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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.
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.
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 1st, 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.
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.
