POARTRY

        The placebo effect continued

Ever since I came to the shores of Ireland I have lived in the exploited and abused world of Christianity, not knowing where I stood in Catholicism or Protestantism.

I always felt outside the realms of spirituality although I find inner peace in my art.  Poetry and painting holds the essence of enlightenment for me so let’s call mine poartry. On my trek through life I have found my own sense of inner peace reading poetry by Raymond carver, and others like him, where water comes together with other water for me is a very spiritual experience and in the reading of that poem I became the river in harmony with nature.  I am sitting there beside that river meandering through life, flowing by the rapids and along the calm stretches.  Through the words of Raymond Carver, I am one with the river (funi) as the Buddhist’s call it, oneness. I feel the same when I read Mary Olivers or Sharon Old’s Chezslaw Milosz or Robert Lowell or look at a beautiful piece of art by Van Gogh, or a piece that stirs emotion.  What was it that Robert Lowell said, ‘language is the imperfection of art and we must use our craft to create something beautiful’. I have lived in Northern Ireland from I was a young boy, I have always wanted to put my Allegiance somewhere it was sore on my arse sitting there on the fence back and forth but it took all that time of confusion for things to settle in my mind. I’m not saying that any killing is right it is not right to take life.  All this trouble could have been over a lot sooner.  Christianity has torn this country apart and they still ring their bells a sad state, it always came across very negative to me and I think in this world of negativity we have to be very careful that we don’t get corrupted by consumerism I think the young people have lost respect because they are drowning in consumerism and there is no one left to help them.

It’s about time we wised up and stopped this disrespectful dog eat dog society we live in it’s about time the government done something.  I believe in most of what the Buddhist has to say at least it’s  very positive.

My poetry and the poetry I read will be chanted like a mantra that finds my center. This is the way I have found to say my thing and be accepted in this world.  I believe everyone has got a story whether their directing a film by someone else it’s their slant they are bringing to the screen. There’s a little piece of them in everything they do just like there’s a little piece of you in everything you do, I want my poems to be like an everyday item say a tea bag, this is my tea bag and I hope someday you’ll lift it and read it and take my experience of that poem with you.  While you’re making that cup of tea remember we are the same kind of people.  What are the sayings, love like you mean it, dance as if no one is watching I could go on but you get the gist?   I dare you to tell them you love them, do something to let them know you love them, the beauty in life is we don’t have the answers and we don’t know what tomorrow brings so make the most of the moment.  as Jarvis Cocker sings go on and give it to her the next click of your fingers could be your last so live like you mean it, go on and give it to her it might just last forever you know it’s now or never, the birds in your garden are all singing your song. As I said before I don’t have the answers to life I am searching like you.  I think the only ones with answers are those who have kicked the bucket passed away to the other-side however you want to say it.  I woke from this terrible ordeal (the stroke) with my friends and family around me I was lucky, get in touch with them now not tomorrow we don’t know what will happen in the next half an hour, poetry and painting is like that in fact all forms of art are like that an expression of our feelings a placebo effect.

GOOD KARMA

We’re living in such a volatile, fragile

state of consumerism, everything

is based on ego/image. I think to-

day we have to be so careful

we don’t slip into the gutter?

While writing this I’m looking at a man-

dala a representation of my soul like

a flower in bloom, a circle within

a circle within a circle, ‘good karma’. 

Imagine there’s a spiritual shop, good

karma. Wave come a long way from

the bleak negativity of the past.

I don’t think we can go back to the tit-

for-tat killings, waking in that neg-

ativity everyday.  Wave had a few years

of peace in this country, let’s not slip back

into that past.  

The beautiful thing was the girl who done 

the representation of my soul never once 
asked me what religion I was
that’s the way life should be. 

I don’t know where I sit when it comes to religion, I think I’m spiritual like the circle within circle within circle I am touching those out there that I think are positive to my life and getting rid of the negativity.

I have lived in northern Ireland through the troubles I’ve seen a lot of negativity especially the way religion has been twisted and turned to suit one side or the other,  in the name of god this country and the world has been abused like a wound on the skin of society lets heal this wound, let’s make a tiny u- turn and if we can all think we can change it then we will let’s stop this negative view that you can’t do this, you can do anything you want you just have to be  positive and tell yourself yes you can do whatever you want at least think that way and hurt no-one. I love that line by the late great songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, ‘I’d like to lean into the wind and tell myself I’m free’.

               

I am not coming to 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 poatry, 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 his words, it’s the name he 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, but please don’t get lost in sentimentality, I think It will kill us. Accept the harsh realities of life then escape in your silly sentiment, I no longer have the brain power of dreams to get lost.

I remember many years ago, being kicked to the ground, one night with seven around me and only 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 now, 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.

A good friend asked me to write this essay. A searcher like me, she and her son have, along with others have been instrumental in my life since the stroke. They are the ‘road less travelled by,’ they are the sunrise and sunset of my life, they are my positive thoughts: Rod and Jen, my family, Peter and Heather, Paula, Marty and Eileen, my Mother, my sons; even my ex-wife. I wouldn’t be here without those people; they were there for me, It’s at times like this you realize who your friends really are.

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 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 me. 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 didn’t 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. 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, as if I was looking at myself dancing in aquamarine.  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.

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.  I’d like to finish with a line by Leonard Cohen that sums up what I have said, ‘there’s a crack a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in’.

Has time went by or has it stood still what day what time what year is it?  It seems the world is spinning like a hologram of love and hate.  It seems my world was stopped that night when I was taken into intensive care and woke up on my back only able to move my eyes.  I had taken a stroke two years later I think and I’m still recovering.  Last week I underwent an operation on my throat to help me to talk stop the air going down.  Before that I pinched my nose to release the words.  It’s hard to tell whether it’s better or worse I’m drained of the energy I had.  Is this Christmas, Easter or the new year any way it was shit.  I’ve cried my eyes out over the last few days this is the time when you need family and friends.  My x girlfriend encouraged me to write this essay in the hope that it will help other stroke victims.  It doesn’t even have a title I’m out here on a wing and a prayer in the hope that by the last full stop a title would have produced itself.  To make you understand the dilemma I face I feel you need a little background information. I am 46 divorced with three boys ranging from 21,19, and 11.  I know my older boys have lives of their own I don’t want to put them under any pressure but I think I deserve more than 20 minutes at Christmas at least sit down and watch a movie together.  I don’t want to become a once a year dad I’d rather have nothing at all.  Last night I sent my youngest son back home he usually stays with me but I was feeling sad knowing that I’ll be in this wheelchair.   most of the people who go through what I’ve been through end up dead.  last night I wished I was I tied the mobile phone around my neck wrapped it around the bed head and pulled.  I’m not the type of person that is flippant with the idea of taking my own life I know people who have used this as a cry for help but I don’t give sympathy easily.  those people are still alive today I don’t understand that, I think you have to be serious and show conviction I believe that if you really mean it then you do the job right not a half arsed mismatch of an effort. I couldn’t go through with it not knowing what’s around the corner I don’t know what tomorrow brings.  I wrote a poem recently called, loneliness by the way I’m a poet and painter and will include with this essay some of my work.  Loneliness conveys a message of reality and isn’t very good instead ill share with you a positive poem I wrote that conveys the same message but in a different way it’s called not the blues.  We’re living in a very negative world and we have to be careful we could tip the balance.  All I’m saying is show conviction in everything you do. My eldest sister died in 2000 and I’m not going down that road following another funeral cortege.  I know you can’t get away from the reality that one day you’ll have to but let’s delay it in positive thought.

HUMAN WRONGS


We’ve got roses in December

and the yellow petals of spring

The energy of tulips a force from

Deep within.  You can call it

global warming? I call it beauty

at a glance.  You can keep your

hymns, amen corner, I lost

my unbalanced chance.

You shouldn’t have killed Sadam-

Hussein no matter what he done.

We are just as bad as him were

Living by the gun.  They should

have let him rot in the prison

of the mind but it’s too late Eich-

Mann was given that right too.

Instead we will die on

In the martyr of his kind.

When do we turn the other cheek?

We are drifting in deep space

like a race that doesn’t know

When do we say hey boy!

we have had enough, when

do we live in positivity?

not in the rough.

Christianity is negative

the righteous path

of the chosen few.

Life is precious

celebrate it new.

Think of life as positive

You’ll be the chosen not

the few, cherish life live

and love this is not the blues.

I’m not telling people what to do, I know it might sound preachy but I’m not standing on a pulpit delivering a sermon.  Cherish life, it seems to me life is so cheap.  I lay in the hospital for almost a year so I had plenty of time to think.  The simple things of life are so important to make our lives grow. Respect for one we are losing that in this consumerist world.  It seems to me that we are focusing on the wrong issues.  Some people are blaming my life style for the state I’m in and yes it has a lot to do with the way I lived.   Trying to be a free spirit and enjoy life maybe in the back of my mind I knew this was going to happen.   There really is no one or nothing to blame I’m just a statistic.  A stroke is up there as one of the highest forms of death, my mother took five strokes It’s in my genes and my sons genes.

 It is a flaw in our human system whether it be a flaw of evolution who knows or if there is a higher being involved.  I am my own destiny and I make my own luck and this is a stroke of misfortune but let’s not think negative maybe it’s a stroke of fortune.

I think differently today because of what happened so maybe it’s a good thing in my other world I was lost going around and around in the hologram of love and hate.  I don’t drink or smoke my sister called me Christian/born again Adrian the other day.  I didn’t see the light and some spiritual being didn’t enter instead I woke up in hell.  I had to deal with my life in a way that I wasn’t used to. Carers coming in the morning to get me dressed and now that I’ve had this other operation I relay on others more as the life it seems was sucked from me but determination is a great thing and I wouldn’t be here today only for it.  So think positive and don’t get lost in this consumerist hell.

In his wonderful book Milan Kundera wrote, we can never know what to want, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. I know my previous life seems a bit of a dream but I feel I’ve been given a second chance.  By who I don’t know god, Buddha, my dogged stubborn determination It’s too easy to say it was god and pass the buck onto a higher being a mickey mouse figure.  It was me and positive thought that got me through, it was my determination. I was talking to someone the other day and this girl had been through the school system and never got much from it and now she’s writing a book.  I was trying to tell her that it was her strength that got her to where she is today but she’s convinced that it was a higher being. If the belief in a higher being brings positive thought so be it.  Respect the other persons view someone once said during the American civil war, I think it was general lee, he said, never hate your enemy, suspend judgement it clouds your view.  When I read that I thought wow what a line if only people heeded it.   after seeing the conflict and felt the hate in Northern Ireland this line has always been there at the back of my mind ready to be loaded into the magazine of positive thought.  If this is karma for the life I lead I have no regrets and I don’t want to blame anyone else.  That’s what we do in the negative world of pass the buck.  I had a great time this isn’t some box I tick and move along let’s not get so cheap and flippant about life it is a precious thing not a commodity that can be bashed around on the journey through life.   Writing keeps me content and very sane, I was looking for a new way to present my poems to give you an insight into my work.  Poetry I think is for sharing and with the aim of the great American writer Raymond carver who is still excluded from the ranks of poetry he always tried to make poetry accessible.  He stands for me among the greats like Chekhov and Turgenev, Hemingway, Anderson, Capote. Anyone who captures silence in a story has caught the essence and he done it.  I read a new path to the waterfall recently again and was brought to tears by its honesty.  Thank you Tess Gallagher for a beautiful introduction.  Although this format is an old one and has been used by many writers it has only been used as a critical format or for the thesis of an M, A.  I want to change the way we view poetry and not let it slide over our heads as if it holds some wisdom. I remember going to a creative writing class and we read out our work and the teacher behind the security of a desk was aloof as if she had some wisdom she wasn’t willing to share.  Bollocks I went away thinking never will I teach poetry like that, alright poetry is a beautiful thing and should be embraced by those who love it but it’s got to be accessible to as Robert Lowell said leave it open and use all the craft you have to create it, he also said imperfection is the language of art.  This is my imperfection.

Yet why not say what happened

                                   R, Lowell

                                    

I’d like to start with a poem well I call it a quatrain of thought a moment captured.   I see this on the road from Foster green hospital on my first day release.

Belfast

Imagine, just past

the garden of Peace

a sign reads

hope.

Heart-shape vermillion red

For Paula

I woke this morning reached out and

The snippets of dreams began

To fade into the night sneaking

Through the sides of the curtains

Dancing out of the corner of my eye.

Re-tracing my flesh as if brushing

Away sleep. I found one of your hairs

Teased it out like a golden thread

Searching for the eye of the needle

Stitched it to memory and felt your

Touch penetrate beneath the skin.

With the beginning of this poem

In mind, I stumbled for a pen.

Threw back the covers to reveal

Heart-shaped vermillion red, the dark

Outline following the contours of your flesh

With the precision of an artist’s brush stroke

As if I’d known you inside out, still

Moist in my mind your kiss.

I would like to introduce you to some poems written before I took the stroke.  These poems try to catch Patrick Kavanaghs simplicity.   his collected poems were words of wisdom for me, alright there might be some that are scrappy and loose at the edges but that for me was the beauty in his work.
 He was showing me and younger poets the flaws that he spent his life trying to re-write. You can’t cut a beautiful sod of earth from the bog.

PROSE-TALE

The name implanted itself

Took root and merged

A half-truth

a distorted memory

One that really did happen.

It’s as if it’s behind sight

The emotion removed

The life you thought

was true becomes

a prose tale?

A NOVEL POEM

The beginning

Jack lay back on the bed and uttered god, god, god

God, god. Closed his eyes so no other thought could

Enter and chanted on god, god, god, god, god.

The middle

He bolted upright into a yoga pose and waited.

The wind outside began to lift, he could feel

And hear it through the open window.

The end

He looked out and saw the pink red and yellow

Petals fall from the blooming roses

In the back garden.

A CROW

Opening the curtains this Sunday morning,

A flock of crows on the overcast sky

You would usually see the odd one out there

Flitting about on the autumn wind,

Flying like debris of alive fossil,

Wings of skin from the Graubelle man,

Manifested from bog oak into grey skies.

It’s as if you were looking at darkness so long

Blotches appeared on your eyes,

Shadows left over from gothic tales, medieval

Times, as near and as far as the crow flies,

Fragments from a womb dream, beauty

Full, black, beauty, full, black, beauty, full, black.

As you’ve heard I love the work of Robert Lowell my favourite poem is epilogue I think poetry captures something and this poem is like a snap shot, it captures the light of all art forms heightened by life.  The killing of the school children in Russia affected me so much that I was the verbal arts officer at the millennium court in Portadown, I created a book of condolence that would travel around the local schools.  I thought the council would take on this venture when I phoned and asked I went for it. I wrote the poem when I went to Brownlow school to deliver the book of condolence to four hundred school children sitting on the floor of the school assembly.

THE BALANCING LAKES

Trying to clear my head of this morning

I find myself on a wooden pier.

The pier seems to shift and move me

Out there where the swans struggle

To take to the air.

Four hundred children were hunkered down

On the floor of a school assembly.

I was there to give a presentation

On a book of condolence, reading Viloshin’s

‘Terror’ and my poem ‘A Collective Grief’

To four hundred children hunkered down

On the floor of a school assembly.

Anna Akmatova asked,’ Why is our century

Worse than any other?’

A swan and four young cygnets

Catch the corner of my eye heading for shore.

This next poem was created when my girlfriend sorry x girlfriend and me went for a walk along the Bluestone road.  My sister who was an alcoholic and called Stephanie Fox is buried out there in Lylo churchyard and the Quakers graveyard is there too.

Bluestone road

My sister and a Quaker graveyard lie low

By the side of the road.  We visited both,

Paying homage to the sacred ground.

At the Quakers’ it seemed the wall garden

Was all that was needed.  Simple in life

And death.  ‘Cool,’ I thought, after all

The hardest thing to reach is simplicity.

Along the path towards the arched gateway

You said, ‘It’s like walking into heaven, a secret garden

look at the grass tipped pink in the sunset.’

My sister was a Fox, no connection to Anne,

First daughter of George.

 If only she had trembled with an inner light

That didn’t chill her to the bone.

If only she had uttered Thou.

Pagan poet

One syllable

Appears on the page

The word sun.

The soft sway

Of language breezes

Across the fertile Earth.

The clarity

Of the new day

Forms the seed of a poem.

The next two poems are elegies the first for my father after visiting his un-marked grave in Hanna town graveyard in the second I was trying to get my head around my sister’s death.  I was in Canada for my brothers first born when I got the phone call she was dead.

Three weeks before I gave her a hug and said if you don’t sort this out I’ll be carrying your coffin.  Three weeks later I was.

The Light on the Stones

I retrace your final journey now in a blue car,

Not black, alone on the motorway.

Passing the Maze prison, the stench of my engine

Overheating is like gunpowder, spent shells,

Lingering, your dream of Irish freedom.

I climbed the mountain graveyard

Above the violent divided the city,

Above the peace line that stood between us

In the Livingroom.

Your plot all weeds,

And wild grass cries out for order.

The fallen wooden cross bears no name;

But you are there. Like a sculptor

With clay I reach inward, my hands

As delicate as salmon wings riding

The white water, struggling

The strong currents of grief.

I brush the soiled tears from your eyes

And you wake in me, swimming

And glistening in mine. My hands

Shape the clay moulding our wounded past,

Emerging in the light on the stones.

Wait for me to lie down on the grass, on the weeds

On the boulder you rest your head upon.

Half a Sestina for Stephanie

How can I write a sestina for you?

Six stanzas of six lines concluding death,

Killing yourself in a three-line envoy.

I, who doesn't know the time of day

When the lines of your life were diverted

To lie low in the Blue-stoned soil.

Reliving grief, my hands delve in the soil

Moulding a clay figurine of you.

Retracing the black paths that diverts

My gaze away from the sunset to death.

A photograph of you on your wedding day

Your smile didn't convey loves envoy.

Was it back then that the messenger

Whispered phlegm words that soiled

Your soul to fall early to your funeral day.

Did a touch reach out and abuse you?

Fondling filthy caresses to die

Out there on the back roads where diverted

Diversions took you

Round and round

To fall foul of the dead end.

This poem is based on the memory of the attic space of 73 Etna drive it is also based on internment morning awakened with a crowd of soldiers around me and my father taken away without trial.

RADIO REALISM

On the little teak Marconi

In the attic space of 73 Etna Drive

We watched Match of the Day.

The bunk beds now separated sounded

Like a football supporters rattle.

Beside the tower of cards on the chest

Of drawers between us were two sets

Of 11 perfectly placed, Manchester United

And Tottenham Hotspur.

When the black and white images faded

Into God save the queen and the white

Dot on the TV disappeared.

The images were replaced by the frantic

Crackle of police messages echoing signals

From the street through the dormer window.

Megahertz igniting Molotov cocktails

And the inferno of Farringdon Gardens.

Unlike, “The War of the Worlds" the black

Screen transmitted a special powers act,

Roger, Charlie, Victor and Bravo

          Brought the front door down.

Oklahoma bomber will go to death armed with poem

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

                           William Ernest Henley

              

I Watched the Panorama programme

On your death and took the Sunday

Times out of the recycle bin to read

The poem you took with you.

I tried to write a poem for you

But I got caught like shrapnel

In the moral maze. I tossed

Your scribbles and a newspaper

Article to the bottom of the pile.

I have children of my own

So it's difficult to find your words.

I mentioned your name in a pub

In a conversation on Big Brother

The silence nominated your eviction.

Tim Mc Veigh you had a lot to say

It exploded from your heart,

A cresh a Federal building

A grain of sand in a desert storm.

You lay there under the deep pile

Of rubble at the end of my desk.

The wind lifted and changed direction

Slamming the front door, removing

The blue tacked laminated poster

Of a native American from the wall

With the quote: "Mans Greatest enemy

Is Man Himself", taking to the floor

The pile of papers on my desk revealing

         A picture of you and this poem.

This is a poem I wrote one night sitting by the statue of Atilla Jozsef the great Hungarian poet.  I was there for four weeks and seen most aspects of Hungarian life.  I had a wonderful time thanks to Gobi of the British council and Andrea from Szeged university,

It’s one country that suited my sense of freedom.

Poem on a Big Mac Carton

for Attila Jozsef

I might have been anywhere today

Off, away off in a dream.

Walking through the streets of Szeged

Like the shadow of my former self.

Shifting through the quiet street’s

With the presence of a sculptor.

Someone who was once there, but

Is now forgotten to stand where

There’s no artificial light even the full moon 

Can’t penetrate the catacombs of your eyes.

I sat with you drunk, I had a Big Mac

and wrote half this poem, With a Pure Heart.

Daylight breaks over Bagdad this morning

And the lacerations of yet another war highlight

The gashes left by the artist’s indentations.

Without a god, a sense of place, I’m alone

Once more lost in the space awarded me.

I passed you by the next day as the strong

Spring sun kissed away the cold of winter.

I wondered why they placed you there

In the cold dark, the young students gathered

Around a fountain out of order just yards away

From your towering presence, the sullen

Glance of Szeged diverted its gaze away, as if

You should be abandoned like an old regime

Put in your place in a Statue Park.

Dusk

The glaring rimless sun reflects

Its halloed image in

A sheet of snow cloud.

Flakes of vertigo

Pelt the windscreen

And the jagged glitch

Sharpened waves

Of the balancing lakes

Slash the sun

Bleeding the horizon.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Bin

I’ve been flicking ash and bad poems into that bin for years.

Tonight I scrunch up and discard the worthless beginnings

Of a poem and it catches my eye, the way the vibrant

Colour of a flower would in a barren landscape.

My kids passed it onto me when they stopped being kids.

Not that they don’t use it anymore. My shit poem is in

There among their M&M and crisp packets,

The remnants of a toilet roll, an empty bath oil bottle,

And my wife’s discarded instructions on the in's and outs of Tampax.

Louis Mc Neice was right when he said; "Poets don’t know

What they are doing, if they did it wouldn't be done".

I never ever thought I would get Teenage Mutant Ninja

         Turtles into a poem.

Woman in Heat

From my window I watched

The summer's day unfold,

A slight breeze fluttering

The leaves of the tree.

The dark shadows falling

Thick from the cars, fences

And lampposts on the heat

Hazed tarmac road.

Everything seemed perfect,

The children's voices playing

In the wind somewhere.

A heavy set woman with white hair

And a flushed face passed by.

With her left hand she shoved

A pram with an infant on board.

With her right hand she dragged

a large blue wheelie bin.

Crucified by the waste,

The infant and the heat.

Nucella

for Robert Lowell

"Imperfection is the language of art"

I was reading your biography by Ian Hamilton;

During the 15th chapter I discarded the bookmark,

A postcard I bought in Galway.

The title was: Happy Dogwelk, (Nucella).

Your finger the pale shade of marine life

Blending with starfish and seaweed, pointing

To the sea bed.

Now  I know where I stand in your intricate

Hard waters.

I sit here at the dining room table, filled

With Whisky, Beer and poetry.

I look up into a mirror that shows my way

upstairs, if I dare move from this spot

And chance my way into the reflection

of the first day of March.

Then, only then, will I descend the stairwell

Of my youth.

"Dolphin"

" My eyes have seen what my hand did".

I wish I had known you,

Even to say hello in the street.

To know why I cry on your words

To know why I cry, full stop.

The next few poems are for my friend Jimmy Simmons it was Jimmy that encouraged me to do my M.A. I went for a retreat at the Poets house in Port muck island- magee.  Before I left I was offered to study for a M.A. by Jimmy and Janice Simmons. The Poets' House was a long time dream.  When she and her husband, the poet James Simmons, moved from Belfast to Portmuck in County Antrim they decided to realize that dream.  They would  bring Irish and American poets together in a supportive ,creative and homely environment.  The student poets would work in the home of the poets, in an environment where poem’s and poetry were part of everyday life.

The Portmuck House was situated high above a small harbor with dramatic views of Ailsa Craig and The Mull of Kintyre.The Poets' House opened in December 1990

in the first few years the couple ran a summer festival over three three fortnights.  Each day there was a guest poet who gave a morning lecture an afternoon workshop and an evening reading.  Irish Poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, Derek Mahon, Nuala NiDhomnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Paula Meehan, Eilean NicChuilleanain, Thomas McCarthy, Medbh McGuckian taught with American Poets William Matthews, David Keller, Jean Valentine, Richard Tillinghast, and Billy Collins.

In 1993 Jimmy and Janice, with the support of Lancaster University began teaching the first creative writing M.A. in Ireland.  Janice and James built a new Poets House tucked under Muckish with two classrooms and ample library space.  The house had two faculty bedrooms for summer visiting poets.  In 1998 Lancaster University approved the first Irish Language creative writing degree in the world.  It has been a long road, but Teach na hÉigse is now long established and has recently received charity status.

Thanx to those people for this creation.

STAINED GLASS

i.m. Jimmy Simmons                               

The Summer sun ricocheted

Of a Bloody Foreland, freeing

A winters cold rock face.

Held like the mirrored words

Of your poems, skimming

The water with undulated joy.

Creating ripples on the surface

That streamed through the plain

Windows of Killalt Church.

Staining them with the colours

            Of poetry, music and song.

I was a pallbearer at jimmies funeral and I never knew who Eamon Grennans work since then I have read his beautiful poems.  Poems like detail and others catch that essence of simplicity I hope mine one day captures that beauty.

         Splinter

         for Eamon Grennan

        "I'll never carry another coffin with you",

         You said, as we shook hands and you departed.

Before that I never knew you from adam,

I had to ask someone to point you out,

    Too stand tall as a pallbearer stands.

    Since then I have read your poems.

 The remnant of a fibre brushed off

 By a flaw on the backbone of the coffin.

            That line sticks in my head like a splinter

            From a shroud of linen these words can't tweaser out.

This next poem I wrote for two of my heroes I walked along the Ray river to the sea.   I didn’t know how to finish my thesis that I done on Raymond carver and Patrick kavanagh trying to link them.  This poem became the end of my thesis Id like to say thanks to Bob Wavle for letting me stay in his cottage by the Ray river.

Ray River

Although I’m here in Donegal and not Yakima,

Washington state,  or in Dublin reclining

On the Banks of the Grand Canal.

I feel a sense that Raymond Carver

And Patrick Kavanagh are here with me

Following the Ray River to the sea

Of this poem.

The winds sway the reeds reflecting

On the rippling water, on a bend a stream

Flows into the Ray, cascading on the rocks.

I love the music of this place, the silent

harmonies of the source, the spring;

Falling from high on Muckish Mountain.

another stream flows in ever so quiet,

secretly subtle, like the clarity

Of wonder in the undercurrents.

Im here at the sea, the reservoir.

Tory Island looms black, remote above

The wild white waves, poetry echoing

Across the golden strand.

The colours of a rainbow rise from the sea,

The intangible essence that lingers here.

The blending colours fade to blue

And I feel a slight tingle on my fingers.

I look down to see a multi coloured spider

Crawling across my hand and the open

Pages of this notebook, as if that

were its only purpose.

The following poems are based on my childhood during the troubles in Belfast.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  I thought at that time all the world was at war.

SHELL SHOCK

Memories drift away

In the distance,

Retiring silently.

Was it ever real

Or just imagined?

The horrors

Of this century

Recalled like

Fragments

Of shrapnel.

Logged And lodged,

Passed on

From the genes

Of our ancestors.

Shell-shock from a previous life.

This poem is based on a poem by Robert Lowell it reflects images of 9-11 and images of Belfast I tried to mix the both atrocities.

New York 2001: Fragment

Gazing into the ether's crystal ball,

Sky and a sky, and sky, till death-

My heart stops...  Robert Lowell.

I woke at six this morning, disturbed

By one of those dreams of falling

Where, they say if you dont wake up

Before you hit the ground, you'll die.

The images splintered away festering

Like a slither of metal or glass imploding

Beneath the cornea of my eye.

I was falling with others filling the sky

Then I was watching them fall grey,

Ashen, dust, a flimsy hologram.

I'm trying to assemble these words

From the debris of Sky News, a poem

By Robert Lowell, a dictionary to look up

Ether and find a line from "Paradise Lost".

Him the almighty power hurled

Headlong from the ethereal sky.

I recalled being the son of a terrorist

In Belfast, 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 didn't know then that I was the Siegfreid

Sassoon of Ardoyne. I didn't want a slap

On the back to congratulate the fine shot

Or another X marked in my school jotter

That replaced the teachers star.

This was war and I was sick to death of it.

I ran like the blood trickling along his face

Through the crevices and alley-ways

Into a friends intestines slithering like

Snails on the concrete. His mother yelling

"The bastards have shot my only son".

That night I cried myself to sleep

And lost myself in a peaceful dream.

It seems I have to go back there into

The dark recesses of my childhood

To let the words come out the otherside.

Can you run away through the Avenue's

Of blood, a friend or family member's

Image flickering when you close your eyes?

Can you wake in the morning and refuse

The X being marked on your school jotter?

Sunday Morning

Belfast 1970, a grey sky hung

Mucus of tar, the scent of hatred

And spent shells residue.

A woman loved for a moment

By the enemy, cried like a gull

Embedded in an oilslick, somewhere

Off the coastline of my heart.

The etched guilt of a one night stand

Tied to the lamp post. Some men

Passed wrenching traitor, slut, cunt,

And greenhorns from their throats,

That slithered on the black tar

Of her breasts, seeping into

          The feathers of her heart.

Unwritten grafitti is my plea for peace hopefully one day this poem will be written on the wall instead of the usual rhetoric we see and hear.  One day poetry will become the language we utter everyday.

Unwritten Grafitti

It’s what we won’t write now

That really matters.

The clear white pristine

Spaces between the verses.

Vacant virgin gable walls

Kerb stones free of colour.

The horizon of the other side

Across a non-existent peace line.

The absence of a mind-set

Locked in cells of oppression.

Just a gentle suffering where

The weather, love, birth, death

Naturally RULE OK!