THE WRITE HEMISPHERE

ABSURDISM

Crying laughter, deathening

 negative capability, a blemished acceptance.

How can I expect more than this?

This is as good as it gets, there

 was so much damage brain injury.

 

 I can no longer get high. 

I live/died and lived again, well

 almost, living death but at least 

I’m living, what a joke.

 

As Alden Nowlan said:  

‘it is human to look down 

on things that have fallen'.

  

It has taken me years writing

 black hole poetry but 

I think my pomes are reaching

 me, there is light in this dark.

 

I see the light of life down here.

My pomes have to be black 

and blue beaten beat beatnic with-

out memory.

 

I lived my life to the full so I hope

My dark words reach you from my

event horizon.

 I HAVE NO CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, NOT SURE IF EVEN TRUE. WRIT BEFORE MY       STROKE POEMS WERE WRIT BEFORE AFTER. MAKE OF IT WHAT YOU WILL.

NO MAN'S LAND

JIG-SAW

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRIT BEFORE MY STROKE.

 

 

These memories were writ down so like leaves on a tree whether you and I like it or not this was me?  I can’t tell you about the beginning or the end of my abyss I can only tell you of my journey.  To tell you this I must dip into the abyss that was writ down.  As Leonard Cohen said there’s a crack a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in, my journey starts here, Kent England on the first of March 1961. 

 

Through the maze of negativity zig zagging heaped words over ramps and through barricades of an exploited, abused, pillaged wasteland of my past.  As I said in a poem a long time ago I must go back to the dark recesses of my childhood to let these words come out the other side, I don’t remember too much of England, a Wendy house and being stuck in a lift on the Isle of dogs.  A couple of flickers on my news reel that’s grainy and black and white.  Like a movie of on the waterfront, light coming through the harbour warehouse of life and breaking through, end of an era.

 

 

The notebook

 

Although it was late morning the sun was still warm over the south side of Dublin draining yet another cold winter from the earth and from the hearts of the poor.  One didn’t have to see the sun or feel the heat to know that summer had arrived in Rathmines. The stench of the Grand Canal lingered with the city’s grime as the church bells rang out. Little Maggie blessed herself and continued polishing Mrs. Mahon’s sideboard.  Every Saturday she helped her mother clean the houses of the rich to help boost her measly widows’ pension from the Ministry of Defense.  Her father died the previous year, cut down in his prime just twenty-seven from tuberculosis leaving a gaping wound in the hearts of a devoted wife and five children.  Maggie worked alone this day. Her mother was away bringing new life into the world as she was the unofficial midwife of the area.  The duster glided across the dark wood, and she escaped into her Hollywood dreams dancing and singing songs by Judy Garland with her friends on the lochs of the canal, the stench of the filthy river forgotten.  She took a small worn notebook from the pocket in her drab tunic and flicked through the pages of scribbled signatures and stopped at Judy Garland, a sense of pride filled her cheeks recalling the crowds of screaming fans she battled through for that autograph.  That little book held her treasures and was as important as her prayer book and her legion of Mary. She turned to the last page autographed by Rita Hayward. She remembered her friends not believing her when she showed them the book.

  ‘You done that yourself,’ they said sitting on a bench that ran along the canal, Pam and Mary squeezed in trying to make some sense of the scribbled line. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of it,’ said Pam. 

‘If you gave our Jimmy a bleeding pen you’d make more sense of it,’ said Mary.

‘How did you get it?’ they asked together.

‘Well,’ said Maggie, ‘I was in Woolworth’s getting threads for my mother when this blonde lady with sunglasses came in the queue behind holding a little girl’s hand’. 

‘Caught Na, Na na- na- na-na!’ said Pam, ‘Rita Hayward hasn’t got blond hair.’

‘I know,’ said Maggie, ‘but I remember Rinty the bell boy at the Gresham Hotel had told me she was visiting Dublin.  I read that in her next role she would be blonde, so there.  I waited at the front and when she came out I said, ‘Miss Hayward, could I have your autograph?’

‘What makes you think I’m Miss Hayward?’ she said removing her sunglasses. I told her that I read about her next role as a blonde and I knew she had a little girl. 

She said, ‘For knowing so much I will sign,’ and handed me an orange from her bag and asked my name and shook my hand. 

The two girls looked again at the scrawl of ink and knew it was Rita Hayward’s and skipped off home along the path.

  Finishing her chores, she fell into the role of a movie queen strolling the highly polished hall.  As she neared the wide steep staircase her hands raised like a ballet dancer pirouetting in a beautiful gown in place of her drab tunic that hung around her like an apron of poverty.  No longer a buck toothed thirteen-year-old Dublin girl she was the queen of Hollywood.  She strode the staircase with the strength of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis as she neared the last flight her step lightened and fell with a thud into reality and Mrs. Mahon stood at the foot of the stairs. She looked forward to the one-shilling wage and the home-made cakes and tarts made from apples and pears picked from her garden and the goodness of her heart.  As she reached the bottom step Mrs. Mahon said in her soft upper class polite tone, ‘Would you do me a favor, Maggie?’

The little girl nodded in response.

‘Go to Dan Dooley’s and get an ounce of tea, half a sugar and quarter butter and keep the change’, and Mrs. Mahon handed her a shilling and she put in her pocket with the notebook.  A small thin man she knew as Mrs. Mahon’s brother in law stepped out of the darkened room behind her. ‘I'm going your way’, he said,' I'll walk with you’. Maggie wanted to rush there and back and get her wage and get home quickly.  She looked at the little man with greased back dark hair wearing a suit that hung on him like a hospital gown.  She considered his eyes and sensed a sadness and thought it would be alright to walk with him and the big door closed behind them.

As they walked out he felt the heat of summer reacting to the searing heat in his chest distorting his view. She smelt the strong scent of summer and said in a rush of embarrassed utterance, ‘I take a short cut over two walls and across,’ and before she had time to finish, ‘It’s quicker this way’ he said and grabbed her arm and held her scream.  He hauled her fresh young body across the garden past the big window of the lonely house and down the side towards the back while the flashes of red bricked confusion seared through her young mind. His greased back hair fell about his thin face like a demon revealing his horns, her eyes bleared with tear filled muffled silence to the rusting roof of the shed.  She cleared those two walls as if they weren’t there, that evil man had torn her soul her life and legion of Mary. She clambered towards the canal feeling a hurt worse than the grief of her dad, the soiled blood ran down her soft white legs. The next thing she never knew she was waist deep in the canal delving between her legs washing away the filth of the devil.  The notebook and the money fell from her pocket and washed away in the city’s grime; her dreams of innocence washed away with the filthy river.  The riverbed of broken glass and rotting metal took blood from her feet, but she was numb to feel it through her well-worn plim-soles. She ran through the great doors of the chapel and settled under one of the worn-down pews and huddled into a ball doing penance on the stone-cold floor of loss, the lonely lingering stench of stained immaculate conceptions engulfed her.

 

‘Come out of there child, I thought you were a flea-bitten dog. What’s wrong girl?’ said the voice of the servant of god.  Shivering she got off her hunkers and looked at him in disbelief. Why doesn’t he know what happened? she said to herself.  A gibberish flow about losing Mrs. Mahon’s money came flowing like the confusion of pollution in her mind. ‘Go home to your mother’, said the priest, ‘God bless you, girl,’ said the servant of god. Mrs. Mahon’s brother-in-law died of cancer some months later and Maggie knelt in the chapel praying as the priest looked on.

 

 

NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH

 

Pat looked from the third-floor window of the block of red brick council flats, she watched the bridge part in the center over the murky Thames to let the cargo boat flow through.  While watching the bleak surroundings, she wrapped a small porcelain figurine in newspaper, lost in thought unaware she twisted it so tightly it tore.  I will miss my family she said to herself and a thought of sadness came over her, the grey enclosed summers day, the factories surrounded her landscape pumped filthy fumes, its best for the children she spoke as if answering herself.  She shook her head as if waking from a hypnotic trance and wrapped the figurine in another sheet of newspaper and placed it in the half-filled t-chest that stood on the floor beside others already filled.  The pictures were removed from the wall, the unsmoked stained squares stood like a stamp of approval to vacate the premises.

Suddenly she stopped packing to make tea and smoke a cigarette, she sat on the sofa, she picked up the framed photo of her dead brother beside the photo of her father dressed in an Irish army uniform. Just twenty-seven when he died of T.B. The same age as her brothers smiling face jokily he sat on a toilet on a building site. A lump of emotion formed in her throat as she eyed her handsome brother taken just twenty-seven before he fell from the ladder to his death, a true friend she thought for life.

She remembered holding his little hand, just an infant but wild and carefree.  He let go her hand and bounded into the river grabbing the great white swan by its webbed feet startling the great bird flapping its massive wings, honking and hissing in a frantic state trying to break free of the boy.  The majestic bird ascended into the sky with infant jimmy hanging by the skin of his teeth, let go jimmy, let go she yelled wildly from the bank of the dodder that ran through Rathmines, Dublin.  Look at me patty I’m flying, he let go and splashed into the river.  She gripped him with all her might, she looked after little jimmy while her mother made up for her measly pittance of widow’s pension cleaning the houses of the rich.  Ridden with catholic guilt that left a gaping hole of grief in the wife and five children.  Times were hard for a young family in Ireland as it grew into a state of independence.  She remembered her father’s Irish Army uniform and his death as a young man, soon after the family went on the cattle boat to England.  After the death of her husband Ireland had nothing left to offer her family and the news of England Where you could earn three or four times came ashore and spread like wildfire.  Attempting to look into the future in the used tea leaves but dealing with the bare facts of NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH plastered in your face everywhere you went.

 

Against the will of her family Maggie sold what few belongings they had and set sail for the future across the rough irish sea to a life not as easy as the idle talk made out.  The family like many others immigrant black and white  families found it difficult at first, discrimination was loud and clear in the English mindset but there was opportunity with the abundance of work.

 

 

 

He never felt the beat of his heart until he was six years old, if he felt it before then it was only a faint murmur so, he takes it that his first years were spent in peaceful innocence.  Mum said he was a laid-back child if his high chair was piled with food, dad said he was lazy needed, too much attention suppose he was somewhere between both. His heart beat like never-before, it felt like his body was vibrating with fear, reluctantly he stumbled up the mobile staircase, mother’s strength tugging his arm as he stopped taking in the sight of the massive steel bird, aeroplane, holding the rail, white knuckled like the branch of a tree when falling a life saver.  On reaching the platform his mother turned to him and reassured him that everything would be alright.  Seeing the fright written on his grimaced face and the buildup of tears, she took him in her arms, he clung to her like a leech so close their heart entwined.  This was my first time on an airplane, flying to Belfast of all places with his head stuck in a second sick bag, as if Ihe had been given a premonition of what the future had in store, as if I knew that this heart beat would be the norm for thirty years, the year was nineteen sixty-seven.

 

 

The first thing I don’t remember is being a six-year-old and going to live in Belfast in 1967, the streets were grey and dreary it was like going to another century.  The taxi fell from the hills of Antrim to civilisation along the crumbling rd. and it turned left onto the cobbled streets of old Ardoyne where children swung around gas lampposts now converted to electricity.  Knelling on the back seat of that taxi was like being on a H.G. Well’s time machine going back into a Dickensian world.  That night I got up taring the flea bites on my skin, the night was in full moonlight like a high-definition wide screen. The picture on the wall was a man in thorns drenched in blood, I stood there in my brothers hand me down pjs, a man entered the cobble street chased by B-specials who’s numbers flashed in the moon light, they trungened his legs and brought him down into the gutter opening his skull with hobnailed boots he stood back and threw up the contents of his guts, the peas rolled along the lino floor. His mother rushed in and tidied him up and closed the curtain, what is this place with evil fleas and evil men filled with hate and Aunt Sarah telling me of banshees in the back yard. Don’t worry we will get our own home soon, he needed to urinate she got the chamber pot and bedded him down on the mattress on the floor kissed him and said don’t look out the window. The next day on the way to Mulholland’s green grocers for broken biscuits, the smell of the sea and the earth wafted from dulse and potatoes, he checked the gutters for to know he wasn’t dreaming the blood was bleached white.

 

I remember being bullied in a playground but there’s only so much you can take until you start to kick back.  I realised that the Belfast accent was harder than most of the slobbers I had to kick into the gutter. There was a river of them I had to show face in the morning at break dinner time and after school until I found my own space. I grew up on the hard streets, but one thing kept me together while around me was mayhem and madness.  I had respect and the love of my mother to fall back on.  That day I stood there on flax street, I picked up half a brick and watched it take to the air kite like swimming until it crashed into the face of a black British soldier. Eventually we moved into a three story house and my father rented a garage on the crumlin road. 1968 was a fine of summer holiday but you could fell tension in the air but

We lived in Columbia street a mixed street, we shopped on the shankill you felt the peoples upset at my mothers Dublin accent they knew she was just out for her family.

 

The back gate was open as I built a kennel for muttley the new addition, a gang of prods ragged me out put me against the wall asked me to say the hail mary,I didn’t know what they were talking about. The next day a gang of catholics beat me asked me to sing the sash like the men who beat the man into the gutter they called him a fenian bastard, I didn’t know what they meant. My dads new business second hand cars was going great on Friday nights he broght home a treat coke and crisps we were bathed watching the Frankenstein dragg his hevy load across the screen. My brother and me were in bunk beds just as we drifted off there was commotion on the street, we looked out to see

A crowd waving unio jacks the colours of our birthright but they were yelling fenian bastards out.  Mum shouted up stay away from the windows. There was three loud thuds on the door my brothers sisters and I sat at the top of the stairs. Dad said to mum you answer it they wont touch a woman. She opened the door to an angry mob who said you’ve got eight hours or we will burn you out, she slammed the door in their face. You bledding coward she said in her Dublin twang you said its best for the kids you and your black north, I left my mother for this, just then the door knocked, its father so and so she opened the door he said he arranged a lorry to take, just take what you need.

He told us kids to take just what we needed. Your business is up in smoke, ive arranged for you to stay at holy cross boys, my mother told me not to filling t-chests. That day the pavement were torm up buses burned as barricades, the smell of teargas rubber bullets and petrol bombs filled the air that night surrounded by wardrobes and bunk this was our home. We watched Farringdon gardens go up in smoke

Streets went up in smoke, the sky full of embers I will never forget.

 

We were housed in etna drive, the family was getting out to Australia, why weren’t we going? I will never be able to prove that he was a plant for the British army he was a brit killing brits how does one do that. My life has been warmongering, even my mothers father buried in Glasnevin cemetery. My family is steeped in irish English blood, with me this has got to stop. My father was released from Crumlin Road

Jail detained for nine months under the special powers act. My father was skipping bail and taking me with, mum said I was wild would die on these streets. That night I went to see my friends but I wasn’t allowed to say I was going, the streets were dark the lights shot out.

I turned by instinct onto etna suddenly there was a barrage of richoeting at my feet I froze to spot, so scared I couldn’t move, I pissed myself. A hand came from the hedgerow dragging me into the garden, I lay the piss was now he grabbed my by the scruff of the neck and arse of the trousers and threw over the top into the next, he done that ten times maybe more. He shoved me into the unlatched door that night I cried myself to sleep when I woke my mum told Brian Smyth was shot dead, I’ll never forget his golden hair, it burst my bubble.

 

I’m sorry that someone got hurt that day I rioted in flax street spitting a black British soldier but somebody must, it’s how we learn. Something positive came from that negative act. I’ve seen people in this country spend their whole lives looking at the negative decaying bodies of their friends and family and still don’t come to the realisation that there is no them and us we’re all in the same boat rowing towards the same shore.  I’ve seen people in this country locked in tradition and wanting to kill this urge is so strong.  For god and Ulster and republicanism they both have a lovely romantic view.   So, I say to all you die hard republicans or loyalists out there the war is over this is the time to build peace.  Build a monument to all those innocent dead who lost their lives for this peace. Stop bickering about who was right and who was wrong were all losers nobody won or lost. When my mates patted me on the back congratulating the fine shot I wanted to run through the streets crying into my mother’s arms. There is one thing I learnt that day never to hurt anyone again. Think of this as a long newsreel I was there at that time at that place as if  had tele ported me from my mother’s womb.  Imagine a world an Goya landscape, the weeping woman not standing over Guernica or the nightmare of the garden of earthly delights or the magic of Vermeer’s light. Picture a world of Monet’s lilies not the boulevard of broken dreams. I’m going through my world of karma this is my kick in the teeth for all those acts of stupidity when I should have been listening.  That was then this is now, I’m turning over a new page of sobriety without peer pressure.  You’ve had a good laugh at me acting the clown now it’s my turn to get something positive from this life before I kick the bucket.  I’m not taking chances with this life again.  Two years ago, this April I was sitting on the bed minding my own business suddenly I was on the floor crawling into my mother’s room.  I woke up in intensive care I took a massive stroke that nearly killed me.  I thought I would leave this world in a wooden box.  I have spent the past years in hospital and rehab I’m still getting over the ill ness.  This is my second time around this beautiful garden so I had plenty of time to think.  This is my conclusion.

 

Milan Kundera once said, we live only once and have nothing to compare it with.

 

The life that existed before this seems like a dream, the world without wheelchairs handrails bed pans and piss pots seems like another world.  But I was there driving myself through it in the fifth gear of time.  We rolled the white Vauxhall victor on the motorway and drove on through the barricades of galvanised steel.  At the majestic mourns we rolled into no man’s land then the unapproved roads of the south until we stopped at a tiny cottage in hack- balls-cross county Louth seven miles from the nearest town. Patrick Kavanagh’s country I played in the fields and walked through his poetic poplars like a green fool. The world of television was lost like the language of the clangers we were now barbarians shot back in time with spears hunting rats and rabbits.

We collected water from the well as there was no running water electricity and we lit the place with paraffin lamps. If you needed to go to the toilet there was a Porta- loo in the shed for emergencies and the girls pride otherwise you dug a hole in the earth. Memories that really stick in my mind are playing time machine with my brothers my younger brother believing even with the roar of traffic that he really did go back to 1874 just by the writing on a stone and innocence even I almost believed it. Walking to BlackRock which was seven miles away for a five-minute swim out and walk home again.  It wasn’t getting there but the craic of the journey that was so good. I remember paddy Quinn who was nineteen and he wanted to play cowboys and Indians my eldest brother was fifteen and bored with it. That really was the age of innocence I remember my brother and I playing in the fields with a stick and a car jack thinking we were members of the Irish republican border patrol then irbp and we were doing a mission for our country.  Your imagination just flies away without tv.

 

Next thing I knew I was on the streets of London 1977. like an extra from a mad max movie with all the other gangs of young men who roamed the streets looking for a release of testosterone.  We found ours on the factory floor of jack roses shoes in stokenewing ton.  The police officers caught us with boxes of winkle pickers with brass toe tips.  I was in the police cell for the whole weekend because I told them that my parents had a nervous disposition and they’d be better off not knowing I was nicked.

 

I went to London to get away from the violence and I walked straight into it.  London was like a fusion of punk skinhead’s soul boy’s reggae and teds mix them all together and you’ve got London 1977.  no wonder there was a punk revolution it had to blow somewhere.  The nights of violence for no reason seemed to follow me. It’s as if they smelt that I was the green white and gold fool, with an air of stubborn Irish stupidity. Although I spent the night being chased through the streets of London because my cousin was dancing too fast or sitting in a party and being asked outside only to end up in a gang war and held over a railway bridge, talking to a young guy, only end up unconscious in a skip because of his glitter socks. Everywhere I went the bullshit seemed to follow.

 

I came back to Ireland and ended up on the streets of Dublin. I was looking for someplace to lay my hat although I had fun in Dublin it was to dear to live there keep a flat and a car have a social life and visit the north once a month it just couldn’t be done unless you won the lottery but that really was a pipe dream.  I moved back up north met kitty and got lost in domestic bliss.  I had fun growing up with my three beautiful boys.

 

For eighteen years, I got lost in domestic bliss. It was magic while it lasted I always had itchy feet we split up for eight months and I lived in reading. maybe I should have stayed there but after seeing my son appear before my eyes like a hologram I returned to Northern Ireland, we had we Kern a beautiful child so I have no regrets.  I knew that I would leave when my kids were old enough to understand, my wife will tell you her story its hers and she’s sticking to it.  It’s like the troubles who’s right and who’s wrong.  No one is were all losers it’s called life deal with it. There’s no such thing as a smooth ride there’s always hidden dips along the way.  This brings me full circle back to where I started.  I could colour this past. I’m not saying don’t believe in your creator, because that belief holds the essence of good in the world. I just want to get closer to what Albert Camus said: we are all in this bloody century together and that should be argument enough to stop the killing.  When it comes to religion, I’m like the guy with the bag and shovel taking a bit of this and a bit of that—mixing them all together to create my pick and mix. Let’s call mine art. It seems that’s what I get off on. 

Let’s stop bickering about the suspending violence and just stop the killing. I was watching spiritual leaders in favour of Hezbollah and I felt very frustrated. Being from Northern Ireland, I wake every day to the same rhetoric of violence spilling from the same mouths. These are supposed to be people who believe,or god and Ulster, we create violence and mayhem.

 

Look at what is happening in Lebanon at the minute—a country created by the worst violence in the world. Millions have died. The world bickers about the meaning of a word that will stop the conflict. In the meantime, innocent people die until they get it right. Stop this please. Israel, you were created from the worst atrocity in the world. I know your trouble goes back hundreds of years, but I believe in humanity and this is my way of saying stop the violence.

 

I don’t know where I stand when the word god is uttered. I’m jealous of people that believe. I have a belief, too. It’s called art and this is my only way of expressing how I feel. I know we are close to Albert Camus’ words now that there is peace in Northern Ireland.  I bet Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, never considered that there was a crèche in the building before he blew it up—I’m not saying he was right no taking of life is right, the system wasn’t working for him. He was bringing the war home to America to show them how evil it can be, he seen women and children mamed and killed so he thought he had no other choice. I bet Osama Bin Laden had been cooking up his scheme for years before he put it into action.  Look at George Bush, Tony Blair and the right wing fundamentalists—they believe they are right and in the name of god they are doing his work. 

 

 

Someone once said, never hate your enemy—it clouds your judgement. Religion and politics shouldn’t be uttered in the same breath because they are too big an entity ever to be satisfied unless you’re a glutton for punishment. Let’s stop clouding our judgement. Let’s stop the bombings. We’re like children with toys—my bombs are better than yours. Mine can kill 28 innocent fruit pickers. Yours can only kill 22.  Let’s get on with the real issues that face humanity. Let’s forget Iraq and America, Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland and the Republic—or any other country you want to bomb.  Look at the money we’re wasting and the resources we could use to end the worlds poverty. We should be dropping money instead of bombs. War is being treated like a commodity.

 

I grew up in North Belfast—Ardoyne. I’ve had my fill of who’s right and who’s wrong and I’ve noticed it’s always the innocent that die. Oh he or she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you idiots weren’t messing around with murderous toys we wouldn’t be hurt.  Americans deal with war by getting in an aeroplane on one side of the world and flying to the other to drop a bomb. They are home again for their television sitcom. War is not a commodity that capitalists trade in.  Don’t let belief interfere. Anything you do behind closed doors is up to you, just respect the other person. Let’s stop this triviality. Embrace capitalism as long as it doesn’t hurt others. We just follow like sheep and the shepherds are those in power.

 

omeone once said ‘Never judge your enemy it clouds your judgement.’ The power of positive thought is everywhere it’s what they see in you. These are the positive thoughts I have produced. I’m not looking for sympathy or pity-you can keep it. All I ask is that you read this and determine your own answers, not one that’s shoved down your throat. I hope this is your placebo effect.  I’d like to finish with a line by Leonard Cohen that sums up what I have said, ‘there’s a crack a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in’.

 

Has time went by or has it stood still what day what time what year is it?  It seems the world is spinning like a hologram of love and hate.  It seems my world was stopped that night when I was taken into intensive care and woke up on my back only able to move my eyes.  I had taken a stroke two years later I think and I’m still recovering.  Last week I underwent an operation on my throat to help me to talk stop the air going down.  Before that I pinched my nose to release the words.  It’s hard to tell whether it’s better or worse I’m drained of the energy I had.  Is this Christmas, Easter or the new year any way it was shit.  I’ve cried my eyes out over the last few days this is the time when you need family and friends.  My x girlfriend encouraged me to write this essay in the hope that it will help other stroke victims.  It doesn’t even have a title I’m out here on a wing and a prayer in the hope that by the last full stop a title would have produced itself.  To make you understand the dilemma I face I feel you need a little background information. I am 46 divorced with three boys ranging from 21,19, and 11.  I know my older boys have lives of their own I don’t want to put them under any pressure but I think I deserve more than 20 minutes at Christmas at least sit down and watch a movie together.  I don’t want to become a once a year dad I’d rather have nothing at all.  Last night I sent my youngest son back home he usually stays with me but I was feeling sad knowing that I’ll be in this wheelchair.   most of the people who go through what I’ve been through end up dead.  last night I wished I was I tied the mobile phone around my neck wrapped it around the bed head and pulled.  I’m not the type of person that is flippant with the idea of taking my own life I know people who have used this as a cry for help but I don’t give sympathy easily.  those people are still alive today I don’t understand that, I think you have to be serious and show conviction I believe that if you really mean it then you do the job right not a half arsed mismatch of an effort. I couldn’t go through with it not knowing what’s around the corner I don’t know what tomorrow brings.  I wrote a poem recently called, loneliness by the way I’m a poet and painter and will include with this essay some of my work.  Loneliness conveys a message of reality and isn’t very good instead ill share with you a positive poem I wrote that conveys the same message but in a different way it’s called not the blues.  We’re living in a very negative world and we have to be careful we could tip the balance.  All I’m saying is show conviction in everything you do. My eldest sister died in 2000 and I’m not going down that road following another funeral cortege.  I know you can’t get away from the reality that one day you’ll have to but let’s delay it in positive thought.

 

 

I’m not telling people what to do, I know it might sound preachy but I’m not standing on a pulpit delivering a sermon.  Cherish life, it seems to me life is so cheap.  I lay in the hospital for almost a year so I had plenty of time to think.  The simple things of life are so important to make our lives grow. Respect for one we are losing that in this consumerist world.  It seems to me that we are focusing on the wrong issues.  Some people are blaming my life style for the state I’m in and yes it has a lot to do with the way I lived.   Trying to be a free spirit and enjoy life maybe in the back of my mind I knew this was going to happen.   There really is no one or nothing to blame I’m just a statistic.  A stroke is up there as one of the highest forms of death, my mother took five strokes It’s in my genes and my sons genes.

 It is a flaw in our human system whether it be a flaw of evolution who knows or if there is a higher being involved.  I am my own destiny and I make my own luck and this is a stroke of misfortune but let’s not think negative maybe it’s a stroke of fortune.

 

I think differently today because of what happened so maybe it’s a good thing in my other world I was lost going around and around in the hologram of love and hate.  I don’t drink or smoke my sister called me Christian/born again Adrian the other day.  I didn’t see the light and some spiritual being didn’t enter instead I woke up in hell.  I had to deal with my life in a way that I wasn’t used to. Carers coming in the morning to get me dressed and now that I’ve had this other operation I relay on others more as the life it seems was sucked from me but determination is a great thing and I wouldn’t be here today only for it.  So think positive and don’t get lost in this consumerist hell.

 

In his wonderful book Milan Kundera wrote, we can never know what to want, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. I know my previous life seems a bit of a dream but I feel I’ve been given a second chance.  By who I don’t know god, Buddha, my dogged stubborn determination It’s too easy to say it was god and pass the buck onto a higher being a mickey mouse figure.  It was me and positive thought that got me through, it was my determination. I was talking to someone the other day and this girl had been through the school system and never got much from it and now she’s writing a book.  I was trying to tell her that it was her strength that got her to where she is today but she’s convinced that it was a higher being. If the belief in a higher being brings positive thought so be it.  Respect the other persons view someone once said during the American civil war, I think it was general lee, he said, never hate your enemy, suspend judgement it clouds your view.  When I read that I thought wow what a line if only people heeded it.   after seeing the conflict and felt the hate in Northern Ireland this line has always been there at the back of my mind ready to be loaded into the magazine of positive thought.  If this is karma for the life I lead I have no regrets and I don’t want to blame anyone else.  That’s what we do in the negative world of pass the buck.  I had a great time this isn’t some box I tick and move along let’s not get so cheap and flippant about life it is a precious thing not a commodity that can be bashed around on the journey through life.   Writing keeps me content and very sane, I was looking for a new way to present my poems to give you an insight into my work.  Poetry I think is for sharing and with the aim of the great American writer Raymond carver who is still excluded from the ranks of poetry he always tried to make poetry accessible.  He stands for me among the greats like Chekhov and Turgenev, Hemingway, Anderson, Capote. Anyone who captures silence in a story has caught the essence and he done it.  I read a new path to the waterfall recently again and was brought to tears by its honesty.  Thank you Tess Gallagher for a beautiful introduction.  Although this format is an old one and has been used by many writers it has only been used as a critical format or for the thesis of an M, A.  I want to change the way we view poetry and not let it slide over our heads as if it holds some wisdom. I remember going to a creative writing class and we read out our work and the teacher behind the security of a desk was aloof as if she had some wisdom she wasn’t willing to share.  Bollocks I went away thinking never will I teach poetry like that, alright poetry is a beautiful thing and should be embraced by those who love it but it’s got to be accessible to as Robert Lowell said leave it open and use all the craft you have to create it, he also said imperfection is the language of art.  This is my imperfection.

omeone once said ‘Never judge your enemy it clouds your judgement.’ The power of positive thought is everywhere it’s what they see in you. These are the positive thoughts I have produced. I’m not looking for sympathy or pity-you can keep it. All I ask is that you read this and determine your own answers, not one that’s shoved down your throat. I hope this is your placebo effect.  I’d like to finish with a line by Leonard Cohen that sums up what I have said, ‘there’s a crack a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in’.

 

Has time went by or has it stood still what day what time what year is it?  It seems the world is spinning like a hologram of love and hate.  It seems my world was stopped that night when I was taken into intensive care and woke up on my back only able to move my eyes.  I had taken a stroke two years later I think and I’m still recovering.  Last week I underwent an operation on my throat to help me to talk stop the air going down.  Before that I pinched my nose to release the words.  It’s hard to tell whether it’s better or worse I’m drained of the energy I had.  Is this Christmas, Easter or the new year any way it was shit.  I’ve cried my eyes out over the last few days this is the time when you need family and friends.  My x girlfriend encouraged me to write this essay in the hope that it will help other stroke victims.  It doesn’t even have a title I’m out here on a wing and a prayer in the hope that by the last full stop a title would have produced itself.  To make you understand the dilemma I face I feel you need a little background information. I am 46 divorced with three boys ranging from 21,19, and 11.  I know my older boys have lives of their own I don’t want to put them under any pressure but I think I deserve more than 20 minutes at Christmas at least sit down and watch a movie together.  I don’t want to become a once a year dad I’d rather have nothing at all.  Last night I sent my youngest son back home he usually stays with me but I was feeling sad knowing that I’ll be in this wheelchair.   most of the people who go through what I’ve been through end up dead.  last night I wished I was I tied the mobile phone around my neck wrapped it around the bed head and pulled.  I’m not the type of person that is flippant with the idea of taking my own life I know people who have used this as a cry for help but I don’t give sympathy easily.  those people are still alive today I don’t understand that, I think you have to be serious and show conviction I believe that if you really mean it then you do the job right not a half arsed mismatch of an effort. I couldn’t go through with it not knowing what’s around the corner I don’t know what tomorrow brings.  I wrote a poem recently called, loneliness by the way I’m a poet and painter and will include with this essay some of my work.  Loneliness conveys a message of reality and isn’t very good instead ill share with you a positive poem I wrote that conveys the same message but in a different way it’s called not the blues.  We’re living in a very negative world and we have to be careful we could tip the balance.  All I’m saying is show conviction in everything you do. My eldest sister died in 2000 and I’m not going down that road following another funeral cortege.  I know you can’t get away from the reality that one day you’ll have to but let’s delay it in positive thought.

 

 

I’m not telling people what to do, I know it might sound preachy but I’m not standing on a pulpit delivering a sermon.  Cherish life, it seems to me life is so cheap.  I lay in the hospital for almost a year so I had plenty of time to think.  The simple things of life are so important to make our lives grow. Respect for one we are losing that in this consumerist world.  It seems to me that we are focusing on the wrong issues.  Some people are blaming my life style for the state I’m in and yes it has a lot to do with the way I lived.   Trying to be a free spirit and enjoy life maybe in the back of my mind I knew this was going to happen.   There really is no one or nothing to blame I’m just a statistic.  A stroke is up there as one of the highest forms of death, my mother took five strokes It’s in my genes and my sons genes.

 It is a flaw in our human system whether it be a flaw of evolution who knows or if there is a higher being involved.  I am my own destiny and I make my own luck and this is a stroke of misfortune but let’s not think negative maybe it’s a stroke of fortune.

 

I think differently today because of what happened so maybe it’s a good thing in my other world I was lost going around and around in the hologram of love and hate.  I don’t drink or smoke my sister called me Christian/born again Adrian the other day.  I didn’t see the light and some spiritual being didn’t enter instead I woke up in hell.  I had to deal with my life in a way that I wasn’t used to. Carers coming in the morning to get me dressed and now that I’ve had this other operation I relay on others more as the life it seems was sucked from me but determination is a great thing and I wouldn’t be here today only for it.  So think positive and don’t get lost in this consumerist hell.

 

In his wonderful book Milan Kundera wrote, we can never know what to want, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. I know my previous life seems a bit of a dream but I feel I’ve been given a second chance.  By who I don’t know god, Buddha, my dogged stubborn determination It’s too easy to say it was god and pass the buck onto a higher being a mickey mouse figure.  It was me and positive thought that got me through, it was my determination. I was talking to someone the other day and this girl had been through the school system and never got much from it and now she’s writing a book.  I was trying to tell her that it was her strength that got her to where she is today but she’s convinced that it was a higher being. If the belief in a higher being brings positive thought so be it.  Respect the other persons view someone once said during the American civil war, I think it was general lee, he said, never hate your enemy, suspend judgement it clouds your view.  When I read that I thought wow what a line if only people heeded it.   after seeing the conflict and felt the hate in Northern Ireland this line has always been there at the back of my mind ready to be loaded into the magazine of positive thought.  If this is karma for the life I lead I have no regrets and I don’t want to blame anyone else.  That’s what we do in the negative world of pass the buck.  I had a great time this isn’t some box I tick and move along let’s not get so cheap and flippant about life it is a precious thing not a commodity that can be bashed around on the journey through life.   Writing keeps me content and very sane, I was looking for a new way to present my poems to give you an insight into my work.  Poetry I think is for sharing and with the aim of the great American writer Raymond carver who is still excluded from the ranks of poetry he always tried to make poetry accessible.  He stands for me among the greats like Chekhov and Turgenev, Hemingway, Anderson, Capote. Anyone who captures silence in a story has caught the essence and he done it.  I read a new path to the waterfall recently again and was brought to tears by its honesty.  Thank you Tess Gallagher for a beautiful introduction.  Although this format is an old one and has been used by many writers it has only been used as a critical format or for the thesis of an M, A.  I want to change the way we view poetry and not let it slide over our heads as if it holds some wisdom. I remember going to a creative writing class and we read out our work and the teacher behind the security of a desk was aloof as if she had some wisdom she wasn’t willing to share.  Bollocks I went away thinking never will I teach poetry like that, alright poetry is a beautiful thing and should be embraced by those who love it but it’s got to be accessible to as Robert Lowell said leave it open and use all the craft you have to create it, he also said imperfection is the language of art.  This is my imperfection. Here are my words—my way of saying, “Wise up, boys. We are ruining this beautiful accident. 

 

”do you know that we have never had one day of peace on this earth ever? Let’s change this.

 

 

 

 

 

His father was released from prison he had been interned in Crumlin Rd Jail and Long Kesh. Michael went to see his friend GG to tell him that they were leaving Belfast and moving to Dundalk. They sat in the dining room laughing about the strange machine in the corner of the room that was used when GG's brother died, he died all the time and this machine brought him back to life, it was like something out of the movies an iron lung.

 

It was dark when he was on the way home, the only lights were that through the curtains of the houses all the streetlights were shot out to let the IRA move freely through the district and for the safety of the people from sniper or British army fire. The sky was red and flakes of black ash were falling like snow as houses and property burned all over Belfast. As he turned left by instinct onto his street a Blatter of bullets came hurtling towards him from a machine gun at the top of the street. They tore through the night cutting the hedges and fences and bouncing off the ground in front of him, he froze to the spot panic stricken. He could see the flashes of the rifle but couldn't move.

 

A hand came from behind the hedges and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him off the street into the garden he could feel the piss steaming hot in his jeans become cold as he lay there on the cold grass. He looked up to see the man, he buried his head in his hand and his mind switched off.

 

The man took him by the scruff of the neck and the arse of his trousers and threw him clear of the hedges and the fence and he landed in the next garden. The big man with red hair and hands like shovels did this over 12 gardens while dodging the Blatter of bullets from the machine gun at the top of the road. At that time all the doors in the district were left off the latch so the gun men could run though the house and out the back to make their escape. The big man shoved Michael through the front door where he landed flat on the bottom of the stairs, he looked back as the door began to close again with the impact with the wall he saw the big man running across the road and saw the impact of the bullet connect with his head and the blood spurting out. Like the last action shot in a movie before the door closed the view like the curtains in the cinema. He climbed the stairs and cried himself to sleep. The next day the house was emptied into a removals van, there wasn't enough room for him in the front of the removals van so Michael travelled in the white transit van with the soft spoken boyfriend of his eldest sister. Michael didn't have much to say as they travelled along the motor way, Paul O Connor was rattling on about a new start new home etc. with his girlie voice that was beginning to annoy Michael who was trying not to think about what happened the day before but his arse was still sore and every bump in the road reminded him. Michael began to drift off to sleep when he felt something he looked down to see Paul’s hand on his leg slowly moving towards his crotch talking about pulling off and buying him a nice meal and ice cream. Michael jumped back when he realized what was going on, get your fucking hand off me he said to Paul. It’s OK Michael he said you might like it, Michael reached for the door handle and pulled it open held the door ajar and said if you don't stop I'll jump. He climbed into the back and sat on the floor against a tea-chest it was worse on his arse but at least he was away from that dirty bastard. How could he do that if he was going with his sister he thought. Is there something wrong with me, he thought?  He liked girls so he couldn't understand what was happening. They slept on mattresses on the living room floor of the new house that night. Michael woke with his little brother Jimmy hanging around his neck still fast asleep. His brother and sister’s mattresses were empty but he looked across the room and saw Paul sitting up smoking. Paul said good morning Mickey, fuck off said Michael, do you want a smoke said Paul and held up the cigarette waving it. Throw it over said Michael. I'll give you three if you let me touch your wee brother.  Michael seen red jumped out of bed ran across the room and kicked him up the face saying you touch my brother and I'll kill you and he left the room carrying his wee brother beginning to wake.  

 

He made new friends and the bitterness fueled by the fear and hatred in Belfast began to leave him as he realized that not everyone was at war. He had been out all day with his new friends progging orchards and taking the girls up to Chuhullians castle for a kiss and a grope of tits that didn't yet exist on most of the girls except Lilly who had enormous tits and beautiful erect dark brown nipples she loved to have sucked so they all took turns with her. There was a party and sing song going on when he returned home all the adults and friends were drinking to celebrate his sister’s birthday and the house warming. Michael said goodnight and went off to bed with his little brother. He climbed into the top bunk and began to drift off as soon as his head hit the pillow. He was lost in his dream world and it was as if he was dreaming about Lilly touching his cock. His member began to rise but something just wasn't right it began to feel like it was real and not a dream. As he began to wake he heard his Mother entering the room shouting you dirty filthy bastard and there beside him was Paul with his hand under the bedclothes. She whacked him one right up the coupon and began dragging him out of the room. His father came running up the stairs shouting what's going on. This filthy bastard was up here touching wee Michael when he was sleeping and you wanted this soft talking pervert to marry my daughter get the fucking animal out of here before I kill him. 

 

It was a cold November morning, he woke early switched on the portable TV that only picked up 2 god damn stations RTE 1 and 2.   He watched the morning news and heard a priest talking about how they should change the law from Canon law to Civil law. "At the end of the day were all civilians who must adhere to the law. Hang the Bastards he thought. On his way into town on the Dart train Canon Law and Civil Law itched around in his brain. He joined the queue outside the Dole office and drifted in with the stench of foul beer and smoke and the stink of some of the dirt birds in the queue to collect his weekly pittance assistance.  He passed two chapels and five pubs on the way to catch the bus back home. He wanted to stop for a pint but he knew the consequences of that as many a time he went home broke so he went to Macs got some groceries and 3 litres of the cheapest red wine and headed home. He filled himself a glass of wine put a couple of strips of bacon under the grill put the needle on the record and the voice sounded sampled through a tanoi, there’s seventy billion people on earth, where are they hiding. As he was listening he remembered what his brother said to him: "Don't be putting that depressing music on again Michael, do you not listen to any happy music" The best songs in the world have been written through melancholy, he answered. What the fuck would he know about music he thought he had disco songs, the music screeched like finger nails on a blackboard.

 

The image of his dead sister entered his brain and left like a hologram. He drifted off back into nineteen seventy-five as Lou Reed hammered out "waiting for the man". It was a Saturday he was at the markets in Dundalk selling toys and Novelty goods from a wallpaper table. It was cold drizzling on and off so the punters weren't out in force they both sat on milk crates behind the table filled with the goods, him and the stall owner. The man reached across and put his hand on Michael's knee below the table. 'I'll take you to a nice hotel in Dublin, we can stay there for the weekend, I'll take you to the pictures and I'll treat you", he said as his hand moved further up his leg, OK said Michael. "I'm going to go for lunch' he said with a rotten smile on his face lifting the milk crate and reaching into the shoe box with the days taking. He took out some notes put the lid back on and put the milk crate back over it sit there he said and guard that money with your life we'll need it for Dublin and I know exactly how much is in it. When he disappeared around the corner Michael rose from behind the table yelling "Everything must go" get your bargains here he shouted like a professional trader. People began to gather around the stall and he sold the lot in no time everything went for next to nothing anything the people wanted to pay he took. He dandered off home with a shoe box under one arm and a folded up wallpaper table in the other.  The images began to fall thick and fast through his mind and the pen was scribbling unreadable words down as if he'd found the fast forward button in his brain and he pressed it twice. Father Mc Duff was getting a dig up the head in a store room in school. A man in a fruit factory had his hand stapled to a crate screaming.  The image of a man with a butcher’s apron fucking a dead pig.

 

Having a piss behind a tree at night a hand reached out to grab him, he ran the man through the streets and into a primary school grounds where the man stopped in the shelter. Blood was splattered all over the grey concrete and the red brick walls, ripping one of the 3x2s the kids sat on wet days, beating and beating and beating the man to a pulp. He dropped the pen and reached under the bed and took out a length of blue nylon rope stood on the chair and tied it onto the heavy duty hook he had placed in the ceiling fixed to the rafter. He tied the noose around his neck and spun around 360 degrees like a ballerina on tip-toes looking down on his world and kicked the chair away. The last thing he heard was the record stuck in a groove.

 

Before his sight went from red too scarlet then black was the priest swinging in the park hanging by a length of blue nylon rope from the rose garden arches. His trousers and underwear around his ankles, the stem of a rose bush sticking out of his innards dripping with blood catching the light of the moon flowing over a fifty pence piece on the grass.

 

 

 

THE POETS HOUSE

 

Ever since I was a boy growing up on the streets of Belfast there has been has been ten or more prime ministers that have dictated like headmasters telling me how to live my life.  Only one has made an impact on me  and that was under the labour government, Tony Blair and mo mowlam the Northern Ireland peace agreement.  I am in the same uneconomic hole that I have always been in.  It seems for years under a labor government we were being schooled to be individuals, I never voted but always leaned to the left but I never found true conviction and true democracy in politics.

Another tory state was entrenched and we went right back to scientific business school, gone were the leftist commentators and art and individualism were tossed out the window.  I wasn’t the smartest cookie on the block but I loved art and English, two teachers in my life have made an impact that ill never forget both their teaching gave me the basic education to be a poet with a master's degree and that’s amazing when you think I was expelled a suspended umpteen times and threw in the dunce class apart from those two teachers who treated like a human being, humanity was their curriculum ill never forget you two miss Ferris at st Gabriel's, Crumlin rd Belfast and mr o Donoghue Dundalk technical college, thank you.

Miss Ferris was the only teacher I fell in love with, I used to loot bomb-damaged shops to get her makeup and beauty products because she was a beautiful woman.  When mr o Donoghue read poems and short stories like Gullivers travels and Julius Caesar the roman empire was converted simply onto the streets where I lived he made the stories and poems so real I seen these people on the streets, he came to my home and asked my parents to keep me on at school but I hated the scientific business bullshit you had to suffer like little boys in a junior army.  I couldn’t wait to get out on my own away from my bastard father who tried to control me like a little boy in formation on the parade ground being drilled.

I had my mother's attitude to life nobody would ever file me into formation, I couldn’t wait to get out into the real world and earn my own money and stand on my own two feet, Mr o Donoghue will always be with me in every story or poem I write because he taught me to drift in literature the same way that jimmy Simmons the great poet taught me and gave me the scholarship to do a masters degree.

Imagine a boy from the streets with not an exam whose poems were sent to professors at Lancaster university and awarded me to study for a degree, wow that’s truly amazing the stuff of dreams.  Throughout my whole school system, they were the only two that saw something in me.  When I left school and went to London and Dublin, I always scribbled down my thoughts so they were always with me.  I had hundreds of jobs looking for a way to slot into society, I was a milkman a message boy a metal polisher a binman a road sweeper an electronics engineer but the workplace was not for me and it took me years and hundreds of jobs to find that out, one day I said to my wife I'm not going to work ever again.  I took the door of the spare box room built a desk by the window bought an old typewriter at a car boot sale and sat down to become a writer.  My wife friends and family thought I was mad and sometimes during those ten years of reading and rereading writing and rewriting,  I thought I was to and I was wasting my time but I knew something was there, truth.  I must have written and rewritten my life three or four times, first in the first person than the third than first and third then back to first.

I didn’t come from the tradition of Irish poetry I was heavily influenced by Lou Reed's lyrics from the streets, the beat poets, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby and Patrick Kavanagh these poor poets were my heroes.  I lived in a different world to the academic Irish poetry scene.  One day my friend gave me fires by Raymond carver, and my room was filled with open books I was reading four or five at a time, wb yeats, Robert Lowell Ted Hughes, Milan Kundera, Liam o Flaherty, Flannery o Connor but the day I opened that book fires by ray carver,  I flicked it open at ariel supreme and as I began to read about Karl Wallenda traveling all over the world to walk a tight rope I was transported by literature as if Mr o Donoghue was reading I was lost in a trance, I was the wind holding him up on that wire, suddenly he fell to earth with a splat of reality. The charge I got from that poem was better than any drug id ever taken, it was as if Raymond carver from Yakima in the midwest of America had spoken to me.  I read the rest of the book and I read it again and it blew me away it was as if he spoke my language, and I said yes I can do this, it was as if I found the formula to life in Carver magic words.  I'm still rereading that book today, I must have read that book ten or fifteen times.  At the library one day I picked up a brochure for the poet's house, I took it home and showed it to my wife it said send three poems so I went upstairs and picked three of my best poems and wrote and rewrote them until I was happy and sent them off and I was accepted to go to the poet's summer school to stay for two weeks.  Before I left they asked me if would I consider studying for a master's degree, I was overwhelmed by it all, real poets liked my work like martin Mooney and mebdh mc guckian jimmy and Janice Simmons.  I said jimmy I haven’t even got an o level he said don’t worry go home and take three weeks to send me ten poems and a letter telling me what poetry means to you and ill send it to Lancaster.  I didn’t drive home from that poetry retreat I levitated, literature was the biggest high in the world better than any drug or drink id ever taken and I  took a few.

Over those weeks I compiled my ten best poems thinking they were all brilliant a letter and sent them off and took my head out of the clouds and drifted back into being an unemployed writer with a young family my two young boys kept me grounded and I forgot all about it and never thought about it thinking it was way out of reach and got lost in my wife and children doing fatherly things, getting stoned with my best friend rab.  One day I got a letter saying I had been accepted to study for a master's degree at the poet's house who was moving to a new location in Donegal and would I consider studying

For three years part-time or three years full-time, after a talk with my wife and jimmy and Janice Simmons of the poet's house I would help  the poet's house relocate to Donegal and I would study

For a year and a half staying in Donegal all week and go home to my family on weekends.

Those first few weeks were like a dream come true like something I read in a Raymond carver book

Studying wasn’t a chore I relished learning about the great men of literature they fell into my life and I into theirs as if they were part of my life.  I still pinch myself looking at my M.A. on the wall knowing I have published four collections of poetry and taught poetry classes and edited four anthologies of other writers.  I was given the chance by the great jimmy Simmons, jimmy has since passed away but ill never forget him and I always swore from that day I was awarded my ma that I would give others the chance that he gave to me.

I have since taken a stroke that put me in a wheelchair and almost killed me, I have spent the last ten years recovering and adjusting to this strange way of life.

As Nietzsche said it is noble to stand alone, he shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary the man beyond good and evil, I have lived this individualism every day of my life and these great people have lived every day with me, here's to ya, humanity rules ok!

 

I wrote this before I took a stroke and lost all my long-term memory but I have my mother's memory in me.

 

 

THE OTHER HALF OF EVERYTHING (REWRITE)

 

METHOD ACT 1.

  

He woke in a tiny bed-sit in Reading, Berkshire, England. An image of his son's face falling

away from his eyes like a rainbow drifting into the filthy walls.The drumbeat rippling with the hummmmm of his landlady doing her washing on a washboard over the bath. 

 

The tune was handed down from her mother’s mother like a tribal lady washing on stone by a river. In a dream state of confusion, he clambered into his clothes along with the three flights of stairs he managed to maneuver in massive strides, standing on the cat that scared him half to death and jolted him closer to the front door. 

 

The fear of what that hologram of his son meant drifted through his mind. The Queen Lizzy pub was quiet for a change the drunks and junkies were asleep or still locked up in the cells after the dawn raid. 

He ran to the end of the street where the kebab van parked and sat on the wall awaiting the girl to exit the phone booth. For fuck's sake hurry up he told her silently, my motives losing momentum. He turned to the street and watched the creeds of the world clamber along, among them the lost and the lonely released into the community, the mad ones, the real people. 

 

An old lady with a white painted face shoved a shopping trolley along the middle of the road the rush hour traffic swerving to miss her. Elvis in a sequined waistcoat posing for a shout-singing Love me Tender across the street. A man in a long black coat who never spoke to anyone just walked around with a scrunched-up ball of paper in his hand wiping crayons taken from his breast pocket across the page. He remembered meeting him once in the Irish cafe and like a tourist, he bought him a cup of tea and asked can I have a look. Without a sound and half a smile, he handed me his sketchpad while another appeared instantly from within his coat and he began drawing the scene outside the window.

 

Only he could see what he was drawing his back was to the view he watched him draw half a man, half a car, and half a street like the aftermath of a blitz. The other ones, with crayons, he said and he took the ball of paper from his pocket and rolled it across the artificial marble Formica topped table. As he unfolded the ball of paper Monet’s, Lilies, Van Gogh’s trees, and Vermeer's light filled his eyes, he looked at him and saw in his eyes the other half of everything.

 

METHOD ACT 2.

 

He rushed past the girl and shoved the coins in the slot his heart beating wildly like electronic codes gathering in his head, a dead tone. He took the rejected coins and shoved them home again and again only to hear the same dead tones ringing like a thumping headache, she must have changed the number, he thought as he returned to his little room. 

 

Felt caged like an animal trying so hard to concentrate on a book but it only brought confusion. Unable to erase the sight of the picture of his son appearing like that hologram and the worrying thoughts attached to it. Your conscience is the prison of the mind, he thought no matter how hard you try you just can't run from it, oh how he wished at that moment that he was one of the dispossessed shufflings through life, oblivious of any moral obligations. 

 

He thought of his father trying to run all his life from his bastard past, each one of 5 siblings was born in a different town and stayed no longer than a year in each English town. Belfast during the 60s and 70s being the longest they stayed anywhere then that it was probably one of the safest places in the world for him, what past would want to find you in Belfast during the nightmare of the troubles? 

 

When he gave up running from his past a secret family exploded after thirty-one years of marriage to his mother and showered down on us like emotional shrapnel, sending the family to the four winds to lick their wounds.  Killing my father and devastating my mother with five strokes.  He always swore he would never be like him and here he was in a fucked up town in England while everything is across the Irish Sea. He discarded the book Charles Bukowski's hot water music with a vengeance into the corner of the room it left him as cold as ice, took his only coat from the only chair and left the still ordinary madness of the room and joined the frantic streets. 

 

It was warm summer's evening, which didn't help much as the town's grim sights clashed with the elements and his void. He called at the Asian shop and purchased a bottle of overpriced wine (uncorked), without care for paying over the odds, anything to suppress his inner lament and to awaken his mind to simpler things. 

 

He walked south of the town intent on not opening the wine until he reached his destination. Beneath a filthy old railway bridge, he uncorked the wine and took a deep swig while in his mind he told the roaring train thundering overhead to fuck off. He passed the roundabout where the cars waited impatiently for their little piece of space in a mad hurry to get nowhere.

 

Dusk fell on reaching his destination, his space by the river, He went there often to clear his head of the modern filth. He sat by the river edge smoking and chugging the wine; a warm slight breeze blew with the river flow creating short sharp waves that gleamed with the red dye-injected sky. A treat for his eyes after the usual week of air-conditioned factories, traffic jams, and everywhere the sight of built-up Grey areas filled with drunks, junkies, and perverts clambering the streets in search of some temporary nirvana. That vexed feeling came fleeting back at the sight of the riverboat pumping along unnaturally like filth on the river.  

 

Its cheap colored lights flashed and cut the reflection of the line of trees from the far bank like a chainsaw. Idling towards the boat where a train of swans at the point was a beautiful white bird followed by four black cygnets, guarding the rear was the majestic male. Pleasantly they blended with the scenery, belonging.

 

The bright lights of the boat's exterior and the lights within clashed creating silhouette shapes that pranced around out of sync with the nightclub's thumping beats. Man’s celebration driving like a nightmare on the surpassing river.

 

He recalled a night he was on board that very boat, The Princess, a cruise or so he thought and a pleasure trip. One of the girls in work arranged it in anticipation he pictured the scene, relaxing on the starboard bow with a beer mellowing with the sights and the natural flow of nature passing by. Most of the people he worked with were assholes their form of chilling out after work was glued to the box in the corner that pumped garbage into their minute recesses.

 

METHOD ACT 3.

 

He was excommunicated, he's an oddball, they said because he couldn't make a comment on the latest goings on in the soap operas or who scored the vital goal in the football or give his opinion on the lunatic on the news that murdered twenty-seven men and women and ate their genitals He liked poetry and literature they can keep their electrified dementia, I'll stay quietly insane.

 

He got a beer and left the swarm of people within, He sat on the deck ready for the world's natural flow. The disco beat pumped decibels of thumping sounds through the hull, echoing tremors through the river's capacity. It's no wonder it's a good river for fishing they want to be caught and have their necks smashed on the nearest rock, he was so pissed off he wanted to catch the hook pull back on it, and be hauled to freedom. He was starving and wanted to hear classical and let his mind wander off to take it in and then pour this experience out on paper. He tried his best to relax and push those stupid sounds away, but just when he thought he had it sorted one of his fellow workers broke his concentration to talk shop. He had riverboat sickness, leaving the deck he returned to the madness and sat with his fellow used, and the presence of beer and whisky flowed. The booze took its toll and he was no longer in control, letting it flow with the filth of the boat on the river. 

 

As the train of swans met the boat two silhouette shapes stood on deck drinking from glasses that flashed in the moonlight, pouring their substance from the glasses down on the flock, their strict security broke in shock. He yelled at the shapes, you think it's fucking funny, ya mindless wankers. In his rage, he didn't notice the swan swimming toward him bolting onto the bank honking and hissing wildly flapping its outstretched wings. He stumbled back and ran for cover behind the trees with the echoes of laughter from the boat. He zigzagged the line of trees and by the time he reached the river’s edge again after finishing the wine, it seemed the moon and stars were out for his benefit only. Mellowing in solitude pondering his circumstance watching the shadows from the far shore rippling a picture for the album of his mind, until something caught his eye. 

 

He turned to see the swans silently coming along the river's edge. He was about to get up and run when he told himself to stall, and relax, his heart beat wildly and shook with fear like the flowing river when the majestic bird broke the water with great ease onto the bank and idled towards him. The massive bird came strolling along the grass verge for a second we made eye contact before he lowered his head closed his eyes and braced himself. He felt the strength of its breast as it pressed against him, it's cold beak brushed his forehead and flowed to the nape of his neck with the affection of a lover’s touch, and a sensation flowed through his mind and body, a new sensation.

 

Something he had only come close to experiencing seeing his children being born. It cleared his mind of every trivial thought he ever had. he opened his eyes, left the river and returned to the town, got his gear together from the corner of the filthy room, and left. On the train, he thought maybe I should leave her alone, maybe they're better off without me. On the ferry crossing, the rough Irish Sea political parties condemned murder in the TV lounge. As he sipped a pint of Guinness, It's winter in Ireland all things are dying, the rain and the sea spray cut with the coldness of steel but he held in his hands a picture of sons, the reality was pulsing with a rhythm he never wanted to lose. Returning to the news of his son being taken to hospital with a strain of meningitis. 

 

 

‘Imperfection is the language of art’

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Robert Lowell

 

I live within a moment frozen in time,

it’s so hard to explain my world to an able-

bodied person. It seems I live in a world

that’s outside the norm of space and time

my world is a locked-in-syndrome definition:                            

 

locked-in syndrome

 

1.                 (Pathology) a condition in which a person 

2.                 is conscious but unable to move any part 

3.                 of the body except for the eyes: results from 

4.                 damage to the brainstem

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

 

In 2005 I took a massive stroke that almost killed me, they switched off my life support and declared me dead but just seconds later I awoke so the process of death had begun within me and for the last ten years I have woken every day and seen the stippled darkness behind my eyes, the way you would see blotches before yours. 

 

My brain was a formless form, like a bowl of porridge gruel, I learned again to read and write and use an alphabet board blinking my eyes, one for yes and two for no.   As I was right-handed before I learned to paint with my left not with the same accuracy as my left hand was slightly damaged by the stroke. 

 

One of the first images I created was a collage of the word positive, my first days of recovery were spent watching nature out the window while the other brain injury patients were herded into the day room to watch daytime T.V.

 

 I was off in the moment thinking poetry. I have tried to adjust to this way of life but it’s been so frustrating as Northern Ireland has not had the infrastructure for wheelchairs or disabilities, were a sectarian lot. I’m now confined to a wheelchair as I can’t walk or talk and I am paralyzed down the right side of my body, when I took the stroke I had no speech whatsoever for almost a year They say I’ll never walk again as the stroke damaged all my balance inside.

 

The Royal Victoria hospital operated on my vocal cords and my voice started to come back but not with the same volume as before but without background noise and reading my lips I can hold a conversation.  Because of that groundbreaking operation, I now have partial locked-in syndrome so I can communicate with a mumbling speech to friends and family who can read my lips but I still find it difficult on the telephone or untrained ear.

 

I live within this moment locked within, lying in bed early this morning I was watching the Shadow of leaves shimmer in the streetlight on my bathroom window.  Thinking it looked like a Japanese print, then I thought what’s the difference between east and west?  Now and then before after stroke.

 

I reached across to get a book of poems that I had published before my stroke, and I let the book fall on the bed realizing that this is the first time in ten years that I could see my own writing outside my moment.  It struck me that I had never compared this moment that I was so locked in before, This was the first moment.

On the road to recovery, it was like standing on a broken bridge, but I could see the other side. 

 

I had been writing a blog online, repeating myself over again but this was the first time I had seen this essay in years ‘The other half of everything.  Wow, I thought reading and writing must be strengthening my mind and words are bridging the gap.  I know this isn’t a eureka moment for you who see and hear this every day but in my world it is.

 

This was the first time in my moment us life that I saw into myself this was the first time in ten years that I could see beyond myself.  I felt like john Keats or a famous writer, I had probably seen this many times in my writing, but this was the very first time I had seen the void, this is the first day of the rest of my life.  Things have felt strange within my body for the last few days and there was something else there in the words that I couldn’t explain

this was it.

 

 

Before I go any further I should tell you of my link with the written word, words and art have been building a bridge across my void.  I can’t stress just how much this means to me, as Lou Reed said in the song ‘I’m beginning to see the light’ not in a religious sense but in an art sense.  Before I took the stroke I was an arts officer working at the Millennium court arts Centre in Portadown until I was fired in 2006 for writing the word fuck in an email which my boss saw.  My aim there was to create a writer's Centre outside Belfast or London/Derry but then I had my stroke and was fired.

 

My mouth has been getting me in trouble for years, I have forever spoken my mind, it got me in scraps, fights but I always stood my ground for my truth, meant no harm by it, for me as a writer fuck is as great an expression as the four-letter word love or rose 

 

There’s no alternative to that great f-word c-word or b- word but righteous people have always been offended.  I’m a broken poet I’ll stop saying the f- word fuck when you stop saying the g-word God until the day I die I’ll say just how it is and if you can’t handle it that’s your problem.

 

 I was a published poet in love with life, with a master’s degree and four collections of poetry published. Setting up poetry groups for young and old all over the country in schools and community Centres, getting vibrant young writers into the area.  Now I can’t work and teach poetry so I write pomes of the moment on an online blog in the hope that I inspire at least one person and myself, it has allowed me to see beyond myself, the power of words and their magic.

 

I have been trying to recreate this feeling of moment-us magic through poems I call pomes because they're created from the moment and find a form of their own.

 

“I Have Always Aspired to a More Spacious Form”:

 Czeslaw Miłosz

Poetry like sunshine is free

 

 

 

Copyright © 2019

by ADRIAN FOX

ISBN: 123-45678-9

Printed in NORTHERN IRELAND

 

A PORTAL OF POETRY

Table of Contents

 

Adrian Fox - Stroke Poetology

https://soundcloud.com/poetrymapp/adrian-fox-stroke-poetology

READ BY MARIA MC Manus

 

YouTube

Adrian Fox (read by Matthew Rice) | Poetry Jukebox

 

DOWN IS UP

                             LOU READ

0.1. stroke-poetology

O.1.2 Kavanaghs ditch

1.1. COVIDIS-ABILITY

1.   LIVING STROKE RECOVERY

2.   READING BASHO

3.   A SPENT SHELL

4.   ALL GO RHYTHM

5.   MELANCHOLY WAY

6.   THE WRITE HEMISPHERE

7.   A REVERSED EFFORT

8.   STROKE DOWN BLUES

9.   F-ART

10. MY LIFE IS FILLED WITH EMPTINESS

11.                     A BASHO GAZE

12.                     CAST

13.                     Creedmore

14.                     CURRENT=SEA WAVE OF POETRY

15.                     FOOTPLATE HIGHWAY

MY LONG-TERM MEMORY IS WIPED

For Mark

 

1.

 

Woke early before the rush hour of life

Before I was rolled washed, wheelchaired. 

Remembering yesterday, when I cried

listening To beautiful you by Mark Kozalek.

 

Knowing I have Lost so much, a rich vein of life

I had to switch off although it was a spiritual

moment, it tore.  I want  to live/love like

the next man but I just can’t recall.

2.

 

I LIVE IN A WORLD OF NOMENCLATURE

AWAY BEYOND ME. I CAN’T DEVISE

A NAME FOR THIS BEING, NO-MEN-

 CLATURE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL WORD.

COVIDIS-ABILITY

 

For eighteen years now I have been

Blogging my stroke recovery, thank you

for all your likes they gave me hope.

 

These words of a pessimistic optimistic

Are all I've got; I know some of you cant

stomach my negativity but this negative

capability is my only source of hope.

 

Sometimes I live and wallow in self-pity but

realise please that this is my only hope to be

a being in this world of non-stimulation,

the stroke took all my being.

 

My only way of explaining this is to compare

myself to a shell, there’s nothing much else

in here just these words that I must write

and find a new way of forming them into

a prose pome.

 

I wouldn't even raise it to the level of poetry,

Just my gibberish way of finding hope in hope-

lessness. Please bear with me as I dive into my-

self, yet again.

 

For near on twenty years, I have survived this

Massive Stroke that left me paralyzed without

any long-term Memory like me your fed-up

listening to me whinge. You pulled

me back from that ledge on the bridge of despair

John Berryman's blind brow.

 

I couldn't have done this without you, if only  I had

Known what Aphantasia was, just to put a name

to dark behind eye would have helped me over

The hurdles of suicidal tendencies. I don't understand

why did the psyche Northern Ireland team did

not know about this I told them of the dark behind

my eye, no mind’s eye.

 

Without you as a sounding board I would have

never got through this, so thank you for my life.

 

I'm not so down but this stroke left me with nothing,

I'm just a shell of man and I must live with that.

I bought my suffering in Schopenhauer the philosopher

of pessimistic optimism.

 

He's right up my aisle so relevant to today’s living

especially In my shell-shock lifestyle

and covidis-ability.

 

 

A SPENT SHELL

 

Without the bond of life:

Emotional memory.

A painting of my father

Draws me in. 

 

He back-fired into me like

shrapnel from an arm- alite

rifle, a spent shell.

 

 

 

 

POETIC LEGENDAY HEART

 

I love jazz and don't like ballet
And new wave bling movies,

just drive me away I guess

I like darkness it can be light

deep down inside,

I got a poetic he-art.

Yeah-yeah-yeah, deep

down inside I got a poetic heart

Oh, poearty lookin' for a good time
Just a poetic heart, art heart.
Lookin' for a good time

I don't like massages or some

thing meant to say, feel.

I wish people like that would just go away
I guess I'm just dumb, 'cause I know

I'm not smart but deep down inside,

 

I GOT A POETIC LEGENDAY HEART

 

DEATH SONG

 

‘Let not my child be a girl

For sad is the life of a woman’

                                               The prairie

 

This is a chant, an incantation

For the souls of a Indian nation.

Written in nineteen twenty eight

by Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

 

Down by a river went

A woman and her children

Canoeing past thick

Forest growth.

 

Her only crime was to be a woman

With a child at her breast.

Leaf like floating on mists

Of spray, the spirit of the river

Took hold in current.

 

This is an Indian woman’s death-

Song, roll on sweet waters, roll on!

Her voice was heard with the rush

of water singing a mournful song

Roll on, sweet waters roll on!

 

 

THE DEAD PART OF ME

                                              

 

 

CREATIVE WRITING (MY WAY)

‘The theory of poetry is the theory of life’

                                                                      Wallace Stevens

 

The end of the line

Is the comma, Ruled

Feint or blank page

hinge that take’s

You to the next line.

 

You can’t semi colon

Emotion, sounding poetic

Is the trick, but as the men

Said, ‘no tricks’.  The con-

Tent of the pome is

Truth, beauty.

 

 

A LONELY NATION

 

Poetry is linked to your mobility.

I live in a world of disabled blues

So my pomes have become momentary.

They are not a language of verseif-

ication but words of truth from

a lonely nation.

 

These are words from my black hole.

They are not here for rhyme but reason

Trying to find their way back home.

 

This is the verb-all of a locked-in-syndrome.

I live inside me, it’s not my style

It’s the darkness in me.  It wants to be

a poem, that’s all I know.  This is my poetic

undulating sea.  I can’t even remember

a detailed past so these words

can only be cast

 

out!

 

 

You had to go

and leave us

with a door

into the dark.

 

Sad but you had

to go to that better

place where poets

live in poetry.

 

 

DEAD DECADE

 

I live again without love and e-

Motion like the cold stone, boulder

My father rests his head on, up-

On the black hills above Belfast.

 

The eyes that have seen hurt and hate

Not in a blue car, not black, alone

On the motorway going to O.T. and Physio

That won’t help me to walk or talk

My way into the world.

 

Whatever way you look at it, I am

The Cripple poet going by re-

membering life through a poem.

 

The dead decayed under earth and soil.

A shadow of ambulance on the lay-by

Alone on the motorway.

 

DISABLED DIMENSION

 

I am the king of this disabled dimension; my

 grandchildren are the jewels in my crown. 

They are my gifts of the mind, my land-

scape, blues, greens, yellow, and brown. 

I paint they’re smiling every-

day, shining down from above 

or below balancing light through 

my window, on the first day of spring.

 

I gave you that ring.  

This is my vow of life that you are now 

my love and my wife

and never again will we defend this castle. 

This is not a fort or bastille we don’t

live a bloody crusade we are on a poetic loop; 

we are not a regimental troop. 

 

These words are my proclamation, we will live together in peace and this business

of the thorn in my side will cease.  

He said: ‘Imperfection is the language of art’,

these words are from my broken heart. 

He also said ‘yet why not say what happened’

these words are my confessional truth.

 

DIS-ABILITY

 

Left out here in limbo, beside

A lonely summer seat.  Be-

Tween independence/day-

Care on independent street.

 

Flitting to and fro between

A computer and I don’t know.

Lost in a haze of disabled peace

And an unremembered past.

 

The ramps out here are to high

To low on sectarian avenue.

 

Northern Irelands infrastructure

is one to be left desired, thirty

years of war have left the streets

and hearts a sunder, shell shock

shock shell.

 

I know this feeling well

but nobody cares, as long as we

have peace, fuck the dis-

abled they’re only disabled.

 

I’ve seen children cry faced by

A monster in a wheelchair, me.

Is this just a disabled flaw?

Are we really monsters?

 

We need to teach our children

To grow and know that we are

Not really monsters, your dad

Planted the bomb but he got

Off, Scott free on a good Friday

Agreement. 

 

I must live in dis-

abled peace, eight days a week

and its shell shock hell, dis-

abled peace doesn’t fit.

 

Peace disabled now, that’s

Dis-ability.

I live with the truth each day

Can you?

 

 

DOPPELGANGER

 

Words are the shadow

Of my former self.  Light

Balances dark like

Heaven created hell.

 

Love comes out of hate.

Night cannot be seen

Without the light of day.

 

 

ALL-GO-RHYTHM

 

Pressing down on my life, alone.

Twenty years living without stimulation

Friends and life just drifted away.

 

I said in a poem years ago

There’s another bud to bloom but

Life is a clean slate, stale mate room.

 

Dwelling in a shell-hell-cell, like

A water skater on well water

Bending realities purity.

 

 

 

 

LIVING STROKE RECOVERY

The blue disabled automatic door
slams shut like a hell-cell clang.
There is no parole, good Friday
Agreement from disability.
The sound of loneliness fills
The disabled bungalow.

The blackout curtains, pegged
Shut to stop sunlight from in-
Flaming his skin. Aphantasia
Behind his eyes. It all sounds
aphasia depressing but poetry
fills his write hemisphere.

The left left years ago, this
Is the new norm living Stroke
Recovery. He inches toward
A new path, a portal of poetry
shimmers a future/past like
a Basho spaceman spaced in-
Out in the dark.

READING BASHO

 

Charging my wheelchair

Sitting in my bedroom

going nowhere.

 

My blister pack was

Posted through my dis-

abled door, I heard

it crumple.

 

This is nobody’s fault

drip, drip, the rain to

Wash this dusty world.

 

MELANCHOLY WAY

 

How can the world know?

This swoon of life/death

Caregivers don’t under-

stand. 

 

How can you step outside

Self and let the world see.

Imprisoned in beauty but

Not finding beauty in me.

 

Searching for the right word

In words and art, the lonely

Streetlight shines on me

The air I breathe is tainted.

 

The sentiment of love is deep

Deep within my heart, lost in

Here out at sea.  All I can do

I write and write this out of me.

 

If poetry is felt by the senses

Then what’s the sense in me?

 

My truth is inside my beauty

I must go round and round

Within my living hope

That I hold that thing

Called love in me.

 

THE WRITE HEMISPHERE

 

For twenty years now I have lived

On the write hemisphere my left

Damaged in stroke. I don’t mean

To blaspheme but no God exists

Here on the right side of my mind.

 

I never believed but I went along

Sending my children to religious

Teaching because there was no

Alternative but don’t you think

We have got to look beyond.

 

Why can’t we live side by side in peace?

All this blood gore and war in God’s name

Isn’t working we must create a new

Society, my life has been war, and now

My children’s lives are war, this is not

a blame game no right or wrong way, life

is peace there is nothing else.

 

A REVERSED EFFORT

 

‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it’

                                                        Anon

My life is the light of wonder

An eternal spark of negativity

That came from re-birth

A stroke, a sunder.

 

Without memory, dream

cripple words have crippled me. 

They say Memory, dreams

Are pure poetry so where

does this come from?

 

Pomes are moment-us-moments

and this is my unadopted kingdom.

 

STROKE DOWN BLUES

 

I woke up this morning with the stroke down blues

A formless form without a clue

I woke up this morning without life’s inclination

Without memory, dreams, or imagination.

 

Hallucinating a chainsaw man behind my head

Hallucinating death behind a hospital bed

The nurses were out to kill me

And I was next, I was next.

 

Black snow pelted and stippled my walls

Ceiling and floors, my wheelchair

Crashed and unhinged doors.

Lost in a moment made of tears

Lost in a moment that lasted years.

 

This is shell shock from a previous life

This is the darkness the blackness, my wife

Black snow pelts from every angle

Black snow stipples I wear that bangle.

 

This is my stroke down blues

This is my stroke down blues

I hope I didn’t burst your 

sentimental bubble

Death is coming 

and I'm not in a muddle.

 

All this for the ethics of medicine

All this to live in this hell cell.

Fantasy and reality which was which.

 

The reality of living with a heartless bitch.

ANY MINUTE NOW

 

My weeping widow hangs on the wall

Meditating grief. Why can’t we just

Have peace and not this bloody war

Meditating music seeps from beyond.

 

We could have a stroke or heart attack

Any minute now, we live with stress

everyday why do we pile more on.

 

I’m not a kumbaya camper, I am a bed-

Bound dis-. Get your fucking act together

Mediate art, stop this macho bullshit.

Its causing breadlines on the streets.

 

We had eight years to stop this mess

And U.s. N.A.T.O. drove a war head.

What do you say to your children?

To their kids the future isn’t bright.

 

Have a thought for Guernica grief

Let art be our meaning and stop

This bloody crusade. Hey boy get

Down of the cross we need the wood.

 

To build an infrastructure, when will?

Our minds be free of the sword

In our sides, were riddled with grief

Bullet syllables, even the wood

Is up in flames the world is committing

Suicide, meditate go with the grain.

 

So much for live aid and feed

The fucking world E.U. Z. and Russia

you should be ashamed. I am not in

your rat race meditate more. Biden bid.

 

Tell it to your citizens who do not lick

Blood of your sword, the ghost is on

His high horse were sinking below.

 

The peasant revolt is coming

To take you away ha ha he he

Go to hell don’t play with my life.

 

THE WARD, FANTASY AND REALITY

An essay poem

 

 

I must have been drifting

in and out of consciousness

like I was between worlds.

 

I had no sense of time during

the stroke, it was as if I was

left out in the dark, I don’t

remember too much about

the early stages.

 

One minute I was on the edge

of the bed, the next I was on

the floor crawling into my mother’s

room asking her what was happening

that’s how suddenly it happened.

 

You can't issue blame on too much drinking

or smoking if it’s in the family blood

there isn’t much you can do about it

it’s going to happen whether you like it

or not, my mother took five strokes.

I did live to excess.

 

The clinical smell of un-smelt death

lingered through the ward the smell

wafted through the corridors. 

The next 48 hours were crucial

to my survival, I pulled through

and the doctors seemed not to know

what to do with me.

 

Now that I think back to that time

I think my thoughts told me, I was a wasted

lump of flesh unable to move or speak

my only way of communicating

was in my eyes.

 

For the first few days it seems

I was kept in a ward where everything

seemed behind me. The wasted corpses

were amputated by a man with a chainsaw

and placed in a skip and shipped away

now I know this isn’t true, but my mind

was playing terrible tricks on me.

 

The strong medication that kept me alive

Was giving me warped hallucinations.

Dreaming that day and night were only

different by the sight of an exit sign.

If the exit was there I knew I was there

I had no preconception of fantasy or reality.

 

That’s all I had to focus on, that was real

everything else didn’t seem to change.

After a few days I was shipped off

to the Royal hospital, without that oxygen.

I don’t think I would have survived without it

That was my life line.

 

It seemed I didn’t need anything else. It also

sent me cuckoo my mind was racing with all

kinds of thoughts. I was paranoid I remember

one night trying to reach my bed side table

to tip it over, thinking they were killing

someone and I was next.

 

The nurses were brilliant, but my mind

was just messed up, I didn’t know

whether I was coming or going.  It still

feels like I’m in limbo and ill wake

from this terrible dream any minute.

 

After my M.R.I. scan and trying to fit

a tracheotomy I was shipped to foster-

green hospital. I didn’t know what to expect

but once I settled in it was a great place.

Everyday I received speech and physio

and all the staff were great.

 

I learnt a lot from that experience, a lot that once

I already knew but the stroke had taken away.

Like brushing your own teeth, wiping your own ass

Simple little things we take for granted.

 

Knowing that people are generally good people

and not the negative view the way the world

is perceived. I remember one guy with MS

was shipped in beside me after three or four

conversations we built up a repour like 

two brothers’the staff seemed to trust me, 

and the feeling was mutual.

 

Most of the people I met in there were young people

which blows away the mis-

conception that strokes

are concentrated on the old,0one guy in there

was just fourteen so much for that. Some nights

it was like one flew over the cuckoo’s nest in there.

 

Norman who was trying to stop someone stealing a car

and was hit on the head. Sometimes 

he thought he was

the president, he was a great artist during

his previous life but since that night he wasn’t 

the same.

 

I must say the things he came out with were hilarious

I remember being bent double at his 

humor even now

writing this I am laughing out loud 

remembering it.

From a president one night to mickey-

mouse the next.

I’ll miss him, poor Norman, must spend his life

in a wheelchair like a seven-year-old child but

boy could he make me laugh.

 

The nurses had to throw me

out into the corridor, I laughed so much.

That ward was one of the saddest places in the world but it also had a black humor 

that’s right up my street.

A bit of humor mixed with reality, you 

can’t beat it?

 

I knew the nurses wanted to laugh but couldn’t.

Picture this, a room full of respite patients

and people with brain stem injuries it was crazy

in there you can picture the scene. In hindsight

my time at foster green was brilliant

and I was treated very well by all the staff. 

 

I spent some time visiting Joss Cardwell center

which is a re-hab unit. It was a real pain getting

there each day and not knowing what time

I would return home. Even that was like limbo

as Milan Kundera said in the unbearable-

 

lightness of being, ‘we have nothing to compare

this life with because we live it only once’.

This was my second time around, the say I died

For seconds in intensive care.

 

This never occurred to me before, I was lost not

knowing what to expect.  Everyday was an event

I didn’t know what was going to happen.

 

Even now writing this still in a wheelchair

with a voice that still isn’t right, paralyzed

and wearing a splint on one leg. It’s just filling

in the time but even now it’s like limbo

between worlds and any minute now

something will happen.

 

I don’t know what I’d have done if my mind

were affected. I remember a poem by Raymond-

Carver called ‘What the doctor said’.

The doctor had counted tumors on his brain

Carver knowing that he was going to die

didn’t want to hear the inevitable news.

 

He even wrote ‘now’ on his cigarette box

in black permanent marker. Being a writer

I don’t know what I would have done had

my mind been affected. I don’t know who

to thank as I wasn’t drawn to any great

light and I’m not sure god exists out there.

 

I think I was drawn back to this life through

The strength of love in my heart and because

My heart is not tainted by hate or malice.

I’m keeping my options open who am I to say

there is or isn’t, millions of people have

believed it for thousands of years.

 

I’m the type of person that must touch

and feel a thing to believe it.

I am slowly but surely drifting in

between worlds. Between the world of the dis-

abled and the able bodied.

 

I am drifting into the real world I know

my time will come when I drift over

to the other side but I’m not ready yet.

It feels good in limbo I have loads of time

to put things into perspective.

 

I remember a pencil drawing, by M.C.Esher

but it’s a picture of a head with open drawers.

That’s the way it feels right now as if I’m sorting out

the drawers and putting everything in its place.

 

I will tell you the conclusion to this essay/poem

when I get there. The world I’m drifting through

is nice good music, great views of nature, poetry

and art filling my world I’ve just got to learn

patience and let the truth slip by

drift here between worlds.