Copyright © 2019

by Copyright holder name

ISBN: 123-45678-9

Printed in Country name

 

Table of Contents

Stuck in a groove

Gold leaf

Peace

Well being

Metamorphic mind

Melancholy happiness

To be continued

 

A SPECIAL POWERS ACT

 

On my lonesomeness doing

Time, love doesn’t live here

anymore. Life lives here with-

out stimulation, opposites at-

tract like a special powers act

an un-in tension rhyme, hell-

 

cell, black noise omits along

dungeon doors, this is not dads

prison blues but a locked-

In-syndrome. A blackhole

Event horizon, no reaction.

 

In-here-I-tense a twisted

Noose swing a monkey-pole.

Like a high tightrope walker

Balancing thin air living on re-

Serves of hospital oxygen.

Keeping me alive hanging by

a thread, a graph on a cat scan

 

          Rising to

fall.

INNUENDO

 

At night it sometimes feels like

My brain is boiling in a slow

cooker, casserole, or stew.

 

I feel itchy where my quim

Should be but this is not a gender

Bender pome. 

 

I’m just a man without his whole.

I’m not going into it you know what

I mean, in-you-end-oh!

NO-MANS LAND

I went down all approved and un-
Approved roads through bandit
Country no mans land. My son
Messaged me saying he appreciated
All those roads I took him down.

Ireland gives you something, he
Sparked this. It gave me poetry
Never mind costa del bullshit.
Sun isn’t just a holiday, people
Is a holiday and Ireland has
The best in the world.

You cant beat the sound of rain
On a tent like the sound of
A lambeg/bodhrán drum. As I
Said in a poem called ‘Totembyro’
Poetry is beyond Irish ( I rich) were
Not English, Irish, euro, we are
beyond a line drawn in the sand.

We are unique N.I. beings we have
What the world wants, PEACE, six
Counties are we. What a place to be
We came through civil wars to get
This is a green and orange uprising
Creation, nation.

Ireland gives you something, some-
Thing unexplainable, I don’t want
To know all I know its magic. Cuts
Through sectarian hatred, I took
My boys away from that hate
As often as I could two or three
Times a year gave them a salmon
Of knowledge deep within bone.

Magic moments I wish I could re-
Member but that’s gone down the drain.
The magic hasn’t its locked in my
Syndrome, poetry touches on it
And it touches in me. 

See less

RENVYLE SUNSET

 

My wife and three children

Divorced of memory. All those

Car journeys around Ireland.

Look boys, what! the scenery

Oh that, this is all I remember.

 

Memory is like the train tracks

Ripped up from the west coast

Of Ireland becoming an independent

State, melted down for infrastructure.

 

Snippets of rail lines set down, twenty

Forty, sixty, eighty years later railed

By private citizens, I met one brave

man set in his way, doing his bit.

 

Laying down the future two hundred yards.

He lay down those lines like I put down these

Lines free like sunshine driving the coast

Blood and sweat for a pittance with no help

From the government, what men they were.

 

I hope this poem is my way of saying thank you

to those great men who railed for me my

way through Cork to Skibbereen. Each word

Put down I remembered more, short to become

Long term, pity I cant cling like those sleepers

To the soil, memory is derailed but I remember

His tale.

THE NEW PANDEMIC

Does the world want to be American.

Do you want to be a bling thing, NATO

Are pushing it your going down the road

Of a great depression why is no one

Talking peace. Were all distant brothers

China, Russia, Euro, the west I thought

We wanted to be a global family.

Were heading back war one and two

Just when we got over nationalistic

Bullshit so much for peace has it gone

Out the window. War is the new pan-

Dramatic line up to get shot. Con-

Script my ass and I’ll shoot myself in

The headfirst,

DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY

 

Keats said negative capability

A long time ago and still we

Act like we don’t know climate

Change, religion, war.

 

Were locked into a time warp

Like a middle age, it is not our

Problem your man will sort it

Out, we are in a a paradoxical

Bubble.

 

Think the right way round

And everything will be sound.

Take it on your back and do

A little lifting, the problem is

Look in to look out.

 

The ringing of the bells wont

Sound freedom. Let the world

Heal of war and ill-usion, be

Yourself let it be to see.

 

A wonderful world of nudging

Creating negative capability.

Brain transparency, paralyzing

poetry of wonder.

 

Footnote:

 

Negative capability is a phrase first used by Romantic poet John Keats in 1817 to explain the capacity of the greatest writers (particularly Shakespeare) to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability to perceive 

WABI SABI (Dryad)

Imperfection is the language of art

                                                  Robert Lowell

 

Broken down by evolution

A chip off life’s glaze.

My mother is there, my spirit

Of the tree watching

Over me.

 

Red hue streetlight

Infiltrates and warms

My lonely inner

Glow.

A WORDED PETROL BOMB

 

I grew up with the G.P.O.

and Oliver Plunkett’s head

Gyles quay wearing an anorak,

get in that water or I’ll throw

you in dad said. What a republican

childhood I had, Marin Meehan

and Fra mc Guigan were like uncles to me.

 

Sean mc Stefan’s oil tank went up

in flames. This memory came right

out of blue, don’t even know if is true

but It looks good upon the page like

a worded petrol bomb.

 

MY Dad was such a bastard he hated

My guts and vice versa I loved to hate.

We live in peace now Dads up the black-

Hills looking down on the divided city

Turning in his grave, peace you bastard

Peace.

DREAM STATE

 

‘I dreamt I was a butterfly

Turned into a man’

                            Chuang Tzu

 

Have I an over active imagination or did I have

A poetic brain injury, is there any bleeding such thing? 

Or am I just spouting my mothers Dub tongue. 

Dublin was Kavanagh’s second home, my childhood

home nestled Mucker as the crows flies from his blue door

across the fields in Hackballscross.  I wrote years ago long before

my stroke in a poem that I had the sense that Patrick Kavanagh

was following me to the sea of this poem.

I can stake my life on that.

 

Last night I dreamed that I saw his black-board

All I recall is the words on and on and on modern.

I woke in a well of mercury with little bits of land-

Scape jutting out.  I recall a childhood memory

Being in a well on the Castle Blaney road, brushing

aside the leaf mold. He is the only writer that’s close

to my heart, who else could it be?

 

I’ll never be able to prove this, you might think me quite mad

maybe the lonesomeness has gotten into me?

 Can a person conjure a place name?

And put a self in a space?

ASHES OF MOTHER EARTH

 

It’s sad when you have no long-term memory

Someone said to me!

Then you look outside at a tree

That’s green, yellow, and golden-brown

That leans in the window and makes you free.

 

Autumnal colors. Unhelpful predictions

Fly down on me, mental filters-my sons

Sister, my past is my future, mother.

My dad is stuck in the middle, mother

Takes pride of place, her ashes.

Painted over covering grey

Isn’t it a wonderful day?

 

Aren’t the trees something to behold?

Like a being sheds above my shed

Mother earth.

 

DOLE ERIN

Act 1.

 

Trying to remember a story of double

Dole hopping. Gardiner Street dole office

was like racetrack for losers, the Liffey it

Stank like hell. He had an address in

Dublin as he worked there in the 80s.

 

The U.K stopped his money, he was

Called in to explain, the man

Said we hear you’ve been signing

On in Dublin, he slammed his hand

On the desk, go in there and ring.

 

He said bluffing, should have won

an Oscar for his role. He knew

they had no Jurisdiction, this was be-

fore 1994. This is the story of a man

who beat the system and wouldn’t

let the system beat him?

APHANTASTIC TALE’S

 

Poetry came from my mother’s grand

Canal bank walk ( the Dodder at Rath-

Mines). Then I read Kavanaghs poem

Enraptured encaptured me in my birth-

Right March 1^st, his bright shillings.

 

It’s as if it was meant to be-side Mucker

Accidently on purpose, a fox thought

Skulked out of Kavanaghs ditch to glare

Into my blackhole that was the very

Start of my poetic being.

 

I was in a dunce class free from abused

science, religion and math’s which suited

me, dyslexic to all three.  When my form

spoke words of spacious form I fell into

a trance. Shakespearean sonnets and Patrick

Kavanagh opened up my mind.

 

He came out to see my parents, asked

Would I stay on. I left just aged 15, ran

Away from my ogre father. Poetry flowed

Out of me the day my father died. The spirit

Of pure poetry flowed from Lou Reeds main-

Line groove, I was rushing on my run.

 

Raymond Carver caught my breath and I

Caught his, poetry is a strange thing that

I cannot explain its beyond religion fame

And money bag elation.   

 

James Simmons took right under his wing.

This is a homage to you all, you know who?

 I’ll never forget what you have done for me.

I sit here crippled but I can see you in me, free

the rest is history, essays, poems, pensée’s.

LORD MUCK

 

 

I was pushing my brother

in his pedal car in London,

built like a toy-soldier with

a piece of metal folded back.

 

Then I was on a plane in turb-

lance and it felt like it was built

the same and we were hanging by

a thread.  I'm here now in Belfast

on the back bumper of a V.W-

beetle, a street urchin being

chauffeured into town.

 

It seems like life is held to-

gather by that little piece

of metal folded back on itself.

 

It feels like I'm a toy-soldier

painted green hanging on

on the back of an orange V.W.

DRIVE BY

 

The bird sings from

the blossom

branch

 

over-

powers

 

the washing

machine on

spin and the

cars shooting by.

ECHOLALIA

 

'I stood in the cold on the porch

and could not think of anything as perfect

as mans hope of light in the face of darkness'.

                                       

                                                       Richard Eberhart

 

These are the places that

I ran in:  North Belfast-

Death, Hack-balls-cross-

Life, over the ocean,

Violence, on the mainland.

 

Over the border, love-

to see me on the run. 

 

I Hear a strimmer strum

a car go by.  What makes

this day any different? 

Me!

 

To all you language buffs this is not

an insult its an experiment, I am not

grammatically correct in English

or Irish.

 

ANGLOW

 

I sah Sean Keats in the crann

his ceannaithe were so sharp

like a man upon nádúr fluttering

a wind so dense and fuar sa gheim-

readh his head filled with liath

cloud adrifting by the harshness

le feiceáil showing us the slí to go.

 

Like leaves upon a crann within

a budding le feiceáil, but life will

titim and ardú again. from an-

other uillinn (a difriúil window)

it looks like Seamus Heaney

facing north, bás of a naturalist.

 

ALL-GO-RHYTHM

 

Pressing down on my life, alone.

Twelve years of 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-like hell cell, like

A water skater on well water

Bending realities purity.

FULL-STOP

 

All these people live in me:

Carver, Keats, Ted Hughes

And Sylvia Plath, Stevens

Lowell and James Simmons

And my mucker Kavanagh.

 

In one big poetic pact, I am

Writing this for them, automatic

Writing flows from me to the page.

Along the black path in a wheelchair

Again and again and again and again

Going around and round the round-

about.

 

Ive been here since seventy-four

I came here to escape my English self.

Ireland gives me something poetic

I don’t want to know what it is, lets

Just say it gives me something

Something that I will never

For-get

 

This is my full stop.

 

 

UNHINGED E E E

 

Hanging out there

on the edge, in a seam

of light-ajar.  Holding up

a door in space and time.

 

I'm like an astronaut in zero

gravity but I'm not fixed

or floating, I'm flat on my back

paralysed un-hinged waiting

for a carer to care.

 

Houston we have a problem.

           

 

STUCK IN A GROOVE

 

Raymdond Carver stopped my breath

I read his book ‘fires’ over and over.

I find it so hard to find positivity, I found

it in filthy realism, failed in life music like

it stuck in the needle groove of ‘Everclear’

by American music club, my ex-girlfriend

told me she spent yesterday crying.

 

Playing over and over like someone walking

out of my life, leaving me with. ‘Me and the devil’

stroke down blues like an old blues record.

I’m playing vinyl in the hope of finding memory but

I am stuck in the scrape through ‘Heroin’ rushing on

my run, mainlined by Lou Reed my life and my

ex-wife tore my heart when she done that in an

argument, so much for good memory.

 

I have said all this before but it’s magic

Moments that keep repeating and re-

Peating. What more can I say, I must

have worn these records out.

 

This is a confessional pome

from a confessional moment.

As Robert Lowell said:

Yet why not say what happened.

 

GOLD LEAF OF TIME

for Riley

 

Autumn came through my door

held up in the delight of my grandsons’

autistic spectrum seen through

a golden-brown leaf. 

 

Can you imagine the rainbow of light

through that prism of nature

written on his face.

 

Like little jack in Jack and the beanstalk.

I gave him an apple for his leaf.  He ran

through the house switching every light

on to catch it reflected in glass. 

 

Wow Riley! this is your balance of light

 these words are magic beans that see

your spectrum.

 

PEACE

 

Life is like a butterfly

In John Keats eye, blue

But very beautiful

Flitting to death.

 

I’m looking out at autumn

And it is looking back at me.

The leaves are golden brown

And the sky is summer blue.

I wish that we could be united

Tender and true?

 

I can see the butterfly within

The layers of tears, I can feel

The touch flying from you.

 

Boldly saying though art free.

 

WELL BEING

 

I’m at the breakfast, lunch dinner table

With the usual early morning stuff

Poetry scrambled egg and coffee.

The bench is bolted to the wall

For wheelchair access.

 

The trees outside are almost bare but

that’s enough of them, I must go in

to go out.

 

The piles of books on my radiator

Add warmth, act as my comfort blanket

its snug and cozy here but it lacks just one

thing Memory.

 

An active imagination won’t bring it back

But It gives me a sense of artistic meaning

And that’s half the battle.

 

Metamorphic mind

 

I know where I must be, I must be in hell.

Lou Reed

 

Something else is alive in me

man-shell, cocooned in dis-

Ability. When will I fly, fly away?

 

I look back on my life but I don’t

Know who that is, memory doesn’t

Fit. For the death of me I know not.

 

I know where I must be, I must

Be in hell-cell with waves of fear.

 

MELANCHOLY HAPPINESS

 

I woke this morning feeling a little blue.

My caregiver joked with me, saying hi grumpy

sourpuss. I know she means well trying to win

a smile.  As she showered me, I was thinking, why

do I feel so low, is it caused by our dreams affecting

our waking hours? But they are only figments of life. 

 

Then I thought she’s probably right you know, I live in

a somber state of melancholy happiness. It’s awful and sad

that I live in this state but how can I turn this around. 

We live with grief and suicide death, wars’ and holocaust

we are all refugees shell shocked by this planet past but

we have to live with that and find tomorrow.

 

The only way is to become better human beings and use

the word empathy more to break down the divides that exist

in humanity, I know there will always be conflict that’s

the human condition but life is becoming inhumane. 

I know that I live in a world that’s lonely and the only way

out of this hell is through writing and expressing hope. 

Here I go again trying to convince myself that there is hope

in the world, words have been my only source of hope.

 

Dark roads, along black paths

                     Finding words in a negative world

Hope on the ropes, the Taoist existence

         Is ‘darkness within darkness’

I am on John Berryman’s blind brow.

 

MURDER BALLAD

 

I woke up in the first person

A memory from childhood but

The detail I couldn’t recall, I never

Grew up in the third person

 

I forget my own mother, dad

Hadn’t much to do with me

I am just a bastard’s son.

 

My first bicycle was built from

A scrapyard, remembrance.

Why I don’t know, he was a cunt

To me gave my brother money

Laughed in my face.

 

He never gave me pocket money

Mum bought me tubes and tires but

He told me to burn a killing coat.

 

Why do I remember hurt etched

Into my broken mind?

ALMOST AN ODE

 

You got me writing a breath of new life

Nature without a soul makes it all worthwhile.

Can I step outside the physical world like you?

Can I see your flowers and feel your stone?

 

The sun it shines down on me giving me hope

Moonlight at a moon lit crest, you have lit

My reciting, The light on the stones.

 

You can’t compare this to anyone

Thing Its mine and mine alone.

DEATH ROW

 

It's hard to live

and accept death

when you've done

nothing wrong.

 

life just drives by

each day in a drive-

by pome song.

 

The leaves are green

brown and yellow

autumn is moving on

the ground is grey

and black the gutter

is there, full of man-

 

holes, here comes bin-

men to dispose.  I know

I've done nothing wrong

but ill keep singing my song.

justice is there in the corner

blind-folded but justice

is singing my song.

 

its hard to chorus this song

when you've done nothing wrong

so ill just whistle this song in

the hope that life's turns out.

 

(whistle to fade)

FUCK THIS FOR A GAME OF DARTS

 

I had to get an ambulance

to be nebulized last night

as I couldn't catch my breath.

I can't do anything on the scale

of naughtiness, to think be-

fore I lived on the scale of

naughtiness that was my

second name. today I chocked

up a train of phlegm or as

my friend called it phle-gm.

now I cant drink smoke

or fuck what can I do?

 

Is there any health trust

workers out there? or do

they all just help for 8 hours

but my disability lasts 24.

FLAW

 

While they raided a house down

The street for guns, I searched my

Mind for these words of light.  Seems

Conflict is passed through gen-

Orations like the error of memory.

‘Do you know we haven’t had one?

Day’s peace on this earth ever:  A fact.

 

It dawned on me, the strong spring sun

Shot through the flaw of glass reflecting

Colour of the door handle like the words

Of Lou Reed came alive, ‘Different colours

Made of tears’.  A hologram of light,

 

A mixture of memory in a rainbow of pomes.

The colours of everything I’d ever seen reflected

Of a door handle.  Shot through like a glance

Of every pome I ever wrote shining for me

And for you, if you look?  Grief will always

Catch up with you so let humanity flow.

HOPE

 

Don't believe the hype

                     Public Enemy

 

Remember humanity forget the rest.

Christmas is the crows outside

scavenging on our overindulgence.

 

The black flock fly off into black

and blue, night and day just drift

away and xmas is no more.

We fall back into cope and the birds

fly free up above us.

 

Evolution stands still and the capitalist

invisible being takes control to leave us

broke again and again but we hope

you have a wonderful christmas day.

 

On this day you can't be blue you have

to be red and tinsel white, yes! I am an english-

man who doesn't like being told what to do.

Ive been called scrooge and the grinch so

I'll take my mile into my inch and be

on my merry way. 

HEALTH CARE 2013

 

Caregivers don't care

they just want to get in-

to your home to get out,

of your home and go home.

 

There's no physio or O.T.

therapy, we haven't got

the money and you

haven't the scope, hope.

 

There is no wheelchair

taxis in your area and it's

ninety-four pounds to Belfast

return please.  I haven't seen

a social worker in months.

 

What ever happened to the dis-

ability forum, disability action

there's no re-action down here.

HEART-SHAPED VERMILLION RED

 

I woke this morning, reached out

and the snippets of dreams began

to fade sneaking through the curtain

dancing out of the corner of my eye

 

Re-tracing my flesh as if brushing

away sleep, I found one of your hairs,

teased it out like a golden thread

searching for the eye of the needle,

stitched it to memory and felt

your touch penetrate be-

neath the skin.

 

with the beginning of this poem

in mind, I stumbled for a pen

threw back the covers to reveal

heart-shaped vermilion red, the dark

outline following the contours of flesh

with the precision of an artist's brush-

stroke as if I had known you inside out.

 

Still moist in my mind, your kiss.

HYPERION 2 (the magic hand of chance)

I dreamed I dropped a cigarette

And there was nothing I could do,

Only lay there paralyzed and watch

The place go up in smoke.

My right side is lifeless listless dead.

I lay and watched the carpet burn like

A picture on the screen. I watched

The things in front of me slowly dis-

Appear like the light was taken from

My eyes, like Keats watching his own death.

Two hundred years in front of me

And I just watch it burn, I had to find

A way in for our words to burn, I live

Out here in yesterday but its today I fear.

His old right hand lay nerveless listless dead

Shadows of the magic hand of chance.

Why should I open my melancholy eyes?

Blazing Hyperion in his orbed fire, darkened place.

Dreams of death and darkness death and darkness

Monstrous forms, effigies of pain. There are

A thousand signs of purer life, receive the truth

And let it be your balm.

LIVESTOCK

 

My breakfast cereal

of cornflakes and Weetabix

was in a bigger bowl like

 

a bucket of pig swill

tipped into a troth in

the middle of a field.

MASTER BATE

 

He cannot be a father

he cannot be a son

he can't be just a dying man

that helps his dying son.

 

his hands are tied behind

his back and his legs are

crippled lack.  he sits there

on poverties throne with-

in his wheelchair home.

 

He used to be a son

and a brother even

some-ones lover,

now he spends his

lonely days trying

to recover.

 

This isn’t a master

bate its a real date

with me.  I know

I repeat myself

talking to the wall.

 

I know this is my

living death

and I must walk

to crawl, I woke up

in a child’s mind

not rising

to fall.

I WROTE THIS FOR ALL OF YOU THAT GIVE ME HOPE!

POETRY LIKE SUNSHINE IS FREEE

Not necessary just to live but to feel.

FERNANDO PESSOA

People need to realize

Poetry like sunshine is free

It goes beyond toxic femininity

Macho war it touches on humanity

Like nothing else on earth.

It’s not crypto, religo, it wont

Make you one of the few. It’s

Not a simulation of re-in-care-

Nation, it’s not my big brother

From a brave world, not new

Its not this and not that.

Live it and it will live in you, it can

drag you from your darkest hour

and that’s a big brush, thank you

for your likes they mean so much

to me. I don’t have much in my life

but I can live with that, poetry.

JUST IS.