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.
