MEMORY LOST AND FOUND 

THE DAY GOD DIED (AN ESSAY POME)

I hopped and skipped along to mass that morning

Armed with a fake plastic mother of pearl missal.

Around thirteen years old, I was going to see my

One true friend, I was going to confess

My innocent self.

Just as I began to climb the great steps that led

To the great doors that held mystery, humanity.

From behind me I heard machine gun fire.

When you live in troubled times you learn

To do things on the floor.  I was used to hitting

The deck when bombs or bullets went off.

I duked into the hedge and lay on the ground

And I saw a man spray three people dead at

His feet, raise his rifle to the sky, and said

This is for god and ulster!

I lay there thinking how could god let this

Happen, this man had just killed for god.

My young mind couldn’t comprehend this act.

God had taken my innocence and flushed it

Down the drain, I knew it wasn’t an act of god

And just a man acting as gods disciple but

My young mind could not understand how

Man could be so inhumane to man. 

I looked up to the great doors, looked down at my missal

threw it away and ran home crying, in my lifetime

there has never been an answer to this.  I can’t

stomach the fact of humanitarian war.  God died

that day and he never rose again.

SON OF A GUN                                                              

February in this dank dark cell

This place may as well be a dungeon

I’m looking back, counting off your days. 

The longest detainee in Ireland, 48 hours be-

Came nine months, a brit term.  We didn’t

know if they threw you from a helicopter

or your cell was white noised, rumors

we’re flying, bailed we went on the run.

All I recall is gripping my mother’s hand.

Why did you tunnel underground not?

To recognize the court.  I think you were

A mole?  How I didn’t become an I.R.A.

man, only poetry knows.  All we got was

a handkerchief smuggled from the dungeons.

We were under British rule, they

Done just what they wanted.

Still do I live their welfare state but

I’m getting out of this hell cell.

Peace poetry is getting me out                                                      

Not bullets and bombs.

I cried and held my mother’s hand              

You thought I would turn out like

You a murdering lying bastard but

I had higher hopes than you.

I never primed your bomb or held

Your gun.  This pen glides across

The page, is read across the border

Water, I am an English Irishman.

Weeping woman meet sullen man                                          

You cried for grief for war, I cried

For disability, between us their flows

a river of tears but we can see, write

through clear, we have faced our fear.

You look down on me, just as you

Did in life, your grief pours down on me

Looking back to those days when I was

the son of a gun-runner.  Now I can’t

recall detail but I know I was there.

You can’t look me in the eye and show

Remorse so I must live with that.

I will write my truth that you didn’t

have the balls to say.  

2.

2.

Man cant look man in the eye and say liar!  

He looks on himelf, we look back in his image

Corrupt.  Salvador dali and picasso we live with their duende.

I remember you in overalls

Smelling of swarfega.  I spit

My syllables right back in

Your face, the stink of lies

Eminate frm you.

The waste of engine sump oil

Burnt out.  A wolsey and cam-

Bridge cars welded together

And they probably killed

Not that you cared.

I break your weld, cycle

Of violence and hope it

Doesn’t show in my kids.

All I can do is cry,

cry, cry.  Just like in the song.

A vessel beneath the bridge of tears.

When will man stop crying, when

You stop this crying shame

And face your fear.

A COLD SON OF A BITCH

                                                        ‘yet why not say what happened’

                                                                                          Robert Lowell

Unmetered and unpunktuated to flow in its cold naturalness

1.

John looked from the kitchen window

the sink he stood by was like the interior

of a well worn tea pot or the inside of his lungs  

sucking on yet another cigarette

 The street light threw a subtle pastel glow

on the still housing estate  The red rusted

Volkswagen beetle stood like a monument

I will have to get stuck in and fix that car tomorrow 

he thought dropping a sleeping pill  rinsed down

with a cold swig of tea and I will have to clean this

place  he reminded himself climbing the stairs. 

He dreamed the usual sixty-year-old dream

young ladies running naked through summer meadows

When he woke it was those abstract images of memory

that disturbed him and lingered like a blunt saw through

his aching heart

It’s a suffering fucking hell he told himself  throwing cold water

over his face as if extinguishing the image in the mirror

and the reality of his bald head and pointed features

The stench of his loss lingered with every step he took down

those steps where once walked the wife and mother of his dreams

He could almost see her walking down those stairs to meet the day

with that Irish strength that pushed the sore reality to the ground

He ejected the stale teabags from the teapot and thought I must go

To the doctors today and get that disability living allowance form filled in

try to get a mobility allowance and have a new car instead of that un-

repairable rusted old banger

He remembered how the car looked in the night subtle pastel glow

and said god you’re a bastard  you and your cold light of morning

2.

He sat in the doctors waiting room trying to remember good times like

his first born or his wedding day but this annoying ugly kid kept shoving

leaflets in his face about cancer of the bollocks and depression

Just as he was about to smack the kid up the head he heard the broken

English voice of the Pakistani doctor call his name on the tanoi like

a London conductor on a bus.  As the doctor filled in a section of the Dis

ability living allowance form and wrote some prescriptions for depression

angina  headaches and the general feeling that life is a sick load of balls.

John was calling him a black bastard in his mind because

he asked him exaggerate his findings on the form and received

instead a lecture on the ethics of medicine. 

John was a bigot he did not know how to be anything else

he hated blacks Pakis  Chinese  as well as all those beautiful

women he could not have and especially that bitch

that left him after thirty one years.

He walked home through the maze of housing estates with his bag

of pills for every ill but the aching black hole in his heart

Going past the derelict houses full of grafitti he remembered

the night the police man called  their words would always be

on his mind no pills could remove them

The shadow of black cap was cast off and fell through the hall like

the black cloud of depression  your daughters have been searching for you

screeched those words to crash with a families laughter

 Those words rang through his mind like the word bastard the winds

of a harsh winter reminding him that life can be a cold son of a bitch

He passed the old decrepid bettle without an engine without much hope

of ever pumping fluid through its rotten pipes  He opened the front door

and half expected his wife to pass him and his children playing music

and busying around the house  Instead he was met by the grey stench

of loneliness

He stood by the sink steadying himself as those words pounded through his head

he washed down paracetamol and an anti depressant

His head pounded filled with anxiety he staggered into the living room

and threw himself on the sofa putting his feet up on the coffee table between

the carbareatur and the innards of a TV he was trying to fix. 

He then stood up over the hearth and placed a little blue tablet below his tongue

and his heart rate began to fall and he was able to catch his breath and relax

He climbed the stairs and threw himself on the single bed this is my bed I must

lie in it he told himself and looked through the ceiling through the grey sky through

the galaxy of stars burning in the darkness of his sight and crumpled up into a boy

I’m a loser he told himself remembering but not remembering

an infant left in a basket by a blood red door, doing time in Crumlin

road jail  the longest detainee in Ireland  nine months of hell

a single droplet of salted tear fell from his hardened Belfast

exterior he brushed it aside like the murdering bullet from

an armalite rifle no point crying over spilt milk

he lay there and cried himself to sleep. 

He woke with the hope of a thirty year old man  bounded out of bed

to tackle the unbeatable day you cant beat a good cry  he told himself

throwing water about his worn features.   He brushed the hair from

the nape of his neck to cover his bald patch and brought it to a point

on his forehead

He sang walking down the stairs a song he sang to his children when they cried

you don’t have to be  a baaa-aaby to cry  Opening a cupboard in the hall

he dragged a filthy pair of overalls from a pile of clothes on the floor

and stepped into them tucked his hair into a tweed cap and lifted the toolbox

The morning was a little cool but the sun was coming up strong above

the grey housing estate  This is gonna be a good day  he thought sucking in the

almost fresh air   Opening the passanger door of the car creaking like a great sigh

reaching in he delved between unsecured seating  busted wings and an exhaust

hauling a jack from the debris

He took the cross shaped wheel brace and placed it on one of the four rusted nuts 

before taking hold he stooped and spat on his hands he gripped the brace and turned

with all his might and tried to budge the nut as if it was the last task on earth. 

He cursed the car and gave it everything he had  all a sixty year old worn heart

could muster  A heart like a prune without syrup dried and left in

the searing desert of hurt to long   a red bastard  ya german fucker  ya useless heap

of shit   mumbled as the sweat broke on his brow

He rested a while leaning against his dream and took a cigarette from his top pocket lit

and sucked  he licked the beads of sweat that fell across his lips his tongue

once more they were cold and grey he licked once more

unsure and tasted death

On the morning of his funeral a letter drifted through the letter box  

one of his pallbearing four sons opened it and it read 

we are pleased to inform you that you have

been awarded  motability

HARD-MAN  (born to write a wrong)

1.

I began writing seriously when my father died

When I felt that I was free to say what ever

I wanted as long as I hurt no one.  My mother

Taught me right from wrong, humanitarianism.

I trusted no one especially not my father

I didn’t trust him as far as id throw him.

He was a dodgy secretive person, he is dead

But I still wake thinking his past will catch up

With and I want nothing to do with that.

In 2005 I took a stroke that erased my long term memory

So there is a lot I don’t recall,  I get confused at times about

Whats true and whats not.  This is my truth that I know.

I began writing my negative capability a long time ago.

Long before my stroke, I never knew anyone else

That took my route, this is the road that I took.

For the first sixteen years I had to live under my fathers rule

But he had nothing to do with my life.

I always had a problem with authority, no one could tell

Me what to do.  I defied my father, the education system

Every one around me was lost in sectarianism

So I had a free way to go.  My father never gave me nothing

He hated the very fact that I was alive.  He never even gave

Me pocket money so I learned to rob and steal

From his pocket while he slept

I don’t write to be an ego writer, my name is Adrian

Fox and I was born to write a wrong.  I write pomes

To be humane.  My father died of a heart attack

in nineteen eighty nine aged sixty one

 I was born in England in nineteen sixty one.

He died a bitter twisted lonely man, I know were all

Born and die alone but most men find a little

Tenderness.  I can say there wasn’t a tender bone

In his body and any there was he took It

To the grave, hard-man.

My father was born a bastard left on a doorstep

In Herbert street, North Belfast.  I grew without

A role model father, from a very early age

I felt his hatred for me.  For a third of my life

I wanted to be like him until I wised up.

He ran away from home aged fifteen, said he

Was seventeen and joined the British army.

He leant how to be a lying bastard

Reinventing himself.

With my mother a Dublin woman he met

After the army, they moved back to Northern Ireland

In nineteen sixty seven, lived first at aunt Sarah’s

the only home he ever knew.

She was called aunt Sarah but she just a mill

Worker who reared my father.

We lived on an estate called Green Island In Northern Ireland

Because Sarah’s two up two down was to cramped

For a family of five and three adults.

Until my father bought a home and business premises

Just off the Crumlin rd.  Life was good there on a mixed

Street between the shankill road and the Ardoyne

Before troubled times.

Everything changed for everyone in Northern Ireland

We lost our home burnt to the ground like thousands

Of families forced to live on a school assembly hall.

No one could sit on the fence and float through

Religious green and orange, after a time we moved

Into a home on Etna drive in the nationalist Ardoyne.

It was strange at first being bullied as the little

English runt at a nationalist school but soon I learnt

The Ardoyne hard man brogue and began

To kick back, when I stood on my own two feet

And could handle myself they left me alone.

My father became a member of the I.R.A.

And we were locked in republicanism.

Everywhere he went he was a member of the I.R.A.

There was no Provo’s or stickie’s back then there

Was just men defending the surrounding oppression?

And then the British army who were put on the streets

To defend us.

Everywhere you went and everything you seen

Was the fight against poverty and oppression?

Watching TV at weekends amid gunfire and bombs

Up and down the street.  All that I was growing up to be

Was a R.A. man I was born into this wild environment?

And became a refugee child bussed out to the Curragh camp

In the republic and homes in limerick, Dublin and Kerry.

I was on the road to i.r.a.ville, my father was detained

Under the special powers act, my mother was in Armagh

Women’s prison and my older sister was in Middletown

Juvenile center.  The first years of my life was on the streets.

I know things happened back then and I seen some awful things

But in two thousand and five I had a stroke and lost forty five

Years of memory so my time on the streets of Ardoyne

Is just a blur.  I can’t really recall instances anymore because

I don’t know if they are true, I’ll just stick to bare facts.

When my father was released from crumlin rd jail, he went

On the run across the border and my mother said I should go

To because I was wild and would end up dead.

Living in Dundalk I seen that the world was not at war

In Belfast I thought the war was a part of me

I seen nothing else, it was there I learned to live in peace

It took the bitter hatred out of me.

In nineteen seventy seven my father decided again

To move back north and took a job in the Goodyear

Tyre and Rubber Company in the new city of Craigavon.

I and my older brother decided that we were both

Working and able to live in dundalk and take on the mortgage

Payments on the house.

We kept up the payments for a few months but we

Both missed our mother and we were to young for that

Level of responsibility.  I didn’t want to live with my

Regimental father but I had grown up without him

In my life, my mother taught me right from wrong.

He was a bastard and I was a bastards son, although

I loved him but we never seen eye to eye.  From

The first day out of the high I felt his hatred of me

He was jealous because I was like my mother humane

And he was just a bastard child, a bigot who hated

Everyone he didn’t know how to be a real man.

It was a shame because mum was a beautiful

Strong woman and he wasn’t a strong man.

In dundalk in my teenage years I ran away

From home three or four times to get away

From and even living under his rule in northern

Ireland, I told mum I have to move to England

Or I would end up killing him.

We couldn’t even be in the same room

I hated him and he hated his son,

He said I took my mothers love but

Isn’t that the role of mother and son.

I ended up punching him to the floor and walking out

Catching the boat and train to London to stay

With my aunt peggy.  I moved to London to get away

From him and the violence but I hated London.

The year was nineteen seventy seven and the tribes

Were on the streets and everywhere I went I was

Picked on as a paddy and yet I was born in England.

My brother and I got a flat together in northern Ireland.

On my sixteenth birthday my father had no more say

In my life.  I grew up through the troubles thinking

I hated the other side but all the time I hated him.

He is dead now and also my mother, for thirty one

Years she was loyal to him but all he ever knew was

How to be a cunt, another family came up out of the blue

And split the family to the four winds.

I am alone now in a wheelchair without memory

Paralyzed down the right side of my body

But I know that I have never been a bastard

Thanx to the humanity of my mum.

2.

The state system we live in has created monsters

And my father was a bastard one of them.

The system is still putting hate into mens blood

Today to fight the Islamic crusade we fought

In the 14^th century. 

Since before world war one

we have been putting hate and war culture into

Mens blood to go out into the world and kill

The people who defy our regime but that is not

The way to create a humane state we have to train

Them to be moral human beings

The doomed youth scenerario is long dead.

Even today we come from a war mongering culture

but at least we are trying to think beyond a cycle

Of violence.  He was a walking contradiction

liar/ brit , I.R.A./ bastard, Jim john or sean?

So im a brit bastard’s- brit son.

It was not until I educated myself and gain a degree

In poetry that I understood that they are instilling

In us suicide killers.   If they gave me a gun and a uniform

Iwould shot myself.  My children wont ever be just their

Fooder of war mongering, I want to be a human being.

My father was born a bastard with regimental hate in

His heart, he killed for god and ulster,the brits and the I.R.A.

I cant ever prove it but I think he was a british army mole

I would never trust him, either to stupid and confused

Or to smart for his own boots.  His heart was written in

His eyes and I couldn’t trust him as far as id throw him.

My mother married him to turn him in to a human being.

Nanny Keogh knew she said don’t marry him he has shifty eyes

He will end up hurting you and he did the bastard.

Good on my mother she tried its strange how I remember

Us being huddled around the fire watching watching

The Frankenstein man made monster shuffle in black and white across the screen but the monster was in the room.

Four of us ended up alcoholics one girl killed herself

It was said that he abused two, one died to live in a wheelchair.

And the other two are far, far away in Canada and Europe.

I write this truth from the heart and yes it hurts but

It also gives me strength to be alive.

I live in hell but this is my humane hell.

THIS AND THAT

Going back to those days I don’t re-

Member my long-term memory was

Shot away, a statistic of the troubles.

Pushing my mind back to smell swar-

fega tear gas, burning buses

used as barricades.

All I recall is a bigot bastard, that

Was my childhood no detail, he

Stood outside me my father leaning

over the hood of a ford corsair like

a bat mobile.  The bat was my head-

master, he beat me with his thin cane.

So, I broke all his windows, the prods

And the taigs beat me, put me up

Against the wall asked me to say the hail

Mary, sing the sash my father wore.

I knew neither so they kicked me up

And down the road.  I almost re-

Member my mum getting all her

Teeth pulled, she was the bravest

person I knew, my father was a bigot

thug he beat me to so I stole all

the bastard’s money.

I got the taigs and the prods back too

I became a poet of peace funny

I remember that and can’t re-

member this.

FENCE, SHADY DEALS

1.

The fence posts are stained by rain

It looks like nature is looking in on

warped grain and knotted wood.

Better than any man-made resin

That says what it does on the tin.

This is true beauty, all it costs is

A look.  We by pass it everyday

And get caught up in what omits

From a forty-two-inch screen that

pumps garbage into your brain.

I won’t ever see a shade like

This again. Fenceposts are in-

Dividual and they see right

Through me and you.

                                                                                  2.

I woke before five, it was dark dis-

Orientating, still clutching a urinal

Undercover.  The joys of one hand

Pisisng, all groggy out of sorts.

Dreaming this pome as if it was

The last thing on earth.

Poetry is like that you must strike

When the memory is hot, at least

I do to write confessional poetry.

This pome is straight from the forge

My mind is red hot.

At the same time and with one hand

I gently maneuvered the urinal out

So as not to spill the liquid gold all

Over me.  It got caught in the bed-

Clothes and just then I needed to

Pis again so I shoved it back down.

Like two steps forward and one

Step back, such has been my dis-

Abled life for ten years.

I don’t know how I have got through

This with just one suicide attempt.

My brain was throbbing, I had to

Feel the pulse of each letter

To type as a multimedia text on

My mobile phone like braile as

I dropped my reading glases.

Some words have only one s

Etc, ill leave it like that to show

U its urgency, spelt wrongly.

 As a boy, I was with my father when

he made those shady deals and I must say

That’s what he was good at, he was

A con-man, he would have charmed

The queen.

I want to tell u this story before I remember

to forget, they said he had dealings

With the Kray twins, whether that’s true

I don’t know but he lived in the east end

Of London and was up to no good, they say

that’s why he left to do shady deals for the I.R.A. 

I’m beginning to get tired close my eyes and feel

for the pulse rhythm of each letter, syllable, word.

These are my shady deals, just rain on a fence
I’m going back to sleep, my head is on fire
fenced out.

NO MANS LAND

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

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

The first thing I don’t remember is being a six-year-old and going to live in Belfast in 1967, the streets were grey and dreary it was like going to another century.  The taxi fell from the hills of Antrim to civilisation along the crumbling rd. and it turned left onto the cobbled streets of old Ardoyne where children swung around gas lampposts now converted to electricity.  Knelling on the back seat of that taxi was like being on a H.G. Well’s time machine going back into a Dickensian world.  I remember being bullied in a playground but there’s only so much you can take until you start to kick back.  I realised that the Belfast accent was harder than most of the slobbers I had to kick into the gutter.

There was a river of them I had to show face in the morning at break dinner time and after school until I found my own space. I grew up on the hard streets but one thing kept me together while around me was mayhem and madness.  I had respect and the love of my mother to fall back on.  That day I stood there on flax street, I picked up half a brick and watched it take to the air kite like swimming until it crashed into the face of a black British soldier.

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

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

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

We collected water from the well as there was no running water electricity and we lit the place with paraffin lamps. If you needed to go to the toilet there was a Porta- loo in the shed for emergencies and the girls pride otherwise you dug a hole in the earth. Memories that really stick in my mind are playing time machine with my brothers my younger brother believing even with the roar of traffic that he really did go back to 1874 just by the writing on a stone and innocence even I almost believed it. Walking to BlackRock which was seven miles away for a five-minute swim out and walk home again.  It wasn’t getting there but the craic of the journey that was so good. I remember paddy Quinn who was nineteen and he wanted to play cowboys and Indians my eldest brother was fifteen and bored with it. That really was the age of innocence I remember my brother and I playing in the fields with a stick and a car jack thinking we were members of the Irish republican border patrol then irbp and we were doing a mission for our country.  Your imagination just flies away without tv. Soon we were back in civilisation in a house beside Marion park and coxs demesne in Dundalk. Although we were still steeped in my father’s republicanism having been interned in the maze and crumbling road and being friends with martin Meehan and the maze escapee Francis mc guigan. As the republican romanticism went out the window in came David bowie, moot the hoople and marc Boland and eventually the punk philosophy of Eddie and the hot rods, do anything you want to do. The old hat philosophy of my fathers went out with the button boots as my mother used to say.  We had grown through the bullshit well most of us my sister still holds the archaic ideals of yesterday.  My brothers and I moved on with multiculturalism and the philosophy that came with the music of the time.

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

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

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

For eighteen years, I got lost in domestic bliss. It was magic while it lasted I always had itchy feet we split up for eight months and I lived in reading. maybe I should have stayed there but after seeing my son appear before my eyes like a hologram I returned to Northern Ireland, we had we Kern a beautiful child so I have no regrets.  I knew that I would leave when my kids were old enough to understand, my wife will tell you her story its hers and she’s sticking to it.  It’s like the troubles who’s right and who’s wrong.  No one is were all losers it’s called life deal with it. There’s no such thing as a smooth ride there’s always hidden dips along the way.  This brings me full circle back to where I started.  I could colour this past.

I could add a little more but what’s the point, from all this negativity I want to live in a positive world where people don’t hark on about the past I started with a quote with a quote by Leonard Cohen so ill finish with a quote by the great American writer Raymond Carver of pure clarity don’t forget it’s no one’s fault think positive be like two streams like water coming together with other water.

Do you know how much courage

It takes to try to kill yourself?

Every sinew and tendon, right

Down to the bone.  All they

Ever wanted was the soup of

Humanity and you treat them

Like cowardly dogs.  They are

From your broken lot, they

Have just been through hell.

You must give to get, this

Is the dog’s honest truth?

You can’t see past your own

Nose, give them credit where

Credit is duende.  You gave me

Life, now this is my reason to

Live and I throw it back in

Your face.

A COLD SON OF A BITCH

                                                        ‘yet why not say what happened’

                                                                                          Robert Lowell

John looked from the kitchen window, the sink he stood by was like the interior of a

Well-worn tea pot or the inside of his lungs sucking on yet another cigarette.

He ejected the stale teabags from the teapot he thought I must go to the doctors today

and get that disability living allowance form filled in and get a mobility allowance

and have a new car instead of that almost unrepairable rusted old banger.  He remembered how

the car looked in the night’s subtle pastel glow, and said god you’re a bastard you and

your cold light of morning.

Opening a cupboard in the hall he dragged a filthy pair of overalls from a pile of

clothes on the floor and stepped into them tucked his hair into a tweed cap and lifted

the toolbox.  The morning was a little cool but the sun was coming up strong above

the grey housing estate, ‘this is going to be a good day’, he thought sucking in the

almost fresh air.  Opening the passenger door of the car creaking like a great sigh

reaching in he delved between unsecured seating, busted wings and an exhaust

hauling a jack from the debris.  He took the cross shaped wheel brace and placed it on

one of the four rusted nuts before taking hold he stooped and spat on his hands gripped

the brace and turned with all his might and tried to budge the nut as if it

was his last task on earth?  He cursed the car and gave it everything he had, all a sixty

year old worn heart could muster.  A heart like a prune without syrup dried and left in

the searing desert of hurt too long,’ ya red bastard, ya German fucker, ya useless heap

of shit, 

He mumbled as the sweat broke on his brow.  He rested a while leaning, took a cigarette

from his top pocket lit and sucked, he licked the beads of sweat that fell across his lips

he ran his tongue across his lips once more they were cold and grey he licked once

more unsure and tasted death.

On the morning of his funeral a letter drifted through the letter box, one of his pallbearer

four sons opened it and it read, we are pleased to inform you that you have

been awarded motability.

8.5 THE BLUE BAG BRIGADE

Lost in a sad song moment, I remember that fate-

ful day when I picked you up black and blue off the road

told you I loved you, If you don’t sort, I will

be carrying your coffin along this dirty road.

Three weeks later I walked past that very spot

like a lightweight hologram now, trapped within

these sad moments that keep me going on,

You can’t beat the truth but the truth has beat

me up and down this road.

Look at me now beaten, in a fucking wheel-

chair paralyzed, I can take a beating but

like you I’m black and blue, you pick me up

each day from a blue bag brigade, I salute you.

We walk the alcoholic route my brothers and sisters

Whether they like it or not, pallbearers inclined. 

You can’t get through the past alive, live

With the truth.

Two thought They got away but this is

The sad truth, we walk this bastard road

  The bastard.  Republican loyalism

Don’t make us look through eyes of hate.

My paralyzed hatred, she was not afraid to die

This is what Stephanie says.

67' to 69'

This was Belfast in sixty-seven

like going into another century

A Dickensian state.  Where children

Swung around gas lights now converted.

I woke each morn to a lonely play-

Ground a barren expanse of land.

Holy cross school surrounded

By rusted barbed wire. That’s

Where I was bullied for being

A little English boy, but little

Did they know to mess with?

Me I kicked back right in their

hard man jewels.

Looking up always looking up

A temporary mattress on a Lino

Floor up to the sacred heart

Of Jesus saturated in blood.

There was no T.V. mickey mouse

In this house.  Sarah’s two up

Two down, my fathers so called

Mother, a mill worker with three

Digits missing to prove it.

She prayed wept each day to her lord

And savior. Awaiting him to grace

Her door but the only men who came

Were B’-Specials looking for a man

On the run.  All this killing was

Done in the name of god, what-

ever happened to man’s humanity to man. 

She scrubbed that step on her knees

praying awaiting.  I went to mass under

a hail of bullets and even watched

people killed to die.

I wake to much the same now, locked in

Fenced in by a stroke that locks me in

or out.  I remember that man that scene

nailed to wood under a crown

of barbed wire.

We are raised on fear, my kids never

Seen this or that, thank fuck.

Pomes’, memories appear accidently

On purpose, they come right out

Of the blue.

How can I live what I forget!

1.

How can I give what has not set!

The past was stroked away on

April 2005 Saturday, a living

Hell dis-ability.  Paralyzed flat

On my back without memory.

Born the son of a bastard son

In Kent 1961, my writing told

Me so, my past was all writ down.

I don’t even know my name, Foxy

Was ere.  The beginning not the end

This may seem old hat to you but

For me it’s a new day, half dead

And half alive.  Now I have to find

A form that will suit today.   I am not

a liar but my father was, this will go

from pome to prose and essay back.

Just write it how it is was!.

2.

Like an athletic high diver, he twisted and turned naturally without a care.

Her face grimaced and her eye lids squeezed tightly together as if under

Intense pain, her eye lids smoothed like the picture in her mind dis-

Appeared but it had only slowed in motion.  Jimmy Keogh lay on hard

Concrete, blood seeped from his nose and mouth.  He wore his leather

Soled shoes, a shammy and bucket fell with a splat beside him like

Jimmies body being sucked to earth by an unknown force.

Tears fell across her cheeks, it was always going to be a hard grief just like

Her father who stood tall in her mind, just twenty-seven when he died also.

The picture of sorrow fell from her mind and her young son stood there

Asking for a piece of bread and jam, ‘are you ok mum’ he said and brushed
The sore memory away like a priests blessing.

Did this really happen?

His dad lay in the coffin

on his death bed, he sat

looking into the bruise on

his Fathers face as if 
he was telling him 

something.

THE KILL HOUSE FLOOR



The swallows were a gang of misfits, an uneducated group of renegades with swallows tattooed on their necks.  I came across a member of the swallows who was working at a slaughter house at the back of a butchers where I worked, he was recruited on peace work

Paid by the head of a pig or a slaughtered cow from the local kill house.

Mad Mick as he was known around town took his belt of throwing knives buckled it around his waist outside the pig skin apron and walked into the pig pen.   The poor sow had twelve knives sticking from every part of its body before the bolt was released into its head and its throat cut and the squeal (the blood clot) dragged from its throat.  The swallows were made up of mute, deaf and dumb, gypsies, and anyone who fell into that lower class of nutter category.  There was Paddy o and Nailie Ward, Sammy the mute Mad Mick who had sex with dead pigs while he cut out their innards.  I seen him one day fucking a dead pig, saying they are great fucks silent and dead , he said.. 

I saw him throw his cousin into a vat of blood while we were curing black pudding made of pig’s blood fat and spices, he looked like something pulled from the film Carrie. 

I seen him another day throw his fifteen year old brother into a skip of animal skin and bone and his brother swam through a sea of maggots.  Mad Mick was nuts you didn’t know what he would do next. He locked me in the freezer one day for hours with the carcasses of dead animals.  His mind and the minds of all the swallows worked in a different way to me and you.  They chased me with machetes one night for beating a young brother.  They threw my disabled friend through a shop window.  During the day they blended into society but at night especially at weekends they came alive and wreaked havoc on the border town. When the swallows were beating the shit out of everything in sight you didn’t want to get caught in their way.  Even the local garda stayed out of their way.  The town was like a miniature stab city you had the I.R.A. men on the run from the troubles in the north you had the gypos and the Irish army camp where its soldiers were let out drinking at the weekends.

We followed bands for the music and the craic, I was just too young but I was always there in the back ground. The pubs and clubs didn’t have an age limit on the door.  I got into that gang through my brother and his friend, I was only fifteen but that was the days before under-age drinking ID.

Back to the night the brew of mayhem.  It all began in a dive we called slaughter house bar. It was the sort of dive with sawdust on the floor, a local joint for the swallows to meet have a drink and off load a week in the kill house.  Paddy and the boys sat around the top table. They talked about who lost a finger and their insanity this week in the mad house they worked in. The band sound checked amid shouts of orders of pints and chasers. When the Provo’s arrived and sat at their table as if they owned the place, you knew that all hell would break loose, they eyed their beady eyes and got drunk like gangs of sheep to the slaughter house blues.  Then the Irish army came dressed as if they were going to a funeral with dark ties, the swallows were well oiled at this stage stumbling along the stage into the men’s room covered in graffiti, the stench of urine hummed from the urinals. The lead singer ranted on through the mic, the accent of his Dublin street charm went straight into his set creating a lively atmosphere and the swallows and the Provo’s and the army seemed to wallow in. Everybody enjoyed the craic and the banter through the mic.

As the roof lifted to the rocked up version of the fields of athenrey and the and the swallows the Provo’s and the army bopped to whiskey in the jar and dirty old town the night began to mellow into madness.  The place resembled that of a place where a bomb had hit.

                                                          

Sammy the mute got up and bounced along the front of the stage and stood over the urinals, cock in hand he steadied himself on the wall and looked to his right at the weedy guy with a black suit white shirt and a pencil thin black tie and hat. He reached across and gripped him by the tie took took the trilby hat from his head finished his piss and turned to look at himself in the mirror.  Uttering some incomprehensible mutter the weedy guy took an empty pint glass from the top of the urinal put it down to his cock filled it with piss and turned and handed it to the mute who downed it half way before spitting it out then realising it was a pint of piss and pulled a flick knife on the weedy guy and stabbed him in the leg. He stumbled through the door and fell at the stage.  The mute stood over the body with a face like thunder kicking his head, the Provo’s broke glasses and bottles and went at the swallows. 

When the realisation of what happened ran along the front of the stage all hell broke loose. The tables and chairs went flying into the ra men and the Irish army, the swallows organised themselves around Sammy the mute by the toilet door armed with knives knuckle dusters and broken glasses and bottles they stuck into any thing that came near them. Mad mick grabbed a bloke by the hair pulled him into the toilet stuck his head in the urinal and slit his throat like an animal.  Even the cops who were called on the radio wouldn’t venture into the madness. By this stage the band had left the stage and were tossing the drum kit and guitars into the van and getting out of dodge. As I walked home along the black path through the railway bridges the stench of stale hops from the brewery thinking this was my apprenticeship to butchery, it was then I knew I wanted to be a writer.