PHOETRY

A WELL-DEFINED EXPRESSION

 

1.          Basho had nature

and seasons to walk, I cut

bedbound disability.

 2.          Of all the songs in

All the world this one rhythm’s up 

twice in one day.

 

 HALF-DOOR DAWN

 

At the half door dawn, from

Kavanagh’s ditch came a fox

Looking at A. Fox. Keats guided

Me with a magic hand of chance

and a negative capability.

 

Lowell and Stevens said ‘yet

Why not say what happened.

The theory of poetry is theory

Of life’. Raymond Carver caught

My breath and I caught his.

 James Simmons had Muckish 

Portmuck over his shoulder.

Michaux and Pessoa showed me

Living with feeling. To these great

Men like fathers, I homage. Loving

Them all the way back to the source.

 

Enrapture encapture me,

ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL

Meditate-E.T.A,

it-dem-ension, deep

Focus, brain fuel 

morpho-genetic

 A CULL-AGE OF WORDS

I’M NOT IN YOUR GANG

 

Are we going to put up

With U.S.A.U.K-RAIN

Double standards.

I haven’t voted in years 

and still, you make me 

feel dirty and corrupted.

You’re taking away my

Human rights I am not

A black op’s sabotage.

I am not in your gang,

My mother used to say

Honesty is the best policy. 

Leave my policy alone please, 

don’t be sleazy. I have standards 

you have none, we are letting

These people drag 

us through the dirt.

MICK-MUCK

For Michael

 

I served up a bowl

Of bile to my care-

Giver wheeze, rattle

Free cool, he said

as only a caregiver would.

 

My air waves hadn’t been

That free in twenty years.

No wonder I was turning

Muck to gold, I was carrying

Around that muck for 20-

 

Years. I wheezed words out

And rattled down my food

chocking everyday making

me sick. I told them for years

 that I couldn’t get it up, only

 

now am I on their script.

morpho-

genetic

FIRST AND LAST

 

My room smelt like

a Maternity ward

Infantile blues woke

up this morning with

dummy-tit trans-

parency bard-o.

 

Sucking up to no-one

but me to be woke up

with a childhood rattle-

beat rattling like death

in my throat.

VICE-

 

This is getting out of the big hands

Of 20:20, am I being hacked like Liz?

I have not a thing to hide, poetry like

Sunshine is free, I’ve got the infan-

Tile blues a wee man syndrome.

 

Nonchalantly I lie here bedbound like

A shadow of my former SELf self.

 

A lower case of being but being BIG

AND BOLD, my words will follow me

Under ground or vice-versa. Gripped

By the divided mind over matter.

 

This is all that matters, locked-in

@21:12.

 DONE PLAYING IN THE MUCK

 

The tree needs wind to grow just like

I need suffering to know, this is

A suffering hell-cell but suffering

gives me health, being well.

 

For twenty years I’ve been digging

Up the past, my memory is in the dirt

And I’m the last, to know.

 

Even then I don’t know if it’s true

No children, wife. Childhood to reboot

All I know is down in the roots, the wind

Is suffering humankind.

 

It twists and morphs into my mind, in-

fantile.

 MAINLINE DOUBLE DUNT

 

Its 16:16 and I’m on the double daunt

Again, born in 61’ and I am sixty-one

So said the covid flu jab nurse.

 

Double digits rule my life accidently

On purpose pomes flow like blood

Through my veins. Mainline home.

THE NAMLESS ONE

 

I can’t remember days before 2005

the day I took a stroke, everything

since is made-up nonsense but

I have to create a world where I can

exist in oneness, being as they say.

 

I am as fed up as you in a written mumble

but what else can I do, life is just like suicide.

Let’s be honest the dogs honest, there’s no point

to my life I can live with that.

 

I’ve lived with this for twenty years, I’m just going

on feeling not meaning like a spider or a mouse.

There’s a weeping woman in the hallway

Grieving for me. I’m impotent disabled paralyzed.

I live in this reality, don’t recall a family.

 

The poems have to be about me or the moment

As they are momentous, I live in a default loop

The boy from elsewhere. My fathers buried up

There on the black hills but we can’t find his plot

Even that could be a lie he died as he lived unknown.

 

Big Jim, John, Sean, Fox or Irvine, I don’t even know

My name he had so many aliases all I know is that he

Was a bastard from Belfast my mother was Pat Keogh

And that’s good enough for me, you can’t beat

The truth or is it all a lie.

 

It feels good to get this of my chest, it’s like

Pressing a refresh button a new-clear way

Its not Russia or Uk-rain. I stand on my own

Two feet.

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?

 

Poems are moment-us-moments

and this is my unadopted kingdom.

 NEWSPEAK BIG BROTHER

 

Tears fall like bombs on the cheeks of humanity

Imploding Peace spoke by Jeffrey Sachs and Tulsi

Gabbard. I used to go to the BBC for a fair minded

Broadcasting a shadow of horrible truth but we

live now in a NATO security state.

 

Where my utterance falls like newspeak, I don’t

Seem to matter anymore. Where is all the Anti-

War and the climate warriors the world is being

Raped/pillaged while you look on nonchalant.

 

I have to dive into the Dive, Moats or Redacted

To Breakthrough into a podcast semblance

Of truth and still these voices go off unheard

As if were all tripping on nuclear fallout pills,

 

I have been posting for months now this image

that says ‘Life is peace there is nothing else, De-

Mili-Tear-eyes’, my eyes are burning sadness

Your capitalist greed is fueling this war.

 

The ordinary man is on the streets protesting

No fuel to go to work to feed their families.

What ever happened to basic human rights

Get your head out and look around.

 

Don’t blame everything on Russia/Ukrain

Their brothers they’ll sort it out it goes

Back thousands of years, NATO get your

Nose out where it doesn’t belong, Hunter

 

Biden started this war with porn and drug

Fueled nonsense and his Dad is going to finish

can’t you see were being played.

This is a fallout con-

Script prescription

Signed by

 

BIG DADDY

 

 Alchem-psyche

Coming out of dreams and we are coming

Back to dreams.

                      Bill Callahan

 

Individuation independent man-

child on the bridge to self, apatheia

as above so below. Intuitive know-

ledge on the dung heap of history.

 

One is all and all is one, Diamon

not demon. On the tightrope

 of literature, the abyss a black 

blacker than blackhole, melancholy 

way.

 

Mandala of circumambulation

So within as without, death re-

Birth ceremonious. Transform

from dead stones to living

philosophical stone.

 

In filth it will be found, turn

this muck to gold, active

imagination.

 ABSOLUTE RHYTHM

The first poem I published was called ‘Bastard life’

it held my syllable truth, the weight and emotion of what happened. 

I saw that weight in the words of Raymond Carver, Patrick

Kavanagh, Robert Lowell, and James Simmons. 

 

When I was a schoolboy, I heard words of absolute rhythm

falling into a trance when the teacher spoke words from 

Julius Caesar. I have seen those words on the streets of Belfast,

 words of Shakespearean sonnets and Gulliver’s travels, I felt 

them in my heart.

 

Ezra pound said:  I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm’, a rhythm 

that is in poetry. Which corresponds exactly to the emotion or

 shade of emotion to be expressed.

 

I had no interest in school, English and art were the only subjects

that held my attention,  I couldn’t get my dyslexic head around

 math’s and figures.  I remember walking into a math’s exam.

 Writing my name at the top of the page and walking out 

and walking home through the fields of freedom, getting four 

percent for neat writing that for me was a pass.

 

I regret it now but that was the weight of my emotional truth

so no regrets that was my emotional choice my first free 

thought not Dad, you needed math and English to pass. 

I just wanted to get out in the world and stand

on my own two feet.  

I had spent the first years of my life under a bastard life rule,

I wanted to taste freedom and boy did I taste it, that’s why

I’m in a wheelchair now. 

 

The weight of my life is sometimes very difficult to carry 

as you know from my writing. I write my truth and it hurts

 sometimes, words of truth find their own rhythm and form. 

The ones who helped me take the negativity and turn it around, 

they help me today to find the source the struggling weight

of words to turn this world around.  

‘Yet why not say what happened, wrote the great 

Robert Lowell in life studies.

 

I was born in Kent, England, the son of a bastard son, 

my father from Belfast and my mother from Dublin.  

I had a bittersweet duality; my mother was goodness 

personified and my father was a bastard. 

He was on my back from day one, my aim in life 

was to get away from all these authoritarian regimental 

bastards get them of my back, to get there I had to go through 

school teachers, headmasters, police, the army,

priests, perverts, and a right a wing system. 

 

Aged sixteen after hitting my father and all these reprobates 

a dig in the head and putting him down never again to lay 

his hands on me, I walked out and hopped

a train to London, never to look back.

 

 

I daydreamed a vibe-

rant butterfly in a blackhole

event horizon.

ALL OF US

Rereading Raymond Carvers collected poems: 

‘All of us. His memory is sometimes too much 

for me to handle. Jealousy consumes me knowing

I have no long-term memory.

 

Carvers magic at capturing the mundane ordinariness 

of life and making it bloom. I wish I could

Remember like, he, was going

To say he did but he's here with me

So he does linger on in all of us.

 LAST NIGHT

Was I being buzzed

back into life or was it

other way round.

                       Are we just blue power

                       cells on the tip of my tongue

                       ever-ready sound.

Life is an electro-

shock treatment am I lost

or am I found?

                         

                     

WHAT GOES AROUND POMES 

AROUND ANOTHER CENTURY   

I believe in an 'absolute rhythm', a rhythm 

that is in poetry, which corresponds precisely to

 the emotion or shade of emotion 

                                  to be expressed.

                                                                EZRA POUND

In two thousand five, I took a massive stroke that almost killed

me; in fact, for a moment, I died, and they gave me a brain, and I

 sat upright like the exorcist. My son leaned to kiss goodbye to kiss

 me and saw my face reflected in his eyes. I looked like a holocaust

 survivor. The stroke paralyzed my right, and I was unable to walk

 or talk; I saw the words coming through my mind, but no words.

 Came out of my mouth. This is 

stroke so-called recovery. It erased

 my left brain and forty-five years 

of memory. this is how our good

 Christian care un-care. Con-

insultants looking down at me,

 waiting for me to choke to choke

to death. I realized their snobbery.

The only one to fix me was me.

They put me down for tracheotomy to fix my vocal cords and peg--

feed me. My friend called to eat yoghurt; I asked if I could try it.

My swallow managed the texture. They didn't like you to have 

a mind of your own. The N.H.S. is riddled with upper-class

 assholes. They look good with the stethoscope around their necks.

 Can you walk and talk? I wanted to tell you. I'm fucking

 paralyzed. What to fuck of your own planet are you on. I asked my friends 

to take me to a fast food cut, a burger, and a milkshake my body

 took the energy nutrients, the peg feed was cancelled, and I

 refused the tracheostomy. These assholes are driving people to

 suicide. Ask, don't tell.

Nobody told me what to do. I knew my body. These assholes didn't

 even see that brain injury caused a no-minds eye, and it was

 diagnosed in 1508 Aphantrauma Aphantasia, this is our mental

 health, sad. they don't like you to have a mind of your I found 

out on YouTube watching a guy talking to a neurologist

after two suicide attempts, unable to see his dead mother in his

 mind; the man said you have a thing called aphantasia. Just a

 name 

In their studies, Marguerite Dumas and Alaina FField said that

 only by knowing can you see the light. When you find yourself in 

a hole at the bottom of a hole, you realize only writing can save

 you. I am compelled to find forms in a formless world, hope in

 hopeless ville.

How many thousands have committed suicide, and the mental

 psyche team asked, will you hurt yourself had no clue. They toss

 you out to live a suicidal tendency. What a sad state, as John

 Berryman called the blind brow. I live on that ledge. As Lou Read

 said, down is up,

                         linger on!

Soman-traverse is my way through poe-art music, I have no sense

of time living a twenty-year moment with no past future, now 

and now like Ted Hughes in A Fox Thought but this is 

A Fox thought. I recall remember only what I write like

                             

                            A VERBAL MEMORY

truth be told

1.

 

Dad was a conman gunman, a British soldier 

I.R.A. killer. He didn't know the meaning 

of the word oath, left England, my birthplace

and returned to Ireland, Belfast, in 67'to get 

away from a gang of thugs.

 

A bigot I loved to hate the bastard; he tore

my mother's heart; they say the Kray twins 

were after him. That's how big a bastard he

was; we lived in the east end of London. 

He was a deep, secretive man, so we will never 

know, he took it to the grave.

We can't even find his plot on the black hills over-

looking at the violently divided city. N.I. was

the best place to hide; he died before the peace 

process, and he was riddled with hate. My father and I

never spoke and avoided eye contact. 

I had my mother's humanity in me. He died 

as he lived unknown in Jim, John, Joseph, 

Sean Fox or Irvine. I don't even know

my real name.

 

He didn't like the sensitivity and wanted me to

Be a cold-blooded killer like him, but I detested 

war and  killing, the first years of my life were 

spent on the streets of Belfast, I was a wild child.

 

Dad got out of jail on bail, one of the longest 

detainees in Ireland, nine months in the Crum. 

He went on the run, and Mum said I was to go.

Expelled from school for trying to burn it 

to the ground, got caned by the bat, head-

master 24 times with a thin bamboo, so I broke

Twenty-four windows. Only for the troubles

I would have been sent to St. Patrick's boys' home.

 

My father went across the border to a cottage

Used by the I.R.A. to run guns, two rooms, no

Electric, toilet or running water, that cottage

Took all the hatred out of me just knowing

That the whole world was not at war.

 

He got a job in Dundalk and left me with

The dog Muttley who had one eye and three

Legs beaten by British army rifle butts left for

Dead. Left for eight hours a day with no food

Only dog food, what a bastard.

 

I have written these days so I'll try to say

What you don't know, my mother came

how could you let your own son eat a dog

food, he's walking alive, she deloused me

and rented a proper home and school.

 

Still a little wild left school aged fifteen

And ran away to London to get away

From regimental ogre home rule at last

I beat the bastard and ran to my mothers

Sister Aunt Peggy.

 

It was the best move I ever made was to de-

Ported back to Ireland to rob a factory.

I was young and had no sense went to see mum

And went to Dublin aged eighteen freeeee.

 

2.

 

I had umpteen jobs from binman, engineer,

Lorry driver, screen printer, and electronic engineer. 

Told my wife I didn't want to work ever again, hated 

being used and wanted to be a writer, family friends 

said I was mad, but I knew something was in me; one 

of my poems were published.

 

Sent three to the poet's house, was accepted

For a two-week poetry retreat, I felt magic in

Before I left the poet's house, James Simmons

Asked me to study for a scholarship in creative

Writing. I said Jimmy, I haven't even got O' level, 

he said don't worry.

 

Send me ten poems and an essay on poetry

I will send it to Lancaster University. I Levi-

dated all the way home, the poems were

Accepted by Lapwing Press for a chapbook.

Got M.A. to set up a creative writing class

 

At the local library, give others the chance

That Jimmy gave me. Didn't know how smart

I was. Applied for a job at the Arts Center. I began 

to write the day my father died. As I said, you

Can be a bastard but don't ever be a cunt!

 

That bastard held my confidence back for six-

teen years was accepted. I Have published ten 

books of poetry, prose, and anthologies of up-

and-coming writers who have published 

their own work and set up workshops.

 

What goes around poems around, wow

Jimmy, I'll never forget you. Peace and poetry

floored the Da; stick that in your peace 

pipe; I'm starting to remember to forget.