.

 

The stones they threw into the pond slopped and slurped then disappeared into its depth. Johnny looked so familiar he related the scenes as his own memories. He remembered being bullied and beat until he learned to kick back, at the same school his father went to,

a lost and lonely look came across. The gang huddled into a tight group like a gang discussing tactics, when they broke away their mischievous look more evil than before.

 

The boy edged slowly toward them, wanting so much to be their friend suddenly he stopped dead, the boys formed a line and marched like a regimental troop out of sync, chanting like a choir filled with cruelty and hate. By the left, by the left Johnny has no ma or da, by the right, by the right, they fucked off on a Saturday night.

 

He stood by the pond with a look of defeat and fear, built up emotional confusion as if he would burst into tears as the boys laughed a sick horrid laugh. The gang dispersed and searched the wasteland for stones he thought they would pelt him and thought

   of running but stood his ground.

 

They threw the stones into the mud at his feet, the thick black rancid stuff splashed about him and stank like hell their voices echoed as he ran, Johnny is a bastard, Johnny is a bastard. Another scene came blurred at first, then focused, he was now a young man walking the dismal streets, hurt written in his eye, as if everyone he passed uttered the word bastard.

 

He stood on the docklands, the cold sea spray drizzled on him like a new friend carried by the winds of change from the dream lands of England where no one knew of him or his past, a land of reinvention.

He stood at the bottom of a garden path, now in his thirties, beside

a gleaming polished car, a bright summer sun shone through the thicket of trees his hands delved in his pockets he posed in a clean white shirt smiling look on his face leaning on the blooming garden fence watching his wife and children play.

 

Peter searched into the still memory and seen himself wearing the white shirt then without effort it changed back and again until the image stood like both. Peter never realized or wanted to be like his father although relatives always said he was the spit of him. Sitting there on the hard chair trying to figure out both his and his father’s life and death. Peter and his father never spoke too much alike, this was the closest they ever came to each other.

 

Sitting there on the hard chair like a film maker watching the first showing of our film and also the critic reading deep into the images as they reeled through his mind. He sat there questioning those images and where they were coming from his father was a deep secretive man, maybe I didn’t need to know?

 

His father was the most secretive man he had ever met but who can blame him having to reinvent himself to hide his troubled past.

It seemed now he was dead there was nothing to hide from any more, like a dream, a story related in silence. Maybe this was just his sensitivity, a look in the eye, the brush of a hand open to our feelings, the very reason why we clashed in life or physically fought that brought us here to death, the doorway into the dark.

 

Maybe I loved to hate and vice versa, it takes the death of a parent before you can sit back and reflect on the part of life that just passed to ease into the next chapter. As Saul Bellow said, deathis the dark backing a mirror needs to see anything? the poetic beauty of unknowing.

ROSE IN ME

 

I began to write on the day my father died.

Something rose in me sitting there on

The hard chair something flickered in me

By the flickering candles. I sat with him

Alone at night. I abstained from alcohol

Not because I’m teetotal but because

I wanted to feel the real grief of mourning.

 

On the day he was buried I cried a bottle

of whiskey. Some might say it morbid but

I would call It poetic and inquisitive. Me

and my Dad never got along for that very

reason opposites that death attracts like

A moth to a flame.

 

From day one my father didn’t like my attitude

He wanted me to be a hard I.R.A. cold stone

Killer a lying conman like him but I had mothers

Humanity he didn’t like my poetic sensitivity.

 

We never spoke for sixteen years under

His regimental way being an ex British

Soldier, how do you go from that too

A killer of brit soldiers, the British army

Gave him a trade panel beater/sprayer

I could never get my head around this.

 

I ran away from home four times, at six-

Teen I ran away to London never too

Return only to see my mother, why she stayed

With that ignorant bastard I’ll never know.

 

He had another family that we never knew off

two daughters and a wife who died of cancer

we never knew for thirty-one-years,  I can’t com-

prehend that suppose you have to be

a bastard left on a doorstep but even that’s

beyond my active nihilism why didn’t he turn it

around I had to find worth in humanity.

 

A policeman called said daughters were

Searching for years my mother dropped

The knitting needles a week before I was

to be married. The miserable fucker never

even give me pocket money, he gave to me

brother and laughed in my face so I learned

To steal from his pocket while he slept.

 

Every Saturday I would find a fiver, my mates

Knew one squealed my father beat me I laughed

In his face when he beat me sent me to bed

for three days I climbed out the window down

onto the outhouse, away.

 

I would have done anything for him but I was

Myself forever he couldn’t take that from me.

He tried the bastard age sixteen I told my mum

I had to leave, when we were in the same room

You could feel the tension mum arranged for

My aunt Peggy in London, I had to go or kill

That man. I blew smoke in his face when he

asked me to put out punched him down and ran.

 

Mum packed me a lunch a change of clothes

And thirty-five pounds, my time in London

Only lasted 3-4 months. Arrested deported

Back to Ireland for robbing a shoe factory.

Didn’t know what else to do to get away

Signed up for military training but mum

Sent me to Dublin, she saved my neck she

Knew the peace in me even before me.

 

This is an echo for him in me, you were

A right ole bastard, you can’t fuck up my life

I’m fucked beyond you.