CARVER, KAVANAGH,
Where do I begin?
I have always had a problem with authority
my father,priests, teachers,police
soldiers tried to tell me what to do but
I was having none of it.
They say I'm from the Keogh clan
related to the rebel Kevin Barry whether
true makes no odds I have a rebel heart,
a Keogh like my mother not
that bastard father of mine.
Aged sixteen I beat my father to the ground, for sixteen years he told me what to do. I was on the dole living carear opportunities, like Lou Reed
my father never gave me shit. On my sixtenth birthday I toked on a fag and walked into the house
my father said put that out and go to your room.
I looked him in the eye, blew smoke in his and beat him to the ground. Days before I had spoke to my mother I had to get out or I would kill my father,
when we were in the same room you could feel the tension it was affecting the family, she arranged for me to go to london to her sister Peggy so I beat him
and ran. I had run away three times before to get away from him but then I felt a man. my father was a military man I wanted none of that what more do I have to tell you apart from him being a cunt.
This was a time of punk, a new wave flowed through every kid this was a time to get up stand up stand up for your rights. Being in London in seventy seven was like being in a mad max movie.
london was magic but I hated all the violence, I left Northern I reland to get away from my father
and the violent troubles but in London everywhere I
went I was the big cunt in the corner, everyone wanted a piece of me but i wanted none of it, I had lived through the troubles as I said in a poem this was war and I was sick to death of it. My punk attitude was in me along the inspiration of Lou Reed, Raymond Carver and Patrick Kavanagh their words rose in me I was beyond.I couldnt handle the angst the police deported me back to Ireland, to beat their fine I went to dublin. I lived in a bedsit on the Howth rd, I bluffed my way was a metal polisher/welder, I was standing on my own to feet, i didnt set out to be a poet, Lou Reed was my man, wanted to write lyrics like heroin from his dirty boulevarde I wanted Belfast to be my New York.
I didnt want to be a disco dick my form of entertainment was buying a Lou Reed album and a box of wine and turntabling it over and over.
I swam in his lyrics,my first scribbling lyrics from my life. After a few I went back up north, truth be told I missed my mothers sense of humanity.
I never lived with the bastard ever again, got a job
and rented a house with my brother. A friend lent
me a book by Raymond Carver and it blew my mind, Lou Reed Kavanagh and Carver they moved me. My father died and I felt his grief but never regreted in hating to love him he was a cunt from his time I was a cunt from mine, today I dont talk to my own kids so this is the norm. The first poem I had published was called Bastard life about my father since then I have had seven books published became a creative writing tutor teaching kids like me who have went on to publish their words,
I was on a current sea of poetry, poetry was like sushine it was free and it saved me. These are my words to them. I realise that all my words are influenced by them, heres to you from me.
RAY RIVER
For Jimmy and Janice
Although I’m here in Donegal and not Yakima,
Washington state or in Dublin reclining
On the banks of the Grand Canal.
I feel a sense that Raymond Carver
And Patrick Kavanagh is here with me
Following the Ray River to the sea
of this poem. The winds sway the reeds
reflected on the rippling water, on a bend,
a stream flows into the Ray, cascading
on the rocks.
I love the music of this place, the silent
Harmonies of the source, the spring
Falling from high on Muckish mountain
To where I sit translating nature to poetry.
Further on another stream flows in, ever
So quiet secretly subtle, like the clarity
Of wonder in the undercurrents.
I’m here at the sea, the reservoir.
Tory island looms black, remote above
The wild white waves, poetry echoing
Across the golden strand.
The colors of a rainbow rise from the sea.
The intangible essence that lingers here,
THE blending colors fade to blue
And I feel a slight tingle on my fingers.
I look down to see a multicolored spider
Crawling across my hand and the open
Pages of this notebook as if that
Was its only purpose.
READ LOU
Lou Reed gave me the essence
and all his strength, blue mask-
sad song a curl of his lip a look in his eye
take no prisoners
Look inside, a rock n roll animal-legendary
heart goes out not with
scotch tape, not with glue the gel of street-level
humanity, adhere
to an uncertain
probability rushing
on my run-
a radiance of strength
to sustain in me another
breath.
American poet
washed up on
Based on a Joseph Brodsky poem for John
Donne
THE EXILED WORDS OF JOSEPH BRODSKY
Raymond carver has sunk in sleep, all
things
beside are sleeping too: the brass swan paper-
weight sleeps on Hebrew translations.
Butts in the ashtray asleep in ash, Chekhov's
foreboding, the lapdog, and the
wicker chair
Sleep in the intricate of willow weave like
the
exiled words of Joseph Brodsky.
Tess sleeps in a bed of
hummingbirds, photo-
graphs and the pins that hold
them sleep
In the cork the penetrate. His unpublished
words sleep piled high in the bunks of America,
Belfast
and Sligo.
