ABSOLUTE RHYTHM

The first poem I published was called ‘Bastard life’

it held my syllable truth, the weight and emotion of what happened. 

I saw that weight in the words of Raymond Carver, Patrick

Kavanagh, Robert Lowell, and James Simmons. 

 

When I was a schoolboy, I heard words of absolute rhythm

falling into a trance when the teacher spoke words from 

Julius Caesar. I have seen those words on the streets of Belfast,

 words of Shakespearean sonnets and Gulliver’s travels, I felt 

them in my heart.

 

Ezra pound said:  I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm’, a rhythm 

that is in poetry. Which corresponds exactly to the emotion or

 shade of emotion to be expressed.

 

I had no interest in school, English and art were the only subjects

that held my attention,  I couldn’t get my dyslexic head around

 math’s and figures.  I remember walking into a math’s exam.

 Writing my name at the top of the page and walking out 

and walking home through the fields of freedom, getting four 

percent for neat writing that for me was a pass.

 

I regret it now but that was the weight of my emotional truth

so no regrets that was my emotional choice my first free 

thought not Dad, you needed math and English to pass. 

I just wanted to get out in the world and stand

on my own two feet.  

I had spent the first years of my life under a bastard life rule,

I wanted to taste freedom and boy did I taste it, that’s why

I’m in a wheelchair now. 

 

The weight of my life is sometimes very difficult to carry 

as you know from my writing. I write my truth and it hurts

 sometimes, words of truth find their own rhythm and form. 

The ones who helped me take the negativity and turn it around, 

they help me today to find the source the struggling weight

of words to turn this world around.  

‘Yet why not say what happened, wrote the great 

Robert Lowell in life studies.

 

I was born in Kent, England, the son of a bastard son, 

my father from Belfast and my mother from Dublin.  

I had a bittersweet duality; my mother was goodness 

personified and my father was a bastard. 

He was on my back from day one, my aim in life 

was to get away from all these authoritarian regimental 

bastards get them of my back, to get there I had to go through 

school teachers, headmasters, police, the army,

priests, perverts, and a right a wing system. 

 

Aged sixteen after hitting my father and all these reprobates 

a dig in the head and putting him down never again to lay 

his hands on me, I walked out and hopped

a train to London, never to look back.