REMEMBERING NOT TO FORGET

   

Poetry is like sunshine it's free

http://adrianfox.org/

Lou, lou, lou

Lou, lou, lou you had true conviction.

Your songs were evolution pollution

The reason for me living

In your solution.

You took me beyond reason

To the point of no return.

Lost in shell shock treatments

Not in stroke down blues.

I heard your walk in 74’ and your lingo

Changed my life forever, no longer

A little boy in Shawaddy Waddy fever.

I fell on the floor like the man

Who fell to earth, I lost my virginity

To a Bowie /Reed score.

New city blues took no prisoners.

My velvety velvet under-ground

Reverberating sounds.  No rules

Or regulations no nouns and vowels

Just mean streets that reflected

My scene like ‘I’ll be your mirror’.

All these memories are grooves

On vinyl and sleeves, Johnny the fox

Meets Jimmy the weed.

Is this a Beckett play?

People and places leave traces

But detailed memory is gone.

Like a jet-stream disappears in blue

I’m here in hell writing words so true.

The scene is jogging memory like

A header or a footer, a margin of life.

I’m here right in the thick of it all

Middling a moment-us moment

Even if it ends up in smoke.

I just can’t put my finger on it.

Mingling with clouds and it’s gone.

It was a line that kept me straight

Now I’m back in blue.  Another

Appears like the fin of fish, mac-

Reel, you keep casting in and out.

I’m standing on a wooden pier, shivering

Dripping wet.  Cold jelly fish stings

My father is telling me to get back in

They’ll do you no harm, now get back in

Or I’ll throw you in, time is flying by.

I’m at Gyles quay, it’s cold, I’m young, in sun.

Is this a Beckett play going in and out?

Of memory or did I steal the stage.

OR-GASM?

I woke up in a wet dream.

A wet dream I can’t recall.

She never even gave me

A flicker of life, snippet.

I was left in the dark

Groping for a stylus

Touch-pen, fingering

The rim for a start button

Like an erog-in-us zone.

Seems all I’ve got is a kindle-

Fire to light up my dull day

And make this pome come

Like it never happened.

BLUE MONDAY

I think it was a Friday

In a blue Volkswagon Beetle out-

side of it don’t matter where.

Blue Monday was on the radio

And I had to pull over to hear

That beat.  It was a new day

Back then in nineteen eighty

Something, the radio was

Held up by an ammo box.

So the brit told me at the border

He pulled me over at the galvanized

Fortress.  Those days are gone 

Thank fuck! , it’s all one now.

Dublin to Belfast in a peaceful

Land on a Blue Monday.

CRUS-I-FIX

The monkey-pole hangs

Over the bed like a noose

Hanging there in space

Like a Salvador Dali

Crus-I-fix.

Was it real?

Was it true?

Everything has a grain

Of truth running through.

Hope in despair

Lost in care

Returning to

Infancy

Wheel-chair

Disability.

Where is empathy?

Somewhere out there

Out there somewhere

Is the color blue true

It makes reality real.

This pome is just

A moment us moment.

Not a poem.

STILL LIFE

The ethics of medicine left me here

without memory dreams or imagination

This is a blank verse by a man-shell.

I bought a Bodhran to beat the blues

But couldn’t beat a rhythm.

In the stroke of lost memory

all I got is dark and light.

Shadow beats out from my heart

not yet willing to depart my

Lonely sad blues. 

My hope in words to find in me

 a pulsating rhythm that finds

its way from source, negative

capability, hope from

a dead poet.

This is a metamorphose nocturne

A change from light to dark.

Shade encroaches everything casts

A darkness down.  Words go down

Almost drown, a pomes kiss of life.

i have to live in this hell cell because

a cruel entity exists in your heaven.

That isn’t very Christian, humane.

When will we have the ethics of humanity?

DOING THE BOOKS

‘There is no easy way down’

                                Mark Eitzel

I cried every night my dad was out in a gun-

Battle, a sensitive boy.  I would have done any-

Thing for my father but kill, he asked me one

day to prime a bomb in the boot of a car. 

I said no and walked away.

He cheered like he scored a goal

Watching the shooting results (news).

18 soldiers dead they said, they were sons

Of mothers, I said and left my dinner

and walked out.  My father was an ignorant

Bastard.

I’m now doing his time, the longest

Detainee in Ireland.  Held under a special powers act

on her majesty’s service, the same service that holds

me under a welfare wheelchair.  My days are numbered

this is my inheritance.  You can fight for civil rights but

you can never kill, there’s two sides to every story.

The first poem I had published in a magazine was called:

 ‘Bastard life’, I’m balancing the books.

THE MAN WITH NOTHING ON HIS MIND BUT ART

The man with nothing on his mind but art.

Hopelessness is a daily chore, suicide is

His only friend.  Art weighs things up-

And down, no god, no mother

No country.  Art has saved his soul

He lives in a black hole at the center

Of his uni-verse.

Memory is a twisted wreck of art.

THE WAVES

‘remember humanity forget the rest’
Bertrand Russell

The world has been in a negative cycle
Hurtling backwards through a crusade.
A child washed up on a beach like
A wild-life film scene of future/past.

A downward current causes this motion
The waves undulate a cycle, life-death
stalls this emotion, an upward perspective.

The people aren’t spongers, asylum seekers
They are just humans from another mindset.
Negativity makes us see
A bigger picture.

DIS-

‘imperfection is the language of art’

                                                   Robert Lowell

I don’t want pity or sentimentality.

Turn away from a turn away society

Locked in a locked in disability

Taught to love angel perfection.

Love my flaws my imperfection

Look up to wheelchair emotion.

We are on this ground not yet

Up in heaven, the miracle of life

Is in humanity.  Reach out warm

Truthful hands, break the stigma

Disability holds.  Separate the syl-

Labels, let life unfold!

We have the ability.

THE BLIND BROW

For John Berryman

I live a poetic cycle.

Keats, Carver, Kavanagh.

An ode to life, pure gravy

On Grand Canal bank (the dodder)

My mother the mountain.

In a love mode, without

a member to distort life.

I wake to find a purpose

Imaginative loco-

Motion.

I catch the 9 am from there.

Jump on a roll of die

never know where I end.

Never know where I’m going

never know where I’ve been.

Sometimes it’s so eerie out there

It’s like living on Berryman’s brow.

This is an ode to life without

The human gene.

I wear a sullen false face

Like a un-Cheshire cat

My smile turned upside down.

It’s an accidently on pure-

Pose pome, I don’t know if this is even

A pome in higgledy piggeldy form. 

A barren lonely land-

Scape, a stage from

Waiting for Godot.

I’ve been waiting a life-

Time and ten years

On this lonely plat-

Form.

THE END

We can’t escape the truth.

I was never a good liar

Never wanted to be like dad

a lying bastard.  Two things

You need to know, my father

was left on a doorstop

in Belfast.  My mother was

a Keogh from Dublin.

I heard the key pad shuffle

From deep within sleep.

After the usual, ‘good morning

Did you sleep well’?  I woke to

Two careers rolling me back

And forth into a paralyzed day.

I stood on the steady to get

Into my wheelchair way.

One of the girls joked it was

Her anniversary and she was

Was 28 years dead?  It’s strange

How memory sparks memory

From deep in a locked in syndrome.

 

I stood way back then in 1984.

Standing in the room of con-

Tentment.  The sound of my mothers

Knitting needles clacking out the rhythm

Of this unrhyme, a drum-roll drama

And father leafing the newspaper.

Me rabbiting on about my future wedding.

Just when you think all is great, then there

was a policeman’s knock like thunder?

There I was walking the long hall to the shape

In the frosted glass door.  Unsheathed his hat

He said ‘is your dad home’, ‘it’s unofficial said

I, don’t worry’.  We stood in silence listening

‘Your daughters have been searching for years’.

The knitting dropped and that was the end

Of that, a thirty two year wedding and six

Children scattered to four ill winds.

TRUTH IS BEAUTY

A Keatsian philosophy helps me

Through the day.

His negative capability gives to

Me my say.

Coffee, toast and tablets, push

The essential loneliness away.

Giving rise to his art his thought

Shunting suicide a stray.

His art is a warm grasping hand

That reaches out and in, one

Hundred year old poetry

That feeds today.  

The man of the moment I found

your one true way.

CASCADE

Without memory he felt detached.

He remembered people and places

Like his friends and family but with-

Out the bond of memory, he felt re-

Moved like life without the emotion.

He couldn’t even remember his own

Childhood or Christmas’s’ with his

Own children.  He looked out at time

Going by, even the washing machine

Stopped its cycle at that moment.

The world was moving but his world

Spun in slow motion, he pinned all

His hope on his children, his dead

Mother and suicide sister.  Hope

Was the memory he never had?

Memory only lived for a moment

Then his moment was gone.

Life drifts on to the next moment

And memory lives on.  You decide

The pleasure or pain, you hear rain

Cascade through your window pane.

U-GERN-I

I remember a flicker of memory

Outside myself, then forgotten.

I will have to write it down in future

And give myself another name.

A name that suits my former self

In wheelchair shadowed shame.

What do you call someone who

Has no memory and lives day to day.

Nergui means no name in Mongolian.

To comprehend in English, ill create

An anagram of the name, U-gern-i.

U-gern-i looked out the window

and thought like he had for the last

ten years, ‘will I kill myself today’

he asked himself.  His dead sister

and mother was strong in his mind.

As if they’re memory was manipulating

His actions, creating a truth that flowed

Like a well of reality.  He drank from this

Pure well creating clarity in his mind.

The well strengthened him like a shield

Against the dark blows of the past.

There is no right or wrong, he told himself

And his past spilt like his present, creating

A future of truth.  ‘You must give to get’

He told himself, the memory was forgotten

But his meaning was there to carry him

Through another day.

A TINGE OF AUTUMN MEMORY

A tinge of autumn memory

Is on the leaves, on the tree

Outside my window

Branching off into the ethereal sky.

Picking up messages of time

Antenna, Ariel riding waves of sea-son.

Hope rebounds of grey sky

Sending a pulse to its form

Rooting death to truth the living

Man-ipu-late me.  To branch off

Into unknown realms of beauty-

Truth, to be not the man-

Of the moment, to know

Not who I am.

The leaves are tinkling mon-

Soon rain then dying down.

CLONED

I cannot find the rhythm of this

crippled left handed stroke.

I used to take tablets to fly high

Now I take them just to get by:

Aspirin to stop the blood clot in me

Pro-prano-lol to calm me down, Lofe-

pra- mine to pick me up.  Sim vas-stat-

in to regulate, Baclofen to stop the Elvis

from shake rattle and rolling in me.

Nurofen for head-aches-red round the head

Cyclizine for slow motion sickness, Zopiclone

To die a little every-day.

I don’t know what the others do Gaviscon, Lax-

Ido and long sounding names.  16 tablets

A day-8 day and night with tea and toast.

Loose and blister-packed they strewn my break-

Fast table.  I’m cloned into dreaming darkness

in this un-tempo time.  Now-where did I put

that pen to write down what keeps me a-

live and delves much deeper than me.

NEW CLEAR WASTE

I was born into a beat ‘em’ up culture.

‘A kick in the ass does you no harm’!

Paddy, Mick or Richard, Dick

A little English Irish boy.

My father was first in line, the bastard

Said I was a sensitive soul.  I would love

To see him now and shove my books

In his ignorant face and say poets are

Meant to be sensitive

his death has made me write.

A little English boy at an Irish school
in a playground of hard-man banter.

I faced it head on every day, at first I took

the beatings, once I got used their hard man banter

being harder than they’re kicks.  I said fuck this

and kicked back, I kicked them up and down

the pad to waste ground.

I always had in me my mother’s humanitarian

golden rule of to do no one any harm. 

Until this day I have lived by that rule that’s why

I’m still here today.  I think there was a list of boys

who wanted piece of the pie.
I fought at break-time

dinner and home-time teaiI
hadnt time to eat cold toast
on the streets is where

I done my learning.  My mother
also taught me

Always to have respect and never let anyone

Stand in your way.  I would never be a bastard

Like dad.  I didn’t like where it took me at times

Lost in rage I could kill.  One day on the way home

One of the best fighters was out to get me.

Shoving me from behind, I said leave me alone

I don’t want to fight, I said three times to leave me

Then he pulled the hood of my parka coat.

I kicked him up and down that street.

My mum had to save for that coat
my friends had to pull me off him
lost in that rage of kill.

‘They are only boys having a laugh’!
I got a kicking off my dad at home
for ripping a good coat, hypocrite.

A NAMELESS POME

Negative capability gives me empathy

Not to dance with Peggy Suicide.

The world outside is inside, commerce

Drives up and down.  Beyond

The pyramid of hope.

The outside world doesn’t impact me

It only comes through my door to care.

I have no memory anymore, it don’t matter

My world is these six rooms, you see.

I go back and forth, forth and back

Zooming round a pyramid of hope.

This is my roundabout city, I came here in 76’

And I’m still going round my balancing lakes.

New-city is the center of my uni-

Verse, giving me rooms to breathe.

My event horizon, a nameless pome

Dark within dark.

NO MANS LAND

They say the first five years

Are crucial to a child’s survival.

I woke this morning with these

Thoughts, not images, as if

This pome was plucked from

The dreamt darkness, pre 1969.

Before the troubles swept us

All away, my father was a dad

back then.  He walked into a room

as if he owned it, carrying

a Friday night treat for his wife

and young family.

I didn’t see to many magic moments

After that.  Once in no man’s land

When he was going on the run in a white

Vauxhall victor, my heart pumping

Awaiting the license for Jim, Joe, john

Or Sean.  His life was a lie, as we

Crossed the border he reached across

The bench front seat and ran his fingers

through my hair.

 Now I feel like I was just another inanimate

Car-part, a tool that got him over a white line. 

I was just a boy, he was just a gun running man

A bastard child.   Running from the brits and I ran

From my wildness, my mum knew, she

Saved my life, ‘it will be safer at the border

With a boy’, she said.  We hardly spoke

That whole journey, we hardly spoke in life.

A journey spent dreamt in darkness

Locked-in doing his time.

DROP-ZONE

I’m here in the hospital foyer
Beyond the quiet room.
A space for everyone but
No access for my wheelchair.

The grey and black rooks hold
The black and grey skies.
I’m bored out of my skull, here
Among ground down butts
And gum, smoking my empty
Brains out.

The charge on my wheelchair
Is dropping from green, orange,
Red, no go. Memory is hard
To grasp for half a man
Without memory. Memory
is a moment of people?
Coming and going, I steal
From the chatter at the coffee
stand, no access.

Met an ugly cunt in the lift, maybe
It was my reflection, stroke ward
dark, an I.V. machine shoots out
purple and green light pulsing.

Sam is so confused he rambles like
A buzz light-year toy but
I see hope in his dark
Trajectory. Humour goes to
Infinity and beyond the liver-
Pool care path way, ethics.

RESPITE NON-CHALANT SUB-STANCE

He woke under a layer of stippled darkness

projected from behind his eyes like a womb-

Dream gone wrong, the stain of death left

over from the process of sorrow.

Left him feeling like a shell shocked

soldier from world war one.

When he blinked three times

like Dorothy in Oz It disappeared.

Alive, he looked up to see two careers

roll him into place, washed and dressed

in his wheelchair, breakfast by the window. 

No longer looking up from a see-through

coffin at the sprinkling of grief scattered

with a red rose tear.

For over ten years now he had lived this non-

chalant moment, that word fitted so well it comes

from another language seems like another time. 

This locked-in-syndrome moment goes round

and round on a loop of loneliness.

He feels like the character from Hubert Selby’s ‘The room’,

 in his hell cell and the way W.B. Yeats  felt in his later years

depressed and desire less.  Even god don’t live in his real reality

no one or thing was to blame, the stroke was in his genes

his Mother had five strokes. 

He was not bitter enough to stick coat hangers up anyone’s ass

anyway he was not a manipulator or a depressed older poet.

This was life, he woke from the coma/stroke seconds

after they declared him dead, switched off the life support. 

I suppose you’re fed up hearing this and he is fed up saying

But shit happens, that’s his sub-stance. 

He looked into the grey sky and thought

Crying is just like laughing, remembering

respite on the stroke ward with his friend.

There was so much sorrow all they could do was laugh

Like two soldiers in the trenches facing death.

It was so sad it brought tears of joy

the head nurse even thought he was crying.

He thought the Bristol stools chart was a menu.

He smiled and laughed out loud, remembering

Life’s happy/sadness.

THE DOGS HONEST TRUTH

We live in a wobbly, stoned, corrupt world of escapism and disability.

Half the world wants to forget us, get high and shove 

us into a pile of inhumanity.

I was a stoner just like you but now dis is my ability.  

Dis- disabled bungalow and my wheel-

chair are my home now. 

I must accept that I am from a broken society.  Respite for me is a stroke ward

where I can feel the empathy of humane nurses and crew

that need a medal trying to mend a broken down society.

I was getting headaches and my voice was thicker harder to under-

stand so my doctor admitted me on Thursday afternoon.

I didn’t want to be there for the weekend but

 my M.R.I. scan was booked for Monday.

A stroke ward is a sad depressing place, so sad all you can do is find a happy-

sadness that stops you from slashing your wrists.  Waking everyday

to a beds eye view of stroke victims.  Empathy is what is needed, we need

to find the balance between escapism and disability.

Disability is life for millions, don’t tuck us away from the public eye.

Don’t coral us into an enclosure hidden in a fenced in world.

Don’t brush us out of society, we are societies broken needs.

The world needs to know we exist

broken but still part of this world.

We need worth, you can’t escape the fact that we are broken.

STREET DÉCOR

Fishing for memory:
They bombed the paint factory
And the sweet factory. We were 
eating trolley loads of butterscotch sweets
for months, the Saracens came round
one corner military green and the next street
they were red, blue, yellow, pink and black
bet ya even the brits laughed.
Blending in street décor like cartoon Saracen's
gone wrong.

Other days they hijacked bread and Maine
soft drinks lorries and burnt them for barricades.
Not a bit of wonder they fart like thunder
Barney Hughes bread, it sticks to you belly
like lead, so the rhyme goes.

One day on the way to school they bombed
A chemist shop and we looted it like scavengers.
I got bomb damaged lipstick and mascara
and gave it to my form teacher
I had a mad crush on her
miss Ferris.

WAR AND POETRY

War and poetry

Has been my life.

The oppression 

Of words but now

They are free

To live in peace.

MAN-SHELL

I don’t remember my children but
I know they are men now. My ex-
Wife was showing me photographs
From Christmas’s past, It felt like
Someone else. I loved them
And know they loved me.

Sometimes I feel like the missing
Link, in between this and that.
I can feel that you three found
Your feet through me, now its
Your turn to crawl. You walked
All over me.

Now I am un-walking un-talking
The man-shell of a child but
I can hear the sea, it’s free.

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

A free form in a man-

Shell without memory.

Un-remember war, hurt

No blame game.

PLACEBO-EFFECT

The cold black sea waits for me, me, me’

                                                                       Lou Reed

The bones of life and death are a placebo effect, 

beyond our comprehension, one that we don’t know 

and I don’t want to know, mystery builds another 

pome filled with love and truth for humanity.  It 

woke me from the grip of death, love and truth 

brought me back from the dead, the bond of love for 

my children was so strong.  For ten years I have been 

on a journey through limbo to find myself and I’ve 

found something beyond me, armed with a negative 

capability I broke through the darkness into a 

placebo-effect, a time and a place that doesn’t need 

to be questioned, a place of wonder.  Something else 

is alive out there like a sword of Damocles hanging 

above my head, stroke took away my memory, I 

recall people and places but detail was erased.

When I awoke from the stroke seconds after they 

switched off my life support and declared me dead.  I 

woke like a zom-me, man-shell, and the word 

positive was the only form floating through my mind.  
To this day I have been using that term in the form 

of pomes and art to cut through this awful disabling 

negativity.  Some of my art work has been close to 

the bone but negativity was the only way through 

that’s all I had to go on.

I began writing pomes, based on moment not poetic 

form, I don’t let on to know that they are real poems 

their lost images somewhere between poems and 

songs.  The pomes became ‘SPLINT and KILL HOUSE’ 

two collections published by Lagan and lapwing 

press so a huge thanks goes out to them they gave 

me hope that I could still do this, they were my 

placebo-effect.

I am not coming this essay trying to shove something down your throat. Like you, I have searched and searched for the answer, but even in my hours of
near-death, I found the same answers as you.

I believe I have been given a second chance for a reason but I’m not asking you to believe in something that fundamentally contradicts itself. I believe what I
believe, it’s just that I call mine poetry, you have another name for this mystery, let’s leave it at that-a mystery. Mysteries are named so because they want to be left alone; If we find out what the mystery is then that’s the end. Like poetry, you get something from it, then leave the rest alone for another day, you will receive something else from the same thing don’t bury it and kill the mystery. It’s about you and how you feel today, everything you receive depends on your mood, how positive and negative you are. You have the power to change your life for the better but it’s up to you. The power of positive thought is an amazing determination; tell yourself you can do it.

I’m looking for the answers like everyone else but no self-help book will give me the answers. At the end of the day they are the authors words, it’s the name he or she places on it, it’s his answer but who are you called, what’s your name and most importantly what’s your answer? It’s in you, look at yourself! When I was in the embrace of death there were always questions I needed answering.

I remember waking up one night in a cold sweat from a dream. There was a crowd of doctors around me administering drugs. I thought I had died and this was my hell, but I came to realise that heaven and hell are the same place it’s how we think of them, they both exist in your mind but it’s up to you how you paint them - positive or negative. You can walk away if you want. I remember, many years ago, being kicked to the ground in Lurgan one night withseven guys kicking and thumping me and I had a beer bottle in my hand. I thought of smashing it over the ring-leader’s head but instead I threw it away, I rolled up into a ball and took the beating. If I had smashed that bottle over his head I would be dead, not here now writing this essay. It’s up to you- your life says what lane it takes.

As Robert Frost said, ‘Always take the road less travelled by.’ Life can be affirming. It’s up to you and what you bring to it, so paint your picture with a beautiful sunrise or sunset and you can’t go wrong. Alright I’ll never be 100% the person I was,but I’m alive. I have someone to thank for that, even if it’s me, my friends and family. I believe in them and they believe in me; that’s what I call the power of healing the positive force within . The beauty in this is that there is an alternative, with every other form of religion there is no other way. The beauty is not to ask people to believe in what you believe in. Whatever happened to diversity? Believe in whatever you want to, it’s your right. If he or it paints your day so be it, that’s your positive force.

This past year has been the worst I have ever encountered. The stroke came without warning .I was on the edge of the bed, then I was on the floor shaking. I didnt know what was happening. I crawled into my mother’s room and asked her what was happening ;she told me I was taking a stroke. She phoned the doctor. All I can remember is being rushed to Intensive Care. I had ‘Locked in Syndrome.’ I knew what to say but hadn’t the power to communicate. I was flat on my back and could only move my eyes I was so afraid it was uncanny. I thought everyone was out to get me, without the power to resist. I really did believe I would go out in a wooden box.

I remembered an experience from childhood. I was running along a mossy pier in cushendall when I slipped and fell into the water. I was trying to get out of there. I feared I would die but when I looked around it was beautiful in there, the seaweed was dancing and for a second it was beautiful. An american tourist dived in, pulled me out and the water from my lungs. Since that day I have never met you but thank you for being there at that moment. It felt like I was lost walking around in a field of nothing, then i woke up with friends around me. I don’t let on to know the answers to life, I am just like you,a searcher of the truth and lying there in that hospital bed I realised that there is no great light that I’m drawn towards-just the people who loved me for their own reasons not mine. this wasn’t the time to be selfish but to take people as they were. Someone 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. id like to finish with a line by leonard cohen that sums up what I have said, ‘theres a crack a crack in everything thats how the light gets.

PLACEBO EFFECT

We follow a coffin underground

but who says were going down.

This is the day of tomorrow, not

yesterday’s sorrow, were planting

seeds of hope, a wonder placebo. 

I don’t know why I’m still alive

but my helping hand is

my placebo effect.

The power of the mind is a human

Vessel, a magic thing, metaphysical

Wings.  I know this time of negative

Economy, even if that’s an under-

Statement.

I can feel this placebo effect tingling

My right paralyzed side, putting form

Into a formless mind.  All those dark

Lonely days, hope was always in de-

pressing pomes, I knew there was some-

thing in words.  I trusted in Keat’s negative

Capability, hieroglyphic healing metaphysical me.

HYPHEN-ATED NON-SENSE

The tock ticks memory

Killing time but time

Kills me. Locked in

Here in limbo, a real

Reality.

Times rolls by with-

Out memory, despair

In check-mate.

Life has flipped right

Over, a life I can’t see.

Life is not my choice

It’s a constant para-

Lyzed disability.

Life is a pitch and toss.

I can’t even find

A spiritual sub-

Stance.

This is a world

Of broken words

A hyphen-ated non-

Sense. My purpose

a shell is beyond.

placebo effect.

PSEUDO-CRÈME

I woke seconds after death

Half my brain said love, live.

I’m sitting here a broken-man

In a wheelchair alive.  A dry-

Skin, diabetic, junky shell.

Inventing memory from

A forgotten well.  Broken-

Words are all I have

To pick me up. 

Could you wake every morning

suicide blues?  All your emotions

merge one,  miss-de-meanor spins

you don’t know where to get  off.

Darkened stipples on the ceiling

Existing shadow dark, death was

Dressed like Johnny cash he was

The man in black.  This is hurt

But not a duel of god and devil.

light was dark and night was day

both were shadowed evil.

No ones fault, no blame,  its called

Evo-lotion, pseudo-creme.  All you kill 

for god fools can do one, loco-motion.  

Going to a I.S. backward state.

Ill innocently play with broken-

Words like a child without memory.

CLASS-BLOOD

We are living a past tense

Life is about inheritance.

Were in the waiting room

Awaiting our fathers to die

Then we will have money to fly

But were already rich at birth

Are feet are on ground so why

Do we need money to get round.

Can’t we get on love, respect

Humanity or have the humans

Lost all humanity?

Oil and gold they are life's riches

For all, from the earth, not from

Your fathers birth. Turn muck to

Gold for the human race.

It don’t come from a hundred million

Lottery, what do we need all this money for.

Ok, we all need a few bob to get by but

Its like living a Islamic state, are we Christian

Muslims or In-here-I-tense.

ODE TO DRY SKIN

Psyche free, I’m writing this

To poetry, dry skin is all over me.

Sitting here, no memory, flaking-

Away, shedding skin like a snake

Sliding up that tree free of memory

That would kill a hard man.

A membrane hanging on to re-

memberance dear life, tissue afraid to fall.

A glitch in the mind’s eye, hanging

On to my Mother’s sake.

The goddess of hope is within.

I want to sing sweet tunes to you but

These are tears from your own eye.

Imagination is beyond me.

The winged psyche flies by, this is a pome

I didn’t dream, whispering in your ear.

Please save me once more! Pat Keogh.

John Keats I’m using your form not to fall

You should be honored, your poems hold

The key to this kingdom and next, ‘you let

The warm love in’, wheel chaired under

Your smile.

SUB-STANCE

I need this like a whole in the head

Ted Hughes and the blues carry

this low down form.  Imagine

if I had imagination and memory

stroke didn’t take it away.  

‘Am I still a poet’, I ask myself?

Is this just my negative way?

I need this like a whole in the head

Death, this pome hold the answer

But the blues got life.

I’ve been up and down every alley-way-

street, the only way up is down.

Absent memory, I got the blues.

I woke up one morning, declared dead.

The hot stink of fox couldn’t enter my head.

I need this like a whole in the head.

My pomes are made of moments

I wait for this moment to arrive, sub-

Stance, somewhere between
pome and song.

I need this like a whole in the head.
I need this like a whole in the head.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

 A suitcase on a sofa, holding the contents

Of life.  I am reading Gaston Bachelards:

‘The poetics of space’.  In and out five rooms

In a wheelchair.  On Irelands divided shore.

She cleaned the houses of the rich, close to

Grand Canal grime, Dublin, enraptured.

Her mother, a midwife who lost a husband

to civil war, her the helper, a family chore

bringing hope into life.  I am heir to her Holly-

wood throne.  Cinematic, motorized, automatic

from relator to a wheelchair.  My mother had

5 strokes and I two, all this is in my blood.

Sitting beside a hoist, a con- trap-tion that

Cranes me into space.  The case holds her

Writings and paintings since 1933, when

Ireland was growing into a inde-

Pendant free-state.

They got out of dodge, went to London.

Time piece was a spaghetti western

Starring Lee Van Clef, all this for a few

Dollars more.  Three homes later, a flat

And a car.   

Four magpie came over the fence

and bobbed the grass on the otherside.

I sit here in awe watching a little bit of

Poetrys happiness.  I am locked in but

May as well be locked out, I’m on the out-

Side, looking in.  Thinking of a Ray Carver

poem and the poetics of space, home.

DISABLED HUMANITY

‘remember humanity forget the rest’

Bertrand Russell

What ever happened to individualism?

It used to be the 70s golden rule

Then it all shifted arse about face

Now were all party political fools.

I was taught to be number 1

At school, now were all clones

Alone. I sat on the fence awaiting

Humanity to strike, a message boy

On a messenger bike.

Ireland became England

And England became Ireland.

Paddy, Mick built your towns

And cities not forgetting motorways.

They built up an infrastructure but

Forgot the disabled roots.

The government aren’t turning me

Into a sponger, a liar, a cheat.

I won’t fit into your box, I’m a dis-

Abled tool but you won’t tick me.

Sucking revenue from drink, drugs, 

tobacco, gambling.

How can you sleep at night.?

I’ll stay on this middle rate dis-

Abled Avenue, you can’t see respect

My independence.

We’re not just disabled we are broken

In need of repair, humanity.

o

plaPLACEBO EFFECT THE ESSAY

I am not coming this essay trying to shove something down your throat. Like you, I have searched and searched for the answer, but even in my hours of
near-death, I found the same answers as you.

I believe I have been given a second chance for a reason but I’m not asking you to believe in something that fundamentally contradicts itself. I believe what I
believe, it’s just that I call mine poetry, you have another name for this mystery, let’s leave it at that-a mystery. Mysteries are named so because they want to be left alone; If we find out what the mystery is then that’s the end. Like poetry, you get something from it, then leave the rest alone for another day, you will receive something else from the same thing don’t bury it and kill the mystery. It’s about you and how you feel today, everything you receive depends on your mood, how positive and negative you are. You have the power to change your life for the better but it’s up to you. The power of positive thought is an amazing determination; tell yourself you can do it.

I’m looking for the answers like everyone else but no self-help book will give me the answers. At the end of the day they are the authors words, it’s the name he or she places on it, it’s his answer but who are you called, what’s your name and most importantly what’s your answer? It’s in you, look at yourself! When I was in the embrace of death there were always questions I needed answering.

I remember waking up one night in a cold sweat from a dream. There was a crowd of doctors around me administering drugs. I thought I had died and this was my hell, but I came to realise that heaven and hell are the same place it’s how we think of them, they both exist in your mind but it’s up to you how you paint them - positive or negative. You can walk away if you want. I remember, many years ago, being kicked to the ground in Lurgan one night withseven guys kicking and thumping me and I had a beer bottle in my hand. I thought of smashing it over the ring-leader’s head but instead I threw it away, I rolled up into a ball and took the beating. If I had smashed that bottle over his head I would be dead, not here now writing this essay. It’s up to you- your life says what lane it takes.

As Robert Frost said, ‘Always take the road less travelled by.’ Life can be affirming. It’s up to you and what you bring to it, so paint your picture with a beautiful sunrise or sunset and you can’t go wrong. Alright I’ll never be 100% the person I was,but I’m alive. I have someone to thank for that, even if it’s me, my friends and family. I believe in them and they believe in me; that’s what I call the power of healing the positive force within . The beauty in this is that there is an alternative, with every other form of religion there is no other way. The beauty is not to ask people to believe in what you believe in. Whatever happened to diversity? Believe in whatever you want to, it’s your right. If he or it paints your day so be it, that’s your positive force.

This past year has been the worst I have ever encountered. The stroke came without warning .I was on the edge of the bed, then I was on the floor shaking. I didnt know what was happening. I crawled into my mother’s room and asked her what was happening ;she told me I was taking a stroke. She phoned the doctor. All I can remember is being rushed to Intensive Care. I had ‘Locked in Syndrome.’ I knew what to say but hadn’t the power to communicate. I was flat on my back and could only move my eyes I was so afraid it was uncanny. I thought everyone was out to get me, without the power to resist. I really did believe I would go out in a wooden box.

I remembered an experience from childhood. I was running along a mossy pier in cushendall when I slipped and fell into the water. I was trying to get out of there. I feared I would die but when I looked around it was beautiful in there, the seaweed was dancing and for a second it was beautiful. An american tourist dived in, pulled me out and the water from my lungs. Since that day I have never met you but thank you for being there at that moment. It felt like I was lost walking around in a field of nothing, then i woke up with friends around me. I don’t let on to know the answers to life, I am just like you,a searcher of the truth and lying there in that hospital bed I realised that there is no great light that I’m drawn towards-just the people who loved me for their own reasons not mine. this wasn’t the time to be selfish but to take people as they were. Someone 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. id like to finish with a line by leonard cohen that sums up what I have said, ‘theres a crack a crack in everything thats how the light gets.

PLACEBO EFFECT

We follow a coffin underground

but who says were going down.

This is the day of tomorrow, not

yesterday’s sorrow, were planting

seeds of hope, a wonder placebo. 

I don’t know why I’m still alive

but my helping hand is

my placebo effect.

The power of the mind is a human

Vessel, a magic thing, metaphysical

Wings.  I know this time of negative

Economy, even if that’s an under-

Statement.

I can feel this placebo effect tingling

My right paralyzed side, putting form

Into a formless mind.  All those dark

Lonely days, hope was always in de-

pressing pomes, I knew there was some-

thing in words.  I trusted in Keat’s negative

Capability, hieroglyphic healing metaphysical me.

MR NOBODY

Mr nobody just killing time

Without a sex drive, hard drive

Memory that isn’t mine.

Celebrating celibate without

Three bottles of wine,

Life on a 24 hour cycle

Writing down space and time.

With a poets essential loneliness

He writes the moments down

Then everything begins to merge

Like a pome needs a rhyme.

He sits in a wheelchair watching a day

Waiting for recovery to come his way.

He can’t do much without memory, time.

He tries walk talk but memory can’t store

Can’t hold the past so memory drifts away.

His sons can take on where he left off, living

Love in summer sun, a girl by his side

Walking strands on golden sands, climbing

Ancient stones.  Mr. nobody has accepted that

 Sings beauty truth and the blues. 

Mr. nobody won’t be held back by memory

And beautiful blue/black.  The clouds drift

like a placebo and this pome

flies into the clear

to rhyme time.

NECK CHOKE

Church bells are a re-

Minder to us to be

Good, god. We didn’t

Abuse the alter

It was you.

You broke the chalice
And you’re telling us
what to do.

Ring your bells and pray
Your prayers but it won’t
make the past go away.

Reach for the rope
Of humanity, un-
Tie the wicked noose.

Only then will we be free
When bells don’t choke
The sky.

BLIND BROW

Calm, get down of this blind brow, John berry

man, John Keats, John Joseph Fox. This un-

caring system is killing you.

Your balancing on a poetic edge, swaying this way and that

Looking down you can see your mother’s boat race. 

Don’t do that! She never had to tell you what to do in life.

The son of a bastards son, don’t even know my name.

Goddess of this dark place, My smile is upside down.

The dire system keeps pulling me back

Black, beautiful black.

HUNG-OVER

There’s six hundred and eighty
Grams of honey beside
The bottle of Bushmills, I’m having
Caffine and whisky for breakfast
To calm my frustrated self.

The care system is going to un-
Care, kill me. This morning
I was literally locked in a locked-
In- syndrome. The carers walked in
And out and snibbed me in.

How can an un-talking un-walking man
Paralyzed talk through a window, stand
Up and sit in a wheelchair. My good leg
Started to shake roll like an Elvis leg, (tremor)?

When I took my stroke it caused so much
Damage, I was a formless form not knowing
The difference between fantasy and reality.

I woke in a cold sweat, seconds after being
Declared dead, like a child reborn in adult shell.
Seems I was lost in a black hole within myself.

Thinking the nurses were going to kill me.
I’ve never been so scared in my life
And I survived, Ardoyne and the horrors of Belfast.

I have woke every morning for ten years
Paralyzed in a wheelchair, seeing the grime
Of death projected through my eyes like
My father’s crude murdering oil embedded
Under his skin, the room is covered in that

Stippled in darkness. Now I think the care
System is out to kill me, forgetting my
Medication, my piss pot, my wheelchair

Uncharged, having to piss in a coffee cup.
A pillow over your head to block the light
Left on like a halo of sentimentality boring
Into your head. Now I’m really locked into
My own home.

A disabled man on the edge, usually hoisted
In and out of bed, trying to stand to get into
A wheelchair to let care in to care, is this a joke
Nightmare I’m in. Why did they keep me alive?

I know we’re all going to die in the end but
I can’t handle no more of this uncaring care.
I want to live in a wheelchair before I die.

I could never handle this sentimental reg-
I mental regime. I’ve always been hungover
By this light, now I’m abandoned in the dark.

Again. This stroke has left me hungover in need
Of a cure, all I’ve got is hair of the dog-god bush-
Mills and honey for a disabled diabetic man.

Fuck it! Was my answer to life, so fuck it!
Blood was pumping through my heart
I almost got a hard on, it was nearly
A good ride, locked in, locked-in.

The coffee with whiskey is black, I can see
The reflected sky, me rippling by.
Now I’ve only got a poets essential loneliness
Of real reality. The Bushmills it seems is
A lifeline that caused my aching soul in
The first place, now I’m repeating and re-

Peating my black hole with the magic hand
Of chance, warm and capable, reaching out
In to you, true, beauty.

REFUGEE

Will I ever regain memory?

Will I ever be the same again?

My memory dreams and image-

Gin-nation all went down the drain.

My words dig-in to find my state

times when  I don’t even recall, de-

tails can’t just come to me like

they come to you, evolve.

I dwell in this dead state, in

A brain-injured state of mind.

Waiting for that dead state

To wake one day be fine, smile.

For ten years now I’ve felt like

This and writ a blog of mind.

Repeating and repeating life

With nothing new to say but

Still living out each day.

My bank balance is getting thin

I’m finding it hard everyday to win.

I want to feel love and see the sun

Without my swelling feet.

I can’t even walk or work, my voice

Is a low mumble, I watch life

Drive up and back.

I was going to write an open letter

But there’s sixty million refugees

Out there and they all want food

And hope.  I hate money and don’t

Want any it’s a pain in the ass but

I feel alone like a refugee, I want

An independent life not half-mast.

I want to live independent in a wheel-

Chair feeling blue.  I need a motability

Grant to pay for an adapted car, I have

worked all my life and I get this salt

rubbed into wounds.  I only want what’s

due to me to travel to sounds, to live life

like a human being travel near and far

Not stuck here in one place on middle

rate D.L.A.  I can’t even go to readings

to hear what poets say.  I feel like one

of sixty million. 

I don’t want special treatment, just life’s prize. 

I’m just an ordinary guy who wants an ordinary life.

 I’m not even allowed a caring care giver wife. 

I can’t afford the train fare, this just isn’t fair. 

There’s sixty million refugees out there. 

This pome is from a broken British citizen, me. 

I’ll have to go to another country where disabled

life is free and I don’t feel like a refugee.

WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF PISS, SIR

When will I see a clear blue day?

The shades of green leaves in the sun

Beyond a webbed dirty window, these:

These disabled aids are out to help me

Through life. I have to forget I’m dis-

Abled but my carer can forget:

My medication, piss-pot.

My wheelchair charged.

I had to piss in a coffee cup, sleep with

A pillow over my head to block out

The light, leaving the light on, all night.

These are very simple things to you

Not locked and paralyzed in a bed.

I’ve got to forget that I am craned in

And out of bed and I’m just hanging

Around hoisted up and down pulled

This way and that just to get washed 

and dressed.

I’ve got to forget I am only a person who took

A stroke and can’t remember to forget.

I’ve got to forget and wake positive

To face the hope of day.

There is no disabled infrastructure here

There is no access to life.

What am I to do, to think beyond suicidal?

Thought to stop me killing myself. I’ve got

To forget that the sky is blue, leaves

Blowing in the wind. Locked in I must

Forget I’m alive.

Twenty girls a week keypad in and out

My home, is it my home anymore?

We should have a programme on B.B.C. 4

Like a time shift time called empathy.

Dignity is being dug up, it seems the humans

Have lost all humanity. Rolf Harris and Jimmy

Saville rule ok. When will these civil wrongs

Be right care, maybe tomorrow.

GOD DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

God doesn’t live here anymore.

The only savior here is me, alone.

An abstract head, without features.

He is my capable negativity, the magic

Hand of chance, spanning poetic years.

I live in a strange world, strange time

Without within my self.  An exit sign

Is between me and metaphysics.

 

A hospital door ajar to a green

green world.  In the really real

world I didnt know the difference

between fantasy and reality.

An exit sign and a man running away

I keep it in mind, art shows

Me the way.

I SAW WHAT PATRICK KAVANAGH SAW

‘poverty is good for the soul’

Patrick Kavanagh

1.

I saw what Patrick Kavanagh saw, a cold

gun grey metal that was killing time.

Mucker made muck in bastard soil, gun

Running hate across a borderline.

The pen is mightier than the gun, down 

unapproved roads we went on the run.

She got me out of Belfast, a rebel mind

She seen I was lost in a troubled time.

The cottage was a front for the I.R.A. 

No water, electricity, a spade sewer.

My gun was childs play with a car jack

I killed haystacks, brits, b-specials black.

A fourteen year old boy running wild

Urbanised country in a deep wild child.

Kavanagh country ditches and bogs

Freedom winds in him and his dog.

Appearing disappearing bark of trees
Pure well water and poetic breeze.

War was cleansed right out of my soul.

I saw what Patrick Kavanagh saw, cold

Grey monaghan graveyard soil, bruised
And battered by inner strength. Worded

Words make an undercurrent clarity, pure
Clear water from a cairn well stone, stone on

Stone balancing a stone head-stone. One
With the landscape under monaghan soil.

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AN IRISH FAMILY OUTING

Memory dream and imagination
Gone in a stroke. Will this broken
World always be in my face?
I use a line from those poems back
Then when I could remember.

                                                           I dreamt I saw Dectara in a flowing

                                                          Yellow dress. A woman dressed by

                                                          Mythology plucked from within

My soul. 45 years of memory locked-

In locked out of that black hole.

How will I ever reach you, how can 

I embrace the past, how do I switch

On the right side of my brain, remember

Not to forget? I recall snippets of people

and places but not detailed events.

My mind is riddled with troubled times

I don’t want to remember that, love

Pulled me through. I remember your

Eyes in the darkness, I’ll never ever forget.

You were my Dublin pillar you gave me ground.
I raise you up like a headstone, you will never
Ever explode down. Dublin was green in the 70s
Outside the G.P.O. This is my uprising, I re-
Member 1.9.1.6. the light in your mothers eye

Singing a Kevin Barry song, I knew that song
By heart: ‘ just a lad of eighteen summers, yet
No one can deny, as he walked to death that
Morning he proudly held his head up high
Standing like a soldier in that cruel prison yard’.

Memory day dream and imagin-nation
Have conjured up this past, imagination
Is in my mothers mother. Mum held me
Up high to see the parade. I knew her song
Line by line just like this pome knows not to forget.

ELEGY, UNTOUCHABLE TRUTH

1.

Writ in a cul-de-sac of pomes

A lonely sad, sad, sad song.

A shadow shimmering the page

Sentences made up of tears.

Locked in both night and day

A Chinese opera shadow play.

The bars of a jail wall window

The scene of a childhood fairy-

Tale, grim, the big, big bad wolf.

Torturing, interrogating innocence

A shell shock way of life, shadowed

By a past, home.  A stroke of luck

Takes you, without memory, dream

Or imagination but you piece

together words of hope.

2.

Poetry is like a butterfly wing

Fragile, beyond untouchable

Truth.  Why is there a price

To pay for the souls creation?

Poetry is being smashed under

The consumerist hammer.

Beyond paint on canvas or

A ballet shoe, words that fall 
in a monologue play.  It has a tender 
truth its own

To trans form words into hope. Poetry

Is like sunshine it’s free to be.  Don’t sell

It down the river, even these words have

A price to pay, even the free ones aren’t.

Is it too late for me to be me and rest in

Words, my sanctuary of hope?

                                                                             3.

The sun and rain are dripping again

The rain beats of my roof, camo-

Flagging wood grain blending red-

Brick, you feel like you’re fenced in.

Lorries rumble to a capitalist shop-

Front, and we buy the mannequin

Outfit because it looks good on him.

We’re living in a middle class 
song of joy, confusion.  

We are puppets for master-

Money.  I used to think my pomes

were free but words have collateral

damage, they spell out the future for me.

ELEGY

Writ in this cul-de-sac of pomes

By a hung out unused monkey pole.

Hyphenated words of the moment

Like the blues in a cotton field.

I woke up this morning

and I was blue

I woke up this morning

And I saw you

She was my lost and only sweet-

Heart, my dark haired love.

I didn’t have no one but memory

To fill my lost essential blues.

To fill my lonely day.

I aint got no one to love to touch

My very heart and soul but you

Do that for me when alone

Going home.

GOD V ART

Jack sat in his wheelchair watching another grey dismal day un-

Fold, he knew he had to find hope to overcome the grey day.

He knew he had to dig deeper into his poetry and art, kill time

That was killing him and making the thoughts of suicide stronger.

He had to kill the next twenty four, to do as he said in pomes

To jump over obstacles and reach the otherside.

Poetry and art was all that he had and even it was riddled in

Hopelessness, but he knew he had to reach through grey.

In 2005 he took a stroke that almost killed him, he woke

After his life support was switched off and he was de-

Clared dead leaving him paralyzed without memory

Or imagination, he never understood why they saved

Him, he couldn’t see their Christian ethics.

He lived a real reality without anyway of conjuring up

An entity that guided him through this negative world.

A world of holocaust and world wars, iss and gazza

Bombings, stroke, heart attack, cancer and earthquake.

He would have to find some hope in his words.

All he had was the memory that disability left him with

And even the godly two faced world tried to take hope

From him, asking him not to take them down and yet

The only glimmer of hope he had was in his negativity.

He knew that he had to find a way through those

Negative thoughts, he felt so alone in his hell cell.

The god squad and their sentimentalism was killing

Any hope he had.  He lived in a cold sweat, the same cold sweat

He remembered waking to like a chainsaw massacre scene from

A gory horror film, he gripped the sheets and took a white knuckled

Ride of trust and hoped to death that the nurses were not out

To kill him, it felt like handing over the tiny glimmer of life in his

Hands and he done this every day for years, ever since he took that night-

Mare stroke.  Man had progressed to this he thought, to a sorry state

Of self-destruction, through holy crusades and a blood bath of religious

Hatred, a humanitarian military drone war.  Although all his memory

Was erased he still remembered people and places but no detail.

He recalled being a fourteen year old kid skipping up the steps of holy

Cross church, going to meet his best friend god.

He heard gunfire behind him and turned to see a man kill three

Human beings hold his gun in the air and said this is for god

And ulster.  He threw his prayer book away and ran home crying.

He is still crying today from that day we killed humanity.  Is this

How far we’ve come to man killing for a god that is supposed to be good.

The word god comes from the word good but because we created good

We also created a devil, a devil that makes us hate.  No thanks I’m not

Going with a god that is killed for, the answer is not in the gun or the sword

Shaped like a cross, there is no such a thing as a holy war.  My father fought

For this land and he’s buried under six foot of soil, that’s the land he fought for.

I will use the pen and not the gun, ill mark my own negative beauty.  The church

 And state have crippled this land and the goodness torn from within. 

I will find magic in these words if it kills me, they have pillaged

and raped this land through crusades and pedophilia. 

They are making a monster out of god.

GODZILLA

Let’s get back to the words of Albert Camus who said, ’we are all

in this bloody century together and that should be argument

enough to stop the killing’ or Robert Lowell who said imperfection-

 is the language of art, art has helped me kill grey.

METAMORPHING

The theory of everything.

Droplets of sun, rain drip

Sediment from my shed.

As if my image were in-

tombed dead.  Shining light

Flickering inclusion, shimmering

Shadow of life’s illusion.  After

The stroke made me great- again.

Ten years going and coming out to this.

Years living outside domestic bliss.

I was never any good at this that

Now all I see is drip, drip, drip

glistening hope within me falls.

The blues howls, poetry is a meta-

Morphing thing.

I am evolving now to this with-

Out bells ringing church and state

Looking up to godlike it’s not god’s gift.

Life and love is full of pragmatism

Shadow shimmering bar code pleasing

 Like a heliograph signal reflecting

brand new.  Don’t look down from high above

This is low down dirty blues.

A web of silken thread, erupts

Negative beauty.

METAMORPHOSING

The theory of everything.

Droplets of sun, rain drip

Sediment from my shed.

As if my image were in-

Tombed dead.  Shining light

Flickering inclusion, shimmering

Shadow of life’s illusion.  After

The stroke made me great- again.

Ten years going and 
coming out to this.

Living outside domestic bliss.

I was never any good at this that

Now all I see is drip, drip, drip

glistening hope within me falls.

The blues howls, poetry is a meta-

Morphosing thing.

I am evolving now to this with-

Out bells ringing church and state.
realities rhetoric reason resounding

Looking up to godlike, it’s not god’s gift.

Life and love is full of pragmatism

Shadow shimmering bar code pleasing

Like a heliograph signal reflectin new.  
Don’t look down from high above

This is low down dirty blues.

A web of silken thread, erupts

into negative beauty.

DREAMING DISABILITY

What might blossom?

from the muse tree, branch out

and spread its wings of night shade.

This is probably the nearest I’ll ever

get to dream-scape.  Locked-in

this cell of dark worship.

I’m compiling a symmetry of words

Looking from inside out.  My

World is almost surreal, swimming

In the shade of in-between. 

Things are only half seen?  The steady

And the wheelchair are like

Strange fish in this aquarium.

The stand by lights like glow-worms

the shadowed streetlight dancing

on the frosted glass reflects

an orange hue.   Even the monkey pole

and the piss-pot are suspended in formaldehyde

Of shaded current, a waking dream.

A CON CARE -HEAR YE! HEAR YE!

Sitting on the edge of the bed

Eating wheaten bread.

Had to get out and in, stood

Unsteady almost fell down

Tat tie bread. 

This is the reason why I stopped night care

girls rush in out-don’t care.  They forgot my

Medication, left it in the kitchen-again.

I’m using the leg lifter, to lift my dead

Leg back in.  How do you get good care in

2015 when the economy is fucked

And you lot voted the cons back in.

I’ll lay this one out in a twisted mess at 4am

My back is broke and I’m in need, dying

For a smoke.  To be disabled in

This world, you need to be

A millionaire tory and that’s it

End of story.  I’m whinging night

And day like a town crier, maybe

That’s says a lot about the middle

Age were in.

Were you ever so browned off, the profile

Bed didn’t work, the phone went dead

And you lay in a heap unable even to

Finish a pome, the one thing in life

That brings you positivity.

I want to cry but ive cried for ten years

And I don’t think I have tears left.  I’m not

Even browned off, I’m fucked off with

A system that leaves you in a state

Of almost nothing.

I’ve always had a reserve in the tank but

Now I’m left here stranded naked.

The profile bed won’t raise me up

To stand and swivel, fall into the wheelchair.

My good leg is too weak, this really is an awful

Care system to try to live an independent life.

I wish I won the lottery and had a nine carat

Gold splint and a stunning female ass-isstant

and a state of the art wheelchair to ride SoHo. 

I don’t even do the lottery and I hate money.

Let’s get back to filthy reality, I’m going to sentence

All the things wrong over the last ten years

And maybe one day we will get a party that cares

And are worthy of my vote.  I’ve only ever voted once

 when northern Ireland got peace. 

I am going to set down

the civil wrongs in bullet points be-

Cause this is a fucking war of words.

ALMOST NOTHING

Picking blues of a tree 

outside my window.

Almost nothing flowering me.

The branches reach up

Toward the light, twisted

And broken flowering me.

The roots are dug down like 

my mother. Trying to focus

brand new, everything in my 

house screams disability, that 

tree is the only thing that grows.

I’m trying in words to reach

Almost nothing, hanging on 

By the teeth of my skin. New

Growth for the honey bees

And me, by black tarmac on

A cul-de-sac, this road is going

Nowhere but I’ll take from it

Her blossoming pride.

3, 650 DAYS ON EARTH AGAIN

I’ve got to look beyond myself

Out there to green white and blue

Where the wind moves tiny features

And the cloud shifts colors through.

Out to the grey and darkling matter

That gives life to me and you.

I have lost poetry’s natural rhythm

It doesn’t speak in tongue or

Roll off between finger and thumb

Because that’s the only history

I’ve got, son.

I lost memory and imagination

I write and I eat, I eat and I write

About me and my stroke condition.

I know I haven’t the scope or diction

To be another Keats or Carver but

I have found my path, my living hand

And it’s full of beauty and truth.

LONDONS CALLING

We lived for Friday and Saturday nights

A bottle of barbiturates under Piccadilly lights.

Five minutes and you were almost there

Tripping urban craters as if you on the moon

Ireland/England you woke up in doom.

It was all blood-letting, a violent game.

You escaped Ireland’s violence for Eng-

Lands mad-max shame.  The gangs came

from everywhere they were doing the same.

You woke up in a skip, another waste ground.

Living through Irelands hunger strikes

Was the same difference.  Roach and dope

And magic mushrooms all for disappearance.

You were down in the tube station at mid-

Night where ever that was, watching brothers

Fight with iron bars and get your head kicked in.

Punk was a snooker table on the dark side of the moon

You were the alien/predator and prey was time cloned.

You didn’t care about p or c as long as you weren’t P.C.

You were beaten by both a gun put against your head

and told that both of you were dead.

We lived for Friday and Saturday nights beer and barbs

with rent boys under Piccadilly lights.  Ireland was England

fuck the fucking crown.  Hunger strikes and mad-max

everything was jamming, punk was banging and we were off

our heads just walking down the street you were one

Of the creeds, a London high street or

The crumlin road, an Irish English paddy

Mick was one in the same.

DRYAD

John Keats selected poems by Andrew-

Motion is leafed through, dog-eared

tattered and torn, wrote on and sepia-

toned, the pages are falling away

from the binding.

 The way prayer books did years ago. 

it holds the shadows of pure spring like

the dryad of the trees, an ode to keep

me from falling.

This morning I woke to a room of melancholia

projected like a womb dream from within.

The leaves shimmer shadow on my wall.

Harvest home beats a pulsating tempo

dancing a display at 8:30 pm in dusk.

The setting sun reflects of my window

casting a beam of light on my fence like

an explorers searching for the center

of the earth.  Maybe the center is in

the shimmering shadow.

'is this a waking dream'?

SISTER, SISTER RAY

For Lou

Heard her call my name

All two syllables-AD-RAIN.

Temptation inside your heart.

Guess I’m falling in love.

I’m not a young man anymore.

Stephanie says-The gift.

Here she comes now.

Mr. rain-run, run, run- waiting

For the man.  Lady Godiva’s

Operation beginning to see

The light- white light-

White heat.

BEAUTY-TRUTH

On this day of grief you gave me strength.

This is homage to you and the master of poetry.

In the very temple of life and deaths delight

I clasped her human hand now warm and giving

And saw an ounce of magic in her eye.

The innocence of life, of death.

I saw a little girl sparkle, a human untainted by

The outer world, in her loving hand she gave.

A girl who bore six children from the tarnished one

Straight out of the goodness of her heart, even

He could not corrupt her from the way of truth.

That day I held the hand of an angel and that

Angel held the hand of me, I wished her veins

We’re flowing now with blood, I hold my hand

Towards you, truth-beauty.

CADENCE

I’m writing to save my life

It’s as if I’m righting wrongs.

All we can do is write songs

To right our civil wrongs.

Life is the blues, the soul

The tempo, the cadence.

We are all a standing by

A waterside, one day

We will be free.

TRUST TO COME

Love tears me apart again.

I have loved and lost.

That day I woke from the dead

And lived in suicidal thought.

What am I to do, to do right?

Live in the moment, in spring.

Season of blossom, leafing view

My bosom buddy of this time of year

Smiling in sunshine facing fear

These words hold me here

Death is clarity, death is clear.

Life is ripened sweet to the core

A man in a moment knowing more.

Interned within internment, living

A waking dream, a special powers act.

Words can unlock the chains of torture

A blind faith called trust.  The unbalanced

One in crippled time.  Life and death with-

In, which is wrong and right?  We live

And die in trust today, the gun and the pen

Are one, peace rises in the sun?

HAWTHORN BLOSSOM

For Paula

The sullen sad girl watches him drift into blue.

I leaf history to find a swoon as close as these

They are in the trees budding green.

Grey, black and blue.

The faces of nature are watching me swoon.

Watching them watching me.

She is the waves of the ocean, she is

The sound of the sea.

Me, I’m just looking on in awe, the cloud

Drifts by her view, melancholic

Sadness fills the air.  The tree trembles

Her hearts a leaf blowing

In the wind.

She holds back the tears of time, then

The rain clouds come and she’s

Watching dripping wet.

I have never known love like this

Yet I have and don’t remember

The day but it sticks in my mind.

I will always remember her deep

Vermillion red.  She couldn’t

Handle my stroke, she could

Not live in blue.  He died writing

A book of poems, bright star.

NOW AND THEN

Now one day is just like another

And another without memory to

Guide me, back then I sat up through

The early hours listening to Henrik

Goreckis’ symphony Sustenuto 

Tranquillo and the birds of that dawn.

Trying to capture the impossible, trying
To capture a purpose, poetry and art
Is the purpose? I tell myself.

It’s as if they have gathered out there
On the windows ledge, drawn like
The wind above sea and stone.
I can’t identify these birds but I know
They are common, feeding our scraps
Each day, without long names and beautiful
Plumage they sing what’s left of my dreams.

Suddenly the tape clicks off and I’m startled

By silence, I close my eyes and listen hard

Ears cocked awaiting vibration.

If I opened the curtain id be a painter

Or photographer, if I caught the notes

I’d be a musician or composer but as it

Is I’m a poet, capturing words that are free.

THE RED COAT

People and places are there in
Memory but incidents I don’t
Want to know are locked away
Inside.  Why did I burn a good?
Red coat, my sister’s pride and joy.
 The maxi coat that carried
An armalite rifle that killed
A soldier dead.  These are
Memories I know are there
Only tears and shame bring
Them out.  A 45 year old
Beautiful woman took her
life because that coat clung
to her mind like a prayer
for the dead and the wasted lost lives.
 We have to move on in this country
To bring out the truth, our truth.

ODE TO BLUE

The blue beyond the haw-

Thorn blossom is the blue

Of your complexion.

The sun is in your leaf young eye.

Your seasoned look awakes ode

To psyche and ode to melancholy.

You are the man in the tree

Watching over me, your poems

Are my negative capability.

This is my ode to blue, you.

The clouds don’t cloud

Your judgement

They drift

on by.

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 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 im 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 a heartless bitch.

Before

After

A FRAGILE MOMENT

‘

Any minute now something will happen’

                                           

Ray carver

The butterfly is fluttering my mind.

Forming a magic moment, over

And over again, time stopped still

That day in April 2005.  That day

I rose from the dead in intensive

Care, for over ten years now I’ve

Been writing this pome, without

Memory or imagination, to fill

These pages of time.  Nature

Drifted through that door

And ticked to tock my clock

And with it flowed these words

In rhyme, I will start again tomorrow

And do it all again, until time catches

Up with me and I’ll die right on time.

The seagull flies across the sun its

Shade will comfort me.  I’ll write this

Pome until I die if it’s my last thing.

The magpie shades upon the roof

And rests there like a king.  I’m sorry

I took you down but I had to get

Back up.  Birds are soaring now

Within a family flock. I had to glide

Through darkness to feel sadness in-

Sight.  The shaded life of deliverance

Within darkness there is light!

Things don’t really matter if they’re

Grey or not, the pome goes on

And on, even if I’m not.  Birds they

Soar like people-grey and black

And white, flying personalities

In a sky of blue insight.  In and on

This pome the birds glide overhead.

My friend said happy Easter

And she laughed at what she said

And flew.

CHINESE BURN

I woke in the middle of the night

To a strange secretive sensation.

I thought my heel on my paralyzed leg

Was on fire or I was having a campfire dream.

Caused by the medical suspender stockings

In a warm comfort zone, funny how I can

Remember but can’t recall the friction.

I reached under the bedclothes and felt

A hard blue thing, my leg lifter, still attached

To my foot from raising my leg into bed.

It was not caused by a native dream because

I can’t dream or conjure them up from imagination.

During the stroke I lost that and 45 years of memory.

This was the story of my reality-for over 12 years now

I had been living the dream of disability, you can’t get

Away from that, I was living a campfire dream.

I dragged my leg out of bed

where it was cool on my feet.

Disability is like interrogation 

it won’t even allow me a dream.

I want to drift into an abstract state full of gods’ 

demons and naked ladies in a fantasy of gardens.

All that information is in my syndrome-locked in.

Will it ever again come out? Until then I am in doubt.

A GOOD YEAR

The vertical blinds are like

Bars on my window dis-

torting the seagull, the mag-

Pie flight.  Beyond that there’s

A fence, hemming me in.  Beyond

life goes up and down the road.

I miss the madness, the memory, all

I’ve got now is sadness, my poetry re-

Flects who I was back then.    Words

Take me out to deliver to the bay.

In-land are the shores and lakes of

Lough neagh poetry’s tran-quill home.

There is my hide, the pier, to watch wild-

Life go by, I can soar or ignore.  The runners

The riders and walkers of this race.

This is my derby, Grand National, the stakes

Are high and dry.  The cloud drifts along re-

Vealing blue that only the pome can see.

A simple poetic perspective of my Ariel view.

Unhindered-unmined.  The stones I wheel-

Chair are precious, on cracked pavements

And black paths of this new city, good-year.

Where my father and brother worked.  Back

Then I couldn’t believe the space

The green, I can recall the estates

That were there, drinking

dens now undone.

ABSTRACT REALITY

‘the main thing was to be living, that was

the main thing.

                         Rilke

The disabled man lay on the profile bed, waiting

below the monkey-pole, beside the table that 

held his piss-pot, leg lifter and crème for dry skin.

Paralyzed unable to walk, he waited for a carer

To care and drag his immobile leg out of bed

Wash him dress him and put him in a wheelchair.

Without memory or imagination, he lay there un-

dreaming lost in the nightmare of disability.

When the streetlights flicker from night to day

and you’re lost in a perpetual moment so blue.

I can’t wait to see my pet dragon, she said to

The other carer, thinking she was a white haired

Goddess from game of thrones.   I can’t wait until

Saturday, said the other, to see, 50 shades of grey.

Fiddling with a key pad for a key.

THANK FUCK

‘Yet why not say what happened’

                                       Robert Lowell

I can’t live in an abstract reality.

Abstractors went out the window

With memory.  Is this it, is this life

As I know it?  Ten years I have lived

This meagre existence, life is a re-

Heated takeaway meal, all those

Years locked in a moment of:

‘any minute now, some-

Thing will happen’.

Is this my lot, words and a re-

Heated takeaway?  I had a life

Before this wheelchair, I was

A published poet in love with

A beautiful woman, with life.

The stroke cut the legs from

Under me, turned my smile

Upside down, almost killed

me, almost-thank fuck!

Mmmm the chicken is good.

I find hope in words.

PRETTY VACANT

Memory erased, with it went

Morals, standards and taboos.

I’m here alone in limbo, lost

In a filthy reality, living a night-

Mare in a locked in syndrome.

The only standard is being in

This home, morals and taboo’s

Were washed down the drain.

I can see the real world drive by on T.V.

Do I really want to belong to:  Life-?

Love, strangled by consumerism.

Art has been my savior, it has saved

Grace from me.  Drinking from a cup

That says:  never mind the bollocks

Here’s the sex pistols, this isn’t just

The rebel in me.  I am feeling through

Pomes and the pomes are being in me.

I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, words

Have become my syndrome writ

In punk poetry.

WANKER IN A WHEELCHAIR

The purpose of life is love.

How can you make love

if your sex is broken?

It’s the yardstick to female

attraction.  Am I just a wanker?

in a wheelchair, do I go on a list?

of sex offenders or hang out

on perverts corner.

When I was young I made up

my own words to tell my father

to go toss off, I said it fast go/toss/off

like one word 3 syllables so he

wouldn't understand. 

Now I’m saying it slow in my broken mind

go toss off.  Those words have come back

to haunt me, how can I stop this being?

a problem in my head

the wrong head?

A PEARL

‘loving everything that increases me’

                                                             

Raymond Carver

A friend lent me a book:  Fires by Raymond Carver.

Two unemployed friends talking of literature

And music he said in a poem I could almost see it.

That night when my family slept in dreams

I flicked open the book and read:  ‘Poem

For Karl Wallenda, aerialist supreme’.

My desk was full of books by T.S. Eliot, Patrick

Lane and Robert Lowell trying to come to grips

With academic poetry, it was going right over

My head, then I read that poem.

I stepped out into the wide blue yonder

That poem held me up, I held my breath.

I was over Magdeburg and Vienna

On the air of a poem, I took the first

Steps into the blue, my hair

Stood on end.  It lit a fire within.

I was from the backstreets of Belfast

And he was from mid-west America

Yakima, the middle of nowhere yet

His voice seemed to be mine.

It held me in the cuffs of my sleeves like

Emperor Haile Selassie and the king of

Belgians, it rolled mangoes along the streets

Of Nairobi.  I walked on clouds like a diver

Diving for pearls, over Puerto Ricco

And the Torrid Zone but I didn’t

Imagine that wire.

The poem blew me away, I stopped

And gasped for air, a poem never

Done this before, I was the breath

Of Carvers language, it made me

Stand up in sky.

SPOONERISM

The spoon sat on

The kitchen bench

Reflecting light

Through a bottle

Of pure sing water.

STROKE OF LUCK

‘The theory of poetry

Is the theory of life’.

Wrote the great

Wallace Stevens.

Life is a big black hole

A big bang theory.

I awoke just seconds

Before I was dead.

I can’t remember playing

With my kids but I re-

Member poems and stories.

Writing is like my stroke

It’s deep in the blood.

I’m going out to come in

Another big bang, a positive

Negative flow.  I’m going in

To come out.  Life is a stroke

Of luck, a big bang theory.

These words are my pre-

Cious stones.  Dug, time-

Lined, displayed from

A big black hole.  Poetry

Like sunshine is free

Not right or wrong, good

Or evil, this is the theory

Of everything.

ARIADNES LAMENT

Who will love me?

One half dead-

Hunted by thought.

The hunter behind cloud

Paralyzed by fear

You unknown god

Stab my heart, stab

My pure heart.

Break this heart

Torment me.

Why torment me?

You spiteful un-

Known god?

Shameless one!

What do you want to steal?

From me!  Humanity.

What do you gain?

By torture.

Proud prisoner

Of ultimate happiness

Executioner god.

DEATH RIGHT

I woke in a room full of ink blots.
A residue of death projected from within
That no one else can see, my death right.

I think I remember reading in Sligo

Long before my stroke. I stood on stage

And a girl was hackling, ‘read you’re happy

Poems’, I stopped and said ‘sorry, these

Are my happy poems’ and read on-

The light on the stones.

Why can’t we see death projected from

Within like a womb dream of life.

Death doesn’t have to be black and bleak

Why can’t it be the light? There doesn’t

Have to be a big bright light, it can turn

Muck to gold.

Life isn’t all huggable sentiment, this is

Truly how we move. We’ve got to take

Smooth with the rough, then your inner

Light will know. It can pull you back from

The dark, it did me and there was no big

Bright light. Be your grace saving not

The other way round.

Look out at the debris that flies in the wind
It can hold it in mid-air like a king-
Fisher hovering prey, me and you
And what we say predicting this
Human race, humanity is winning
Hands up, this is my tiny glimmer
Of light. The theory of every-
Thing, life is a big black hole.

THE EMPEROR

“O for a life of sensation rather than of thought.”

Keats

The shadow of hell cell (bars on the window) is

Cast on my wall like a remnant of dream

Turned into my black-hole nightmare.

Will I ever recover this locked-in thing?

All the world should have a negative

Capability, guarding them against

The forces of dark, teeth to the arming.

We all must face this harsh reality to make

Tomorrow new, I want to turn this muck

To gold and see color behind my eye.

I want to pray this pome, the holiness

The heart knows. This is my theory

Of life/poetry- so the great Wallace-

Stevens said who stepped beyond him-

Self to create the emperor of ice cream.

He was thinking outside the box, I’m thinking

Inside but Keats, Carver and Stevens are

Giving me a leg up over this big black wall.

Like the peace line that stood between us

In the living room (from an early poem)
I’ll get over my origin, the bastard.

HELL CELL
For Helen

Sunshine snow drifts by my window
The world doesn’t seem to know
What to do, I thought I was the only one?
But nature is in two minds, bringing
In a cold spell of past and a present warm spring.

The sun almost blinds me casting a shadow
Of vertical blind, bars on the window
Of a hell cell, that’s my little bit of sky-
My glimmer of light.

This is Ireland!

                                  COHEN AND CO

A secular majesty of sorrow

Wakes me in an aura of mourning.

This is the beginning of a new age.

Music and the songwriting of great

Men lifts me like a Rilke poem

Universally up. Thank you for

Making me see the light. There are

Problems in this world but

None of them are mine.

                                  WAITING AROUND TO DIE

Thirteen tablets a day

For ten years= forty seven

Thousand four hundred

And fifty. Pre-scribed over-

Dose of cramp and hope hangs

By a thread-due-

Ende.

Waiting around to die.

The pome is all that matters.

Death is versed on a moment-us moment.

The living spirit of blackfulness, death will

Kick in any moment now.

HAND IN HAND ( cortege)

I look out the window and see 

past the houses and new city 

streets, with wind in grass 

and trees, a land-scape.

We need to go back 

and celebrate the land 

when life and death

went hand in hand.

A pagan/christian

time of day, when

we had our say, went

our own way.

When death comes in

i dare you not to cry.

Sit down and take

deaths hand and she

will guide you through.

Smile at grief and he

will smile up at you.

Don’t be afraid, this

is the beginning not

the end, walk on.   

BLACK NOISE

'Found death in life, may here find life in death
                                          Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This is the pome I didn't want to write.
Only through sadness do I find joy.
Every night I wear this veil of tears
I don't want to live with happy/sadness

it burst out of me like an over-dose
Of mixed emotion. Please take me
out of this hell-hole, even suicide
wont trip me. I want to think beyond
myself, I must live in

my negative positivity this wheel-
chair is my home of stroke gene cell.
I'm doing my fathers time, living
his inner bastard life, an internment
of the soul, my life is interrogating me

sending down a black noise, I have to
live with, it is my black hole holding
my inner light. Give me the humane
touch not a police escort as if it's nine-

teen fifty, I have the right to die like
you have the right to live, I don't live
your moral code. I don't want to write
these stanzas or live in this district of

sadness within despair but these
are the words that hold my truth like life
within my stare. These words are
my only hope of ever pulling through.

LOCKED-IN-HISTORY

A poet without dreams and imagination

That wakes every morning wall-

Papered into a symmetry of shade.

Locked in by darkness projected

From within.

The nearest to dream are jet streams

Painting a landscape of sky inside

A real reality home miles

And miles away.

He can’t see beyond the walls

You dream, his locked in

Sin-drome is black.

Religion rings and cannons roar

The time of day, are we still in

A middle age, the age of discovery.

Locked in a church and state

Crusade war.

WITH-OUT

Ten years of living a real reality with-

Out the right side of my brain.

A writer writing without imagination

And forty five years down a drain.

The days and nights have been long

And dark but words have kept me sane.

Even words of truth and blame that

I have let you sustain.

Thank you for letting me be blue

There is hope in this left brain.

Here is a prose piece from before

The stroke my downright dirty blues.

I’ve seen only darkness and pain, ill

Be that until the day I die just like

Carver on cathedral and Chekov

On grief this is a brand new day.

So hang on in there you can’t beat

The truth with a big stick.

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 cities grime.

As the church bells rang out the Angelus little Maggie blessed herself and

continued polishing Mrs Mahon’s side board.

Every Saturday she helped her mother clean the houses of the rich to help boost her

measly widows pension from the Ministry of Defence.

Her father died a few years previous, cut down is his prime of twenty seven by

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 a life into the world 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 with 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 cant 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

blond lady with sunglasses came in the queue behind holding a little girls hand’.

‘Caught ya na na na na na said Pam said, Rita Hayward  hasn’t got

blond hair, ‘I know said Maggie but I remember Rinty the bell boy at the Gresham

had told me she was visiting Dublin.  ‘I read that in her next role she would be blond,

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 blond 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 standing 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 favour 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’.

Patti 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 looked into 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 leered 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 tore her soul

her life and legion with 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 cities

grime,  her dreams of innocence washed away with the filthy river.

The river bed of broken glass and rotting metal took blood from her feet but she was

numb to feel it through here 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 of 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’.

Mrs Mahon’s brother in law died of cancer some months later and Maggie knelt in the

chapel praying as the priest looked on.

For ten years now I have lived without dreams, within my own harsh reality.

No abstract realism, entity or metaphysical being exists here. 

This is a rough road, the hardest journey of my life. 

I have posted the horrors of my reality every other day on Facebook,

allowing the world to see my harsh causeway.

Please don’t judge my pomes on any poetic form they are moment

Us moments from my harsh causeway not based on any dream

Imagination.  They are moments that matter to me and help me survive

This harsh world in a hell cell buts it’s the only hell cell I have, reality

Rules ok.  For ten years I have been writing the self, living with the moment

That has become a decade of de-ja vu, these blogs have been my life.

From day one I have been living a harsh reality and now since my stroke it has been tenfold.

I am the son of a bastard son and these are my dark dreams of reality, 

my bastard life, the only one i got.

UNDREAMED

I woke to a blotch of alphabet letters

Projected from within. Was this a code?

To the kingdom of death or just a mumbo

Jumbo mess. I tried to find a way through.

It was a scrawl of different fonts as if written

in my other hand the paralyzed one.

All I could make out was w, q and y then

The hologram of letters disappeared.

As plain as day was there upon the wall.

Are my pomes just a mass of letters?

Like graffiti on a back alley wall?

At least that read: foxy rules ok!

Was there method in this madness?

Or was this my misspent youth.

This was like piecing together tears

Blemishes left behind the eye from

Stained life. I switched off the light

And fell back into undreamt dreams.

GOD EAT GOD

I live in a lean limbo time, caught in a catch 22.

In a uneconomic uncaring society

Sandwiched between good and evil.

Everything comes down to the penny

In your pocket, empathy comes

Right down to this.

Empathy for me a disabled poet

Is humanity, its priced way out?

Of my league.  Can this poetry of moment us

Moment make any difference.

We have to begin to care, humanity

Is going too far, caring costs nothing.

We’re living a dog eat dog existence.

Are we taking the good from the bad or bad from good?

Empathy decides.

HIS STORY

Rhyme stops and the rhythm

Of words take over.

Life is renewable if we just let go.

History is not gospel, write your own.

Hold your past that is sacred

and spin a present web.

The world is full of diversity
not the truth, the light and the way.
Words have a way of finding form
If they are seeking truth. 

Show a little tenderness and we
can make it grow-out of this
repetitive reality show.

TRUE EMPATHY

For my sister Stephanie

There was only life or death

But we’ve got to find that balance

In the center. The thin line between

The only way out or in.  My sister

Might have made that choice

Before she fell in a blur- and banged

Her head.  Why have we let life?

Go this far, knowing there’s no way back?

Caught on the thin line that sucks us

Into the pool of right and wrong.

She was just another alcoholic worth-

Less human being that the system

Washed into their moral drain.

Build a safety net so my sister

Can die with dignity moral judge-

Meant is the evil way down.

You let your citizens slip along

This path, it’s a sad state that

Allows us to fall without a thought

For life love the purpose fit to be tied.

Moral judgment has taken her down

Poor Steph.  The same moral judge-

Meant that keeps me alive without

A disabled infrastructure. Humanity

Come and show these righteous people

how it’s done.  Empathy is there to give

Us hope of never finding her thin line

that takes us down.  Black rotten society

is in my heart but I am coming up

for Stephanie.

ESSENTIAL LONELINESS

I was born to be lonely!

I’m the king of loneliness

Ray-mond.  Both syllables

Of your name called me

From another poem.

I am but a tiny speck in

The blackness far beyond.

I put my face into my hands

And sorrow came about like

A painting by Picasso or

Vincent Van Gogh.

We all crave a little love, that’s

the purpose fit to be tied.

I love you until I die!

Melancholy grips me and holds

Me in its stare, intently glaring

Inward on the cusp of suicide.

Bearable essential loneliness.

I had to get over morning now

I have to get over night.  I love

That word vulner-able it holds

My inner sight.

THE PLINTH

Bodies, I’m not an animal

                                     Sex Pistols

It’s hard to be positive when

You wake negative

And the world won’t let

You breathe. 

Disability is a non-entity in a un-

Economical state of disbelief. 

I’ll just sit here in hell cell trying

to reinvent the wheel-

chair.

Life is just going around and round

In this war torn terrain.  Picking up

These vibes like a litter-picker from

The past.

If I close my eyes will you able people

Tell me when the carousel stops

Spinning and the future pre-

Sent the past.

YOU MORALISTIC EVIL BASTARD

For ten years now, I have been
Crying wolf when I’m a fox.
How can one step outside ones
Self when all you see is truth not
Beauty. A poet without speech or
Memory, a pome writ like waves
On ocean. Written so black and bleak
They are hard even for me to re-read.

I feel I’m the darkest deepest depressed
Writer in all the world, even this uni-
Verse wont stanza globally turn. Black
And bleak can’t walk or talk, what was
Their point! The ethics of medicine
Moral me today but when to fuck in
God’s name can I have my say.

Have I been talking to my-
Self! Your just like my
Bastard father.

who am i talking to?

RAW WAR

Raw war

Is over.

Let

Humanity

Begin.

THE STROKE GENE-IE

Words today don’t have true-

conviction to swim in current-

sea, there’s too much weight 

placed on them, they drown in

currency.  Can poetry like sun-

shine be buoyant and free?

Walk and talk, do what I can’t

call at my mother’s home, tell

her I love her not to worry! 

I’m not just here killing time.

Humanity and independence 

came from her and has been 

with me like the stroke gene 

that almost killed me and gave 

my mother mini strokes that 

we both have to live with.  

I sit now in a wheelchair in 

a world of disability trying to 

stay outside an uncaring-

health care system. Living 

a lonely existence but this 

is life, a blemished accept-

ance.  I would like a little 

love in my life but I'm 

a broken man and 

that’s not to be.

I come from a family 

of individuals that stand 

or sit on their own two feet

my feet rest on footplates.  

I don’t come from a world 

of books and poetry but 

they have become my life.  

I come from a world 

of rebellion, rebelling 

against the worlds 

oppression, not for

the cause of a country 

but to feel free within.  

The freedom I feel 

is the humanism 

that is shown, love 

has kept me alive

so it works both ways.  

I’m writing these words 

for my inner peace.

The only words in my house 

were words of war, the secret army

Michael Collins and Hollywood stars.

I devoured them words at a very young age.  
It was never about the subject matter
words were always matter of my moment.
My words don’t have a conclusion

they are an on-going battle 
against the oppression 
I face in me.  

They don't come from a bitter 

loyalist republicanism 

they are words of truth 

and justice that shape 

my peace within.  

I might not be able to walk 

and talk but I have got 

a brain and the right to 

say my dark is light, up- 

is down in me.  Jack-

Kerouac the beat poet

said write as if you’re 

the first person on earth. 

I am the only person here 

so these are words of joy.

NO CHOICE

Hypocrisy is sending

You this pome, life-

Death in a road-

Side bombing.

I dreamt this pome

And planted it

By the side

Of the road.

A LONELY NATION

Poetry is linked to your mobility.

I live in a world of disabled blues

So my pomes have become 

mom-entry.

They are not a language of verse-

if-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, outside me

it’s not my style

It’s the darkness

you see.  

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!

flowers in a piss pot

flowers in a piss-pot

Crying out tears from a sensitive mind

A man with an open heart.

Crystal clear they fall, the family kind

That goes right back to the start

Loving and living honest and true.

What on earth are we to do?

Why do we strive to be great?

When we are already man-kind.

Look down at ourselves sinking

In the swamp of greed.

The Irish kill the Irish and blame the Irish.

Chairman Mao, America, Afghanistan, Russia

Ukraine man un-kind.  World war one

and two went on and ricocheted our hearts.

Humanity has given us the greatest

gifts of life and death.  Why don’t we

stay here on the ground instead of

climbing the ladders of class, we tramp-

down the dirt of the past and stand on

the skulls of our ancestors. 

There is only one human class!

Start as you mean

To go on, homage.

PAST-TENSE (a song pome)

Like a prisoner on death-row

In a hell cell, I dreamt I was

Waiting around to die.  These

Were my last eight hours now

Alive.  No codeine high, to live

To fly.  These are my last words

Never again will I see this lonely

Hope, just darkness from here

On in, I’ve seen before.  Sunshine

And my little piece of sky has lived

In me but now all the poetry must

Die, all those words of lasting hope

And truth, must go into the dark

Where they came from.  I know

They will find a home in someone’s

Memory of me, my throne.  You are

My friend and I’m your mate to, dark-

Ness enrapture capture me, to live

Again on pages I can’t see.

I want these last words to sting and bite

But at least you are happy writing me.

To be worthy of your memory and what

I can’t see in me. These are words

Of trembling right that I’m trying

To capture in this light, before

It gets dark and out of sight.

HIGHCHAIR, WHEEL-CHAIR, THRONE

A shadow casts within like

A due-end, negative capability.

This is my empathetic view:

Life was good, I played with muck-

Cut up serpents into two, ‘turned

Muck into gold’.  I didn’t want for

Anything, full of love and security.

The first six years held me back from

The dark in childhood misunder-

Standing, today the truth wanted to

Come out to play.  For too long now

We have been held back by a twisted

Regimental church and state fostering

To drill us like little boy soldiers.

In these years of adjusting to living out-

Side in my new world stroke order with-

Out god or a metaphysical being.  Finding

Hope in the Tao te Ch’ing, poetry and art

Darkness within darkness.

Nietzsche said, ‘God is dead’, one hundred

Years ago, he didn’t mean it to be a derogatory-

Term.  He meant we no longer need god as

A moral mentor.  The word god comes from

Good, he was very good fighting off the middle-

Ages but we no longer need the churches

Out dated pedophile corruption.  We need

To be more godlike, not looking up but down

Full of beauty and truth like Keats.

We now know that our shadow casts the light

Of wonder, true humanity.  God came from

Good let him rest there.  Spending the last few

Years alone, as Bukowski said, ‘it makes sense

To be alone’, in the poets essential loneliness.

Alone I found an inner dark that is a magical

Human tool of survival in these harsh times.

EVENT HORIZON

I woke with enriching darkness

Within my heart, knowing

I had shared with you my tears of joy.

Freedom of choice was out there

I could feel it driving by.

I had to cry myself into this sorrow-

Full state to find the essence of true

Poetry without illusion.

Even death has no hope in the majesty

Of life but I bow to the darkness-

The light within my black hole.

Stop distorting the gloom, it holds as

Much truth as light.  It holds the shadow

Of our sight, I have found wrong to be

Right, beyond good and evil.

A POEM FOR NIK WALENDA

In memory of Karl Walenda

and Raymond Carver

AERIALIST SUPREME

Writing a good poem is a tight-

Rope act, your following in your

Grand-father’s footsteps I’m re-

Tracing words of a master

Capturing a little piece of sky.

Trying to catch the breath of life

That held us up on that high wire.

From Vienna to the torrid-zone.

Imagine that wire!

A SCREENPLAY POME



unknown freedom

A woman walks the dark lonely

Cobbled streets of 1930s Belfast.

A basket is placed by a blood red

Door, the door is knocked like

Thunder echoing the lonely dark

With her step running away

To unknown freedom.

A boy sits by a stagnant pond in black

And white, a group of young boys pass

Singing he’s lost his Ma and Da

And doesn’t know where to find them

Leave them alone and they will come

Home dragging the bastard behind them.

The word bastard echoes through the

Air, the scene goes forward back to 1969

The man and the boy are being put out of their

Home an ex-British soldier and a union jack

Son. 

The pavements are torn, there are buses

burning at the end of every street, black

ash falls like snow, on every corner stands

a man guarding crates of Molotov cock-

tails, the smoke of war fills the air. 

A young man is dragged through a hedge back-

wards during a gun battle in 1976, the man that

saves him gets shot in the head.  A woman stands

screaming over the dead body of her son lying

on the ground with his intestines spilling

on the concrete.  Its internment morning and the brit-

ish soldier walks over a pile of 78’s (records)

And arrests the man of the house.

The man wakes in a dungeon cell, white noise shoots

The jail landing outside and he holds his ears as the lone

Bulb swings in the interrogation room.  The father and son

Are in a white car going over ramps around barbed wire

Barricades and nervous young soldiers.  Unspoken on

A lonely motorway.

A fifteen year old son stands at a dock-

Land waiting for a boat to take him away

In black and white.  A sixteen year old son

of a bastard son stands on a railway platform

full of squaddies going on leave in 1977.

He sits in a lonely compartment

Suddenly it fills with squaddies

One shakes his hand and offers

A beer.

The rebel boy and the soldier get on

Like a house on fire, Farringdon gardens

A street of houses goes up like a in-

Ferno.  At a coffee shop at Euston station

A black girl serves him change from an all-

Most white palm.  He gets tossed out of

A paddy wagon being beaten like an Irish-

Man into a cell, he stands there in the dock

Receiving community service.

A lonely old man in tweed cap and overalls

Trying to free a rusted nut from a rusting

Old V.W. beetle, tastes death.  Inside the lonely

House a carburetor rests on the table beside

The innard’s of an old T.V.  His son holding the hand

Of his son follows a funeral cortege.

Haystacks are untied like freedom winds, the flash-

Backs of war flash through their minds, the memory

Of his father thrown from a helicopter just feet off

Of the ground with a sack over his head.  The boys

Wife gives birth to a son.  His father wakes in a wheel-

Chair looking out a window.

Watching his son walk down the street with his son.

DROME

I remember people and places

But I can’t put detail to faces.

These are just moment-us pomes

Pomes created by moments

Without the depth of detail.

Pomes are not spun out tales

They are truths that find my flow.

My pomes arent read they're felt 

This pome wants to rhyme its way

Into memory, it leans into words

To pretend that it’s free.

Real poems are black holes

In a word uni-verse, that hold

An abundance of light.  I want

To reach my syndrome but

Memory is holding me back.

One day I’ll write a moment-us

Pome that reaches beyond blue

Until then this is all I can do.

Give you a glimmer of black light

Blue, this isn’t a song by Shelby-

Lynne these are words that lost

Meat off of the bone.

This pome is very

very thin

It has its eye

in the syn-

UNDONE

Un-mouthed

unmoral, un-able 

to utter a natural rhythm.


Fatherless, god-

less, life

less, sil-

ence.

A poem cant ever be finished by the fact that its a pome.

HIGH WINDS

The high winds of winter are calling to me

The red golden leaves want me to be free.

Being alone is to essentially be, once

More I go round and round into me.

Through the path of leaves, 4 magpies, 2

Crows and 3 seagulls, the wind in my

Face, scavenging for words.

The green white and orange flags are still

Flying in 2014.  I know I’m Irish/English

I lived on the streets or did they live in me?

Words set me free among leaves and live-

Stock, the shores of the lake laps me.

Humanity walks by into the shimmering 
sound of the Belfast to Dublin train 
trembling, main-lined.

The bare naked trees are like a queue of people 

waiting, what more can I say about 
the balancing lakes balancing?

IN-SIGHT

I saw something levitate right 

behind my eye, like a humming-

bird hovering in my center of sky.  

It may be a figment but I don’t 

know it flew right by.  

The black blotches have dwindled 

to a pin-point symmetry-a 70’s wall-

paper of monochrome two-tone.  

Can death inside come back, Can 

my locked-in-syndrome come 

out to play?

I’m not a brain surgeon but 

I think my stroke is going away. 

I can stand a lot longer, ok-

I’ll never walk but I’m less of a crier.  

Before, I hadn’t any hope at all 

maybe this is my humanity in-

side, poetry has been my savior 

of that there is no doubt. 

I’m sending this to a stroke 

specialist to point the right 

way and why?  In the meantime

reading-writing makes the mind 

stronger, hopefully this is just 

a stroke of time.

I hear an ambulance go siren-
by and remember that day 

in April 2005.  I woke when 

my life support was off 

and I was technically 

dead.  Life and love has 

brought me to this other 

shore.  

My mind was like a dish of 

porridge gruel but I woke 

with the word positive 

on my mind.  I looked out 

a window and knew 

I was alive.

I SIT IN ON

This wheelchair looking out

For hope, by this disabled lake.

Never mind the sun outside

Shining, shimmering the golden

Leaves, it’s what it’s doing in-

Side that counts.  Keats shines

in on my kitchen bench, dog-

eared to let love in.

I can’t get to grips with his myth-

Ology but feel the silence in your

Words, your psyche tremble

Whispering into my inner ear. 

I want to write this pome for you

this is my moment-us moment. 

You are my Greek tragedy

beyond suicidal sorrow, beyond

the grave.

These are words writ in water:

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES


VAUXHALL VICTOR



Sitting here in a wheelchair, aged fifty

three smoking a pipe watching a clear

blue sky, thinking of me and my dad

in a Vauxhall victor in 1972.



Over ramps past nervous young soldiers

Beside barricades of barbed wire. I did

Not want to be there, I wanted to be like

Him, a freedom fighter but this was my

Mothers will, to get me off the streets.

April ’72 was green and brown camouflage

We hardly spoke.  We were both going on

The run, him away from the Brits and me

Away from the future my mother knew

Would kill me or end up in jail like my father.

At every check-point my heart was in

My mouth.  Down Shankill and up the Fall’s

On the motorway, he said, at least were

Out of Belfast as if talking to someone else.

The road went on and on and on, at the border

He reached across and ran his fingers through

My hair that was one the only time he showed 

me affection.  We were on our way to hack-balls-

cross in the middle of nowhere, down a un-

approved road in bandit country just across

the border.

The cottage with no electricity no water just

A superser gas heater a bed and a spade to

Dig a hole if you wanted to go to the toilet.

I carried water from a well along the Castle-

Blaney road.  The next day’s weeks and months

We were like spirits of the past, floating past-

Each other with paraffin lamps from another

Century but it was heaven to me, running through

Fields like a street urchin from a dickens novel

With my friend Muttley the dog, a one eyed three

Legged dog, beaten by the brits by kicks and rifle butts.

He chased herds of cattle and then chased me

Through fields of cool grass.  I came to call it

My freedom winds, it took away all my hatred

And bitterness, death and war from a no-go area

of killing.  My checkpoint Charlie was over there

over the border and my black hills of memory

Kavanagh country.

DESCENT DEATH

I lived life in the fast lane, so
I must suffer this slow lane.
In this wheelchair I sit out-
Side life but I need love, art
And hope to keep me going.
When love, art slips away
into nothingness again.

Now I hold my grandchildren

In the magic hands of chance

And feel the shadows of hurt

Trembling founds. Inspire life

To tear down the global peace-

Walls us in, me out, humanity

Feels this shiver. Stop this de-

Struction of life, humanitarian

Dehumanism. The greatest human

atrocity in history is causing grief.

There is no descent death, abolish

Words like ‘target killing’ that make

It ok to kill, military humanism. We

Don’t need a virus to destroy human-

Ism, were doing it ourselves. We have

Tipped the scales of life/death into
The red, the danger zone. Ebola will
Wipe up the mess, we are on a head-on
Collision. Slow down, drop into the green-
Sector. I can no longer chase my tail, why
Am I still in this foxhole?

SIGHT

A shadow cast by street-

light animated by the wind.

Dark is juxtaposed 
by light
to be a drawing of the night.

Dawn arrives and the ghost
is gone but it's 
not a ghost
of fright it's my dark friend
called sight, good day.

Demons are created 
from good
too good, be humane.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES

to be continued and continued


POOR POETRY

Memory woke on that day in 2005
When I woke from a stroke/coma.
45 years of memory were stroked out
This is the first day of the rest of
My life, I reset the clocks from here.
I can remember certain moments
When I done certain things but I cant
Remember details surrounding those
moments so this is a memoir of moments.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES

The poetics of time and space

Part 1.

Is there any point to this?

I’d rather be up than down

You can’t stop natures flow.

This isn’t a moral maze where I can

Get lost, this is my decision.

I say who comes and goes in

a pome.  I predict natures flow

poetry has already made my

up my mind.  I’m writing

the natural flow, the poetics

of my landscape are creating

my picture for you that keeps

me whole.  We create our own

destinies, we paint the words

in our heads, these words feed

my hurt, I am the king of dis-

ability round here.  There’s only

me here and art, lost in the poetics

of time and space assemble a land-

scape of me.

The poetics of space and time

Slept in a poor home, death and

War harbored in dreams of a

free Ireland.  ‘Poverty is good

for the soul’, Wrote a great man

with a great hunger.

All I knew then was Hollywood

And the I.R.A.  A Frankenstein

Monster limped across the T.V.

During a forty eight hour gun-

Battle that seemed to last for

Days years even.

Monsters in uniform kicked in

My door and took my father

And mother away to dungeons

And my sister to juvenile jail

Middle-town, I became a ref-

Ugee boy.

I wanted to live and die for my

Country, when my father was bailed

We went on the run, not before humanity

Saved me and dragged me from a gun-battle

Hauled through a hedge backwards

got me home and was shot in the head.

I fired blanks through the branch of a tree

nurtured on the song Kevin Barry, martyrdom

was just eighteen years old, I was too young

to die and too young to be a freedom fighter

these were my freedom winds, I could see

the world wasn’t at war, Kavanaghs country

changed my mindset moulded by my fathers

hatred.  I didn’t know the words of Kavanagh

yet but poetry was cooling my heels running

through his acreage, a greener fool

with mucker on the horizon.

At school I learnt of Julius Caesar and saw

Him stabbed in the back on the streets.  A girl

Kicked me in the balls, I didn’t think a girl

Could land a fine shot.  I fell in love in a heap

On the floor, mucker was in my heart.

KEATS

Can I stand beyond myself?

and whisper like a breeze

Can I be a golden leaf?

Knowing I must fall

There is no disability

Deep within my heart.

There is no war and famine

In a warped corrupted world.

Poetry arrives like a flower

Opening in spring, that feeds

My senses with every living

Thing.  It’s hard to be independent

Living in a welfare state.

This is a ‘mere matter of the moment’

For a man who found a universal truth.

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.

o.c.

I don’t dream much these days

But writing my memories keeps

Me sane. My Fathers plot of weeds

And wild grass cries out for order.

The fallen wooden cross bears no name

Just like the seed markers he planted

To say which is which, the plot he turned

In an acre and a half of land to plant

Lettuce, cabbage and carrots from

A packet of seeds.

I was left in charge to see them grow.

Forgotten little shoots that nurtured

Into grief, un-weeded neglected was

Your theory of living of the land.  City

Dwellers trying to be country-folk.

Now you lay beneath the land you fought for

without a flag to wrap around your bones. 

We don’t even know where your plot is?

So how can we weed a plot we do not know

from what is what.

UN-POLLUTED JOY

‘Loving them all the way back to the source,
Loving everything that increases me’.
Raymond Carver

The mind creates a form like
Shadow goes into light.
The form becomes a memory
Of what I done yesterday.
A childhood I thought was erased
Almost like an anagram my mind
Is raised to remember yesterday
Today. Words have a healing prop-
Erty if you let them form, only like
They know to flow. Words find
A way to journey through the mind
To feel the tremble of light in un-
Polluted joy, to wake up on another
Shore with Raymond Carvers sight, might.

i was talking to a housing inspector about a dis-

abled door and this came like that.

THE GLAD STREAM

The spittle from my pen leaves

Its mark upon the page, a heart

Pierced by a sword.   My Father used

a gun to find peace, I used a pen.

‘ The glad stream’, metal and plastic power’.

I’m reading Coleridge while the young couple

on the far bank are moving. I’ll miss them

at the backdoor coming out for a smoke even

If they never say hello, it felt like some-

one was there.  The cot and toys are being

shifted into a van, the white door through

the fence has closed a chapter.  The sky

is blue and the river of cars flow by.

BLOOM

The world goes on and on and on

But I’m here and here and here.

A plastic urinal looks up and blooms

Between the wheelchair and the dis-

Abled toilet.  I’ve been reading poets

And poems and poetry but can’t find

A link to my home. Poetry is out there

in the meadows and trees but I’m

Locked-in alone.  I put a search into

Google for poets who took a stroke

Nothing came up.  I turned away

In my wheelchair to see my leg-

Lifter and my grabber catching rays

Of sun on my profile bed so I suppose

The only link is the sun coming in

And this pome going out.  A pome

From a un-romantic, un-academic

Spineless confessional poet, there

I said it that word poet but I’m just

A shadow of my former self living

A stanza in me.

SPRING SHADOWS

Spring shadows, thick and black
They make a tree look like a tree
Within a tree. A lazy lonely mid-
Day as if the shadow was painted
By Edward Hopper. The shadows
Fall in this sun against the cloud-
Less blue like it didn’t need any
More to be today. The shades
Of yesterday are with us, cele-
Brating this glorious sunshine
Falling upon contrasting light,
Being.

A COLD FRONT

I have to dig in deep

to find a purpose

to find a stanza that

translates my soul.

My purpose is to be-

come a silent poet

a screaming din with-

in a noiseless state.

A person that is way be-

yond a person a human that

seeks to find humanity

a searcher of the truth within

the search, a man that has

touched his own black hole.

A POEM INSIDE A POEM

A poem inside a poem

revealed it-self to me

showing a slant of ages

like an image within

an image.

Coming out of dark

a bi focal trick in the eye

of concentration to go

deeper and deeper into

grey matter.

GREY MATTER

I look around this room and realise my muse

has exhausted the theme of light and dark

but the shadows still fornicate.

I’ve used the bed-rail, the wheelchair

And the stand-by beacons to keep me

from drowning in dark.

My piss-pot is angled like a shooting star

Blazing my trail of hope.

My positivity comes from the well

Of treasure, the source that we call god.

Whether it is or isn’t I think the well

Of human spirit is a vessel of magic

That keeps us whole and I always

Make love with my light in the dark.

WHAT WASN’T SAID

for Fiona

Autumn is almost here.

The trees are golden-

 Green and the cars move

like a cortege along the road.

This morning I had three women

And a dead dog hovering around

The wheelchair reading poetry.

One was shadowing, learning

the ropes of my splint. One had lost

her dog, feeling sad I let her read Carver

‘You’re dog dies’, ’Gravy’, and ‘What

the doctor said’.

There is no difference in grief, human

Or pet, they went about their day in

Looser uniforms, caring.  It made me

Recall Mucker, Muttley and me.  Muttley

Was a one eyed three legged dog, beat

By the brits with the butts of rifles and kicked

they called him the O.C. of dogs, he hated uniforms.

Hit by a truck and killed.

Hearing the last yelp of Mucker clubbed to death

By a golf club by a boy at the bottom of our path.

Oppression is felt by a dog to!  Carver brought them

Back from the dead and we all shook his hand.

Carver you created this in

Between the lines of what

Wasn’t said.

GUTTERSNIPE

Down up alley-

Ways and back

Streets of life.

Out on waste-

Ground in

Wasted time.

Through love

I found a second

chance

Not a golden

Path but

A black path

That leads no-

Where, full of

Disability. 

Forty-five years of

Memory washed

Down the drain.

Guttersnipe on

His way to death.

Found his own way

Beyond con-vention

Because my bastard

Father was without con-

vention, diverted traffic.

He found his way

Through the rubble.

Thank you mum

my boys and John

Keats negative

Capability. With-

Out them I’d be

Dead.

This is the first day of

The rest of my life.

Life is like a butter-

Fly in John Keats eye.

Blue, brown

Or black.

A jet stream rises in the sky.

Something happens and you capture it

if only one person reads this, then

my job is done.  It doesn't deserve money

to add to the capitalist strife of the world.

If this falls on the mind-set of freedom

then it will be a majestic fall.

AURA

An aura comes from

every dead and living thing.

Today, I saw a haze

rise from a Bee in

the back garden.

Its almost Autumn.

We rise in an aura

of dust like the Bison

rolls around on the ground

or water for the Elephant.

An aura rises to flow

in a majestic fall.

PEACE

Life is like a butterfly

In John Keats eye, blue

But very beautiful

Flying to death.

I’m looking out at autumn

And it is looking back at you.

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 flitting from you.

Boldly saying though art free.

WANK
for Hank

I’m going out to-

Day to catch and hold

The last days of summer.

I want to feel the adrenaline

Classical flow like Henryk Gorecki

Churning out his symphony of sorrow.

I remember days when I drank

And screwed like Bukowski but

I just can’t recall, it’s all dead wood

Now. i used to love my tales

of ordinary madness.

The mind can’t go to the comfort

Of a quim.

I’ll twig along and catch the last

Rays of summer before the bare

Season.  Everything I say and do re-

Turns to melancholy so ill

Have to turn this around in-

To a holy essential loneliness

And wank on web-cam, I wish.

A TAO INTERPRETATION

Return to the uncarved block, infancy. My words are easy to understand it acts without a name, flowing like water, following your own nature deep, deep, deep to the gateway of subtle illumination.  

Don’t cling to your body’s woes, crippled becomes whole.  Egoless ego cultivates endless energy to rise fall and stand

Beyond dark wonder.

Nature’s way moves on through dark

Vision, what was will be and what will

Be was, opposites attract.  Gold can’t

Be guarded, fulfill within, wars famine

Great victory is a funeral, the bright road

Seems dark in wreathed smiles, clay is

The word and clay is the flesh.

Empty words go back to nothing, magnificent

Scenery remains still, drop drops like stone.

Good words leave no trace in the intangible

Essence, know when to stop, hold your ground.

Empty vessels and blunt weapons fade away.

A violent man does not die a natural death.

Held loss harms nothing, stand by your word

No more sorrow, no self.

My son collected weeds in my garden

For this piece of art.

GOLD LEAF OF TIME

Autumn came through my door 

held up in the delight of my grand-

sons’ autistic spectrum, seen through

a golden-brown leaf.  Can you imagine 

the rainbow of light through that prism 

of nature? it was 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.  Maybe

Stonehenge and the Pyramids were 

sensory monuments, gold leaf of time.

Wow Riley, this is your balance of light

these words are magic beans that see 

your spectrum.  Just stop stepping into 

my fridge freezer to put on and off

The light because your adjusting 

the flow, time traveler.

I was wondering why my milk was going off.

SEPTEMBER SUN

Sitting in September sun

Watching the Dublin train

Go by without the hinder-

ance of bombs on the line.

You can scent the season

Coming off the trees by

The water’s edge.  A majestic

Swan swims by in clear purity.

The sun ricochets of the lake

Like skimming stones creating

Ripples on the surface as if

Caused by the tremble of the train.

I follow the backbone of cloud

To my destination, blue.

THE WOMB OF TRUTH

A jet stream shoots through

Leaving a cloud that dis-

Appears into the clouds

Of time.

Trying to live a positive way

In a negative world, I came

From the womb of truth.

My father said I was a sensitive

Child who needed too much.

i wanted to fight and die

for ireland, to be like my 

father, to fight for his cause

be one of his clan.

He found his mother in the earth

Of Ireland, buried up there on

Her black hills, where I ran as

A boy.  Now I’m running lines

Across this page, trying to find

My mother’s truth. I tripped on

Seaweed and went head over

Heels into the water and almost

Drowned, coming up and down

Three times but I couldn’t grapple

Thin air.  I fell exhausted through

Paradise, it was beautiful in there

The seaweed danced with the tide.

I was dragged out, a man

Baptized by nature.  Nothing

And no one could touch me

The world gave me its calling

Truth beauty, beauty in truth.

MEMORIAL PREPARATION

We follow a coffin under-
Ground but who said were
Going down. I lost my Father
And my sister to grief and I
Am doing it no more, this is
What death is for, to form?
Death for the living. Even
A question mark makes us
Question what we truly
Believe.

I brush the soiled tears

From your eyes and you
Wake in me swimming
And glistening in mine.
You are my future my
Past my gift wrapped
Present. The clay of
My mind in each
And every day.

We are not going down
You’re coming up to me.
This is not about a man
In a robe, it’s about re-
Spect and remorse.
I love you, I hope you
Take this with you when
You go. Humanity
anoints our soul.

Only you will under-
Stand this is a blessing
From my heart.

THE FOG

We have been lost in a meta-

Physical fog, drank from

The rivers of forgetfulness

sipped the altering wine

To forget our fear, the world

Has become a place of myth

Death, inferno and holocaust.

While we were drifting out

Of our heads.

The only way to repair itself

From this hell, is through

Reality.  Reality rules ok!

Our whole way of life, humanity

Has been lost in classical mythology.

The fog is lifting and reality is seen

all around, we must be more

Godlike looking up not

looking down.

I LOVE THE DARK HOURS

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There i can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life,already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

then the knowing comes:  I can open to 

another life wide and timeless.




Rilke

          

      Poetry is like sunshine it's free

                        'It is human to look down 

on things that have fallen'

                          Alden Nowlan

                                          

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
the last word becomes 

the hinge that take’s

You to the next line.

You can’t semi colon

Emotion, sounding poetic

Is the trick, but as the man

Said, ‘no tricks’.  The con-

Tent of the pome is

Truth, beauty.

THE ZONE

For Kenneth White

The left and right side of the brain
Balance things to be seen by the eye.
‘any minute now something will happen’
Wrote Raymond carver.
The sky will change, a bird will fly, a man
Will walk a street, something from some-
Where will spark a memory from the past
Or future and stream the present.

The sun is up there behind the grey of 1967.

Boys play football in the street, girls swing

Around lamp-posts while ladies scrub the porch

Below sacred heart pictures waiting for god oh

To welcome you in tears of blood. Men think 

of hate and bitterness being kicked into the gutter

I scene it in my own eye.

Broken biscuits are a treat at Mulhollands shop.

Butler street goes all the past Herbert street to

The holy cross church high on the hill looking down.

Banshee howl in the back yard beyond the out-

Side toilet down the alleyway, the streetlights have

Been converted now to electricity. Cars thump along

Cobbled street, we have left the pad behind

And moved on into new Ardoyne

.

BALANCING

Watching night shadows dance

On streetlight reflected on my window.

Remembering yesterday sheltering

Under trees during a sun-shower.

Being hypnotized by sun sparkling

Like water on the black path.

There’s nothing like the wind on your

Back and the sun on your face!  I moved

Out into fading raindrops twinkling like

The stars at night.

Opposites attract now and the night

shadows dance on the stationery

streetlight like a negative image

of day. Dawn arrives and shadow dis-

appears but both images bring

the balancing lakes home.

MAN OF DISTINCTION

Green leaves shoot out

To create an eye, bark

Forms into a nose.

The cloud and sky are

Your complexion, leaves

Form the nape of your neck

And your hair.

You frown north-ward at

Winters term, east-ward

Over water.  Main-land is

Your home but you grow

Safe into shadow.  Dusk

Falls upon your gaze

And you gaze back into dusk.

Time is seen in the blink

Of an eye, the scene is

A land-scape in sky.

A man of distinction, a true

Conviction rooted in time.

HARD MAN

Crying has become the norm

We live in a sad world.  I cry

At least twice a day, tears of

Sadness and joy.  I wonder

Will we ever balance?

The same muscles are used

For both, my father would

Sing to me as a boy, ‘you don’t

Have to be a baby to cry, dry

Your eyes’.   You can’t beat

A good cry, why can’t we

Balance on tears of happy

Sadness.  As Leonard Cohen

Says, 'it’s almost like the blues'.

‘It’s your party you can cry

If you want to’.

A SYMPOETRY OF HAPPY/SADNESS

A double bass sounds a twelve bar blues
The saxophone splashes on the waves
A trumpet sounds the last post, can you
Hear it in your head? The violin comes
A rolling in and the flute lifts it upon
A single note, the drum rolls and bounds
A symphony in my heart.

                       SHORT POMES:

WAKING DREAM

The waves

swim eyes

to shadow-

light.

ZOM-ME

‘ill be your mirror reflect what you are’

                                                                Lou Reed

I eat these words.

I wake to sleep

To eat.

STICK IT IN

You share brain-

Waves by e-mail

Sucking e- cigs

After cyber-sex.

We store lif-e on

e-styx, lif-e is 

e-ver-lasting 

through

a U.S.B. 

port.

HELICOPTER

I hear a helicopter over-

Head, buzzing like a fly

Around death. I hope

There wasn’t any trouble.

It throbs within my mind 

like the noise of child-

hood still reaching 

me now

in peace-

Time.

MY AIR-SPACE 

I woke yesterday and my air-

Space was being invaded

Radio waves of negativity

Shooting through my sky.

I try to live in a positive

Bubble and hide away with-

In my black stroke, trying

To get by on fumes of pos-

Activity but this morning

Was my shot to pieces miss-

Isled morning, left here with-

Out hope. The bombs are

Raining down on medical re-

Searchers and children on a

Beach. I want to believe in

God and leave the skeptic crew

But there isn’t any where left

To go, only into my art and truth.

We can no longer live in fairy-

Tales that offer false hope, you

Can’t blame the Christian crew

Who want a light savior?

Humanity can’t even redeem

A light favor, humanity has gone

Too far. I woke this morning, away

From the world service, I know

I’m shell-shocked and the truth will

Show in art. I need a day off in here.

I’m going deeper and deeper into

My locked in syndrome, the melon-

cholic silence of disability that flies by 

in the solitude of joy, the miss-

Isles of my day.

EMPATHY (the living dream)

Lying here in empty loneliness re-

Membering what it was like to live?

To be in here outside without that sense 

Of dreaded fear. Even watching 

the celebrations of Humanity upset me

because I know I’ll never reach that 

realm of emotion.

I know every-day I’m going to face that

Impenetrable wall, knowing I’ll never

Reach that empathy of love but

I can reach it through my art of love.

Inside outside like an alien in outer-space.

How can I better explain this: living in?

my own leper colony in a moment of

Negativity within constant doom.

You know there is another way but

It’s not marked on your map, you live

Inside your stroke and there’s no way

Out of the black grey and blue. You

Push your mind out of this black hole.

It’s the only time in life I couldn’t find 

A way out, we all come to this point but 

I live the nightmare, Keatsian waking dream

Looking at life beyond that impenetrable wall.

Poetry and art seem to remove me from

The dream and show at least a glimmer

Of light. That’s why I call them pomes

They live outside the rules of life and are

Created by the moment as if the moment

Is the form and is formed by that feeling

of empathy in a glimmer of light.

This pome has taken me out of myself

And into the self, it’s the only place to go.

THE MAN IN THE TREE

The man in the tree
Is breezing to me.
Beauty is in the eye
Of the be-holder.

He is limb-less but
Speaks of truth. Nature
Touches him each day.
Shades of grey and blue
Highlight his mood of green.

Dusk turns him black and
Darker blue, I will remember
Him in winter, he will all-
Ways be with me, twisting
Through that tree.

He feels the wind within his
Hair and the sky within his
Mind. The roots are deep
at his own feet, he is grounded
in earth. Watching sea-
sons turn, living
And dying me.

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