Monday, 12 June 2017

THE SPARK

Flicking through a photo album from

When I was a boy, why are they no help

to me now, I want to make something

imagined not recalled? I hear the noise

of my own voice, mumble. Sometimes

everything I write with the threadbare

art of my eye.

The school photo looks formal, is that really me?

Seems a snapshot, lurid, grouped, paralyzed

by fact, all’s misalliance. I flick inside and try

to let me be, on a wall with my cousins

Buncrana, Donegal, I think.

Black ‘n’ white by a flat in England, looking

as if I knew, a happy child at x-mas, with

brothers and sisters, I don’t know them

from Adam but they were family, looking

back on those days does nothing for me.

Photos are nostalgic moments of magic but

I can’t see the past looking back at me.

I know I was there in my infant smiling face

Now I’m a man living disabled dis-grace.

There is no way to paint this, it is what it is.

I see something dressed in a matinee coat

I think I caught my mother’s eye and that’s

Good enough for me.

CARVER REPAIRS THE CRACKS

IN THE DAM

I am a writer that I decree

I am as mad as mad can be.

I am a writer totally blind

Not wishing to see but find.

To society I’m useless have

No need, push my food

Under the door to feed.

When it’s snowing I think

Of Chekhov, Joyce, in wind

Rain it’s O’ Flaherty, Buskowski

On beer whiskey, talking

Of race tracks and whores.

Kerouac has been high since

1969, Carver repairs the cracks

In the dam, together again un-

Til I think the next line.

Thursday, 8 June 2017

INNER WAIT
Re-reading Rilke

The spider is at peace

In its own inner weight

The bird soars free, alone.
I sit down here, looking up
Balancing my inner wait
In my essential loneliness.

The spider sees its legs, move
The bird sees its wings flap but
I see my hand like a claw
clawing, a pen.

For my family:

A STAGNANT MEMORY

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I awoke in a real reality just seconds after
my life support was switched off, declared dead.
Somewhere in-between, I must have been drifting
in and out of life and death. Don’t know why
I didn’t drift to the other side? The bond of love

held me in poetry in motion.

I think that’s why I am a writer, memory is writ
under my skin,This wasn’t a Jungian dream
or a Yeatsian realm of spiritual wonder, this was a locked-
in nightmare of darkness and sorrow,.

I had no sense of time, it was as if I was left out in the dark.

A domestic servant in yellow, cleaning around the bed

gave me a smile and a drink of water

but spoke another language.

One minute I was by the bed at home reading a book

by Ray Carver, the next,I was on the floor unable

to walk the legs cut from under me. I crawled into
my mother’s room asking her what was happening
that’s how suddenly it happened.

I think you’re having a stroke!

This was the veteran woman of five strokes
and her humane Dublin wisdom pulled through
and I was following her footsteps. You can't issue blame

on to much drinking or smoking if it’s in the family blood
there isn’t much you can do, It’s going to happen
whether you like it or not. My lifestyle was to rich
the clinical smell of unsmelt death lingered through
the ward the smell wafted through the corrridors.

I checked my self for lost limbs, paralyzed down
my right, I tried to say thank you to a nurse
I saw the words in my mind’s eye coming along my brain but

when they reached my mouth they got lost.

I hallucinated a man behind the bed cutting bodies
with a chainsaw throwing body parts on a skip
and I was next, I gripped the sheets

and took the white knuckled ride

of imaginative nightmare.

I thought the nurses were out to kill me
I had no sense of form, I had lost

all memory, there was nothing on my mind
like a newborn in an adult body

I drifted back into limbo.

Tuesday, 6 June 2017

THE LIFE OF REILLY

1.

Mickey Reilly sat on his single bed looking out onto the busy road. The dark nights were slowly creeping in as the lights of the traffic flickered through the rain spattered window. His computer dimly lit up the tiny bed-sit behind him, his library of music was shuffling through the 722 songs he had downloaded and stored there. The raw bass of Damaged Goods by Gang of Four played at the back of his mind.

He was re-enacting a scene. He was walking through St Anne's park smoking a cigarette as he passed the band stand where the local acts played a free summer

festival. He fixed the length of blue nylon rope—burnt at both ends to stop it fraying—around his neck and tucked the ends into his bomber jacket. He zipped it

up to his neck.

It was a crisp winter’s night and the stars glowed clearly above him. As he walked through the arches of the rose gardens, he saw a puff of smoke rising from a figure seated at the bench. The man turned to look up, and Mickey noticed the white strip around his neck shining like a star.

"What about ya, father?” he said. “Lovely night.”

“Yeah it is, son. Been sitting here watching the stars and listening to the sea out there beyond the darkness. Come and sit down here son and listen,” he said, patting the seat beside him.

Mickey looked at the old man for a second, then settled in beside him. He rested his arm across the back of the bench and shifted his right foot over his left knee, inching closer to the dark figure.

"Can I have one of your smokes, Father?” he asked.

“Have you no smokes son?” asked the priest.

“No Father, I've only got fifty pence to my name.” Mickey took the coin out his pocket and flicked into the air it dropped dully in his palm.

"I could tell you a story about a fifty pence piece just like this one, Father.”

"I'm sure you could, son', said the priest handing him a cigarette.

He dug a lighter out of his coat pocket and reached over to light Mick's cigarette. The flame illuminated the darkness between them. Looking deep into the priest’s eyes, Mickey pulled back on his right arm and let it collide like a hammer with the side of the priest’s head. He opened his jacket and pulled out the rope, found its centre and dragged it through the priest’s teeth from behind like a bit in a horse’s mouth. He crossed the end of the rope and laced it across his

back to bind the priest’s hands and place him back on the bench. The priest began to come to he sat on the bench beside him, his arms wrapped tightly around

him.

“Now Father, I want you to shut the fuck up so I can tell you a story about a fifty pence piece just like this one,” he said, flicking it through the air to land in his palm.

He was twelve again the year was 1972. It was a Sunday. One of the gang said lets rob the egg factory. He couldn't remember if it was Hardbap or Haggis who

suggested it but they sprang into action and got together a couple of giders and old prams and headed off to rob the place.

They broke in through a back window, but had no way out through the smashed window with the boxes of eggs. With all the eggs they couldn't take they had a riot in the massive factory space.

Mickey unleashed the fork lift from its power point where it was charging and crashed it into every wall before getting the forks wedged under the steel door.

He prized the roller door up to let them out and stacked the boxes of eggs onto the giders and prams.

They headed off across the fields through the gypsy camp where they gave out a few dozen of the eggs to the women who sat around outside one of the caravans talking.

Some of the kids ran after them, the boys calling out, “Give us some of your eggs” until the women called them back saying leave them good boys alone.

They took the boxes off the transport and carried them up the steep hill, then piled them back on at the top and wheeled them across the all weather pitch through the kids’ playground and past the army sandbag post.

The two young soldiers taunted them, shouting out through the gap in the sandbags.

“Oi mate where did you steal them eggs”.

Razor walked up to them and looked up into the gap and said, “That's none of your fucking business, you

British bastards.” He dragged a greenhorn up from his gut and spat at them.

They waited for a gap in the traffic and dashed the cargo across the main road that was the divide between the Catholic and Protestant areas. They feared being approached by a rival gang. They would have a punch up or a mini riot with them and maybe they would end up with the eggs, but that was nothing compared to what the I.R.A would have happened had they sold the eggs to their own community.

They split up on the other side off the road and began knocking on the doors of the houses of the three streets that ran off the main road, careful not to go to

deep into the Protestant area. Within no time, the eggs had disappeared and the money was in their sky rockets. Only one suspicious lady asked where they had came from. Mickey said his Da was in a van selling them in the next street. At 10p a dozen she took three dozen.

Before crossing the main road, they piled into the shop on the Protestant side of the road and each bought 20 smokes, lemonade crisps and chocolate bars.

They

passed the army post again where one of the soldiers said, “Give us a couple of fags mate”.

Hardbap removed two smokes from his box held them in his hand shoved it down the front of his trousers rubbed the fags around his balls before taking them out and threw them through the gap in the sandbags, calling out British bastards as he ran across the pitch laughing.

They sat in a burnt out car in a back entry smoking, eating, drinking and laughing before heading home for tea. Mickey hung his coat on the rail just inside the front door. After tea his Ma said she was going out to see Aunt Anne who lived up the street. As she lifted his Harrington jacket off the rail to get her coat below it she felt it was heavy. She shook it and heard the money rattling. She took the coat in to where Mickey and his sister were finishing their tea. She spilt the contents of his pockets out on the table: the money, cigarettes and chocolate bars scattered everywhere.

“Where did you get this?”, she asked and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, dragging him into the living room she sat him down on the chair.

“Now look up at that picture and tell me where you got the money,” she demanded.

He looked up at the sacred heart picture and said, “We found crates of lemonade bottles and brought them back to the shop and we got some copper and lead from the burnt buses and sold it to the gypos.”

“You’re a liar,” she said. “You wouldn't get that much money from a few bottles and a bit of scrap.”

The door bell rang and she answered it. Hardbap hung back on the front step.

“Were you with Michael today?” she asked. The boy said yes, She asked him in and sat him down on the sofa and told him to look up at that picture and tell her

where he got the money. Haggis, Razor, GG and Cash all called then, and they all sat there in the living room looking up at the picture of Jesus on the wall in silence. Eventually Michael couldn't stand it and out of embarrassment admitted they had robbed the egg factory.

She told the boys to leave, saying that each of their parents would be told. She told him to go to his room, and as he climbed the stairs she said “I'm putting

that money in an envelope and you’re bringing it up to the priest tomorrow after

school.”

2.

The old lady ushered him through the front door of the Parochial house, asking his name and telling him to sit on the small pew and wait for the priest. He was physically shaking with nerves and felt sick to his stomach as the minutes ticked by on the big clock in the hall. The priest eventually came through, dressed in his ceremonial robes.

“Michael Reilly?” he said and Mick mumbled a yes. “I was talking to your mother today. Come in here,” he said.

He followed the priest into a library with a desk in the middle of a room surrounded by shelves of books along each wall.

“Do you have the envelope with you?” Mickey took it out of my pocket and handed it to him as he sat down behind the desk.

“You know you done wrong boy, don't you?”

“Yes father,” he said.

“You won’t do anything like this again, will you son?”

“No father,” he said.

“Bringing shame on the good name of your family.”

“No father, I'll never do wrong again, father,” Mickey said, almost beginning to cry.

“Ok, I believe you son,” said the priest. “But one thing I don't understand. Why did you sell the eggs to the Protestants?”

Mickey said nothing.

“I'm going to send this envelope of money back to the egg factory. I won’t say it was you if you swear you won’t do this again.”

“I swear father, I swear,” he said.

“Ok. Come here boy,” he said, pointing to the floor beside his chair. He reached

over and held his arm and looked up at him. “Now you know because you have done a wrong deed and brought shame to your poor mother you have to do penance to pray for forgiveness.”

“Yes father, I know”

“Ok, when you leave here, I want you to go to the chapel and say six Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and ask god for his forgiveness.”

“Yes father, I promise,” Mickey said, letting out a sigh of relief and moving to turn.

“Not so quick boy,” said the priest, gripping his arm even harder. He pulled back his chair and ordered Michael to stand in front of the desk. Mickey stood

there in front of the desk.

"Now look boy', said the priest from behind him. He turned his head to see the priest fumbling under his robes and pull his hand out with a fifty pence piece.

He held it up for him to see “I'm going to put this in your pocket, ok?”.

The priest let it drop into the front pocket of his trousers. “Now if you tell anyone what happened here, I'll tell your mother that you’re a liar and a thief and that you should be put in a home. Ok, boy?”

“Ok, father.”

“Now open your trousers and pull them down.”

He done what he was told, thinking he was going to be slapped across the arse with a cane, but he jumped back startled like someone had walked over his grave at the touch of the priest reaching between his legs to take hold of his cock and start pulling on it. He put his strong hand on his back and bent him over the bench while still pulling at his cock. He heard his zip opening beneath the robes. “Don't scream boy,” he said and forced his hard cock into him.

He lay there across the bench biting through the skin of his thumb, his teeth clenched and his top lip trembling as if to start crying but he didn't. He bit harder on his thumb thinking I'm going to kill you, you dirty bastard. He could feel the stuff that oozed out of him growing cold between his tummy and the

bench as the priest hammered into him moaning like an old pig. His stomach did somersaults as the priest came inside him. He wiped the cum from his arse with his robe and told Michael to get dressed. He shuffled his robe and told Michael to leave.

Mickey got to the door and the priest said, “Don't forget son, one word and you'll be spending Christmas in a home.”

Michael never turned back. He threw the 50 pence piece into the air and heard it smack of the roof of the parochial house and slide down the slates and into its gutter. He ran all the way home crying inside, thinknig I'm gonna kill that dirty bastard someday.

His father was released from prison. He had been interned in Crumlin Road Gaol and Long Kesh. Michael went to see his friend GG to tell him that they were leaving Belfast and moving to Dundalk. They sat in the dining room laughing about the strange machine in the corner of the room that was used when GG's brother died. He died all the time and this machine brought him back to life. It was like something out of the movies.

It was dark on the way home. The only lights were those that shone through the thick curtains of the houses. All the streetlights were shot out to let the IRA

move freely through the district and for the safety of the people from sniper or British army fire. The sky was red and flakes of black ash were falling like snow as houses and property burned all over Belfast. As he turned left by instinct onto his street, a splatter of bullets came hurtling towards him from a machine gun at the top of the street. They tore through the night cutting the hedges and fences and bouncing off the ground in front of him. He froze to the spot, panic-stricken. He could see the flashes of the rifle, but couldn't move.

A hand came from behind the hedges and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him off the street into the garden. He could feel the hot piss steaming in his jeans become cold as he lay there on the winter grass. He looked up to see the man shooting back up the street with a hand gun and buried his head in his hand. His mind switched off.

The man took him by the scruff of the neck and the arse of his trousers and threw him clear of the hedges and the fence and he landed in the next garden. The big man with red hair and hands like shovels did this over 12 gardens while shooting back at the machine gun at the top of the road.

At that time, all the doors in the district were left off the latch so the gun men could run though the house and out the back to make their escape. The big man shoved Michael through the front door where he landed flat on the bottom of the stairs. He looked back as the door began to close again with the impact with the wall and he saw the big man running across the road. He saw the impact of the bullet connect with his head and the blood spurting out, like the last action shot in a movie before the door closed the view like the curtains in the cinema. He climbed the stairs and cried himself to sleep.

The next day the house was emptied into a removals van. There wasn't enough room for him in the front of the removals van so Michael travelled in the white transit van with the soft spoken boyfriend of his eldest sister. Michael didn't have much to say as they travelled along the motor way. Paul rattled on about a

new start, new home, etc. with his girlie voice that was beginning to annoy Michael who was trying not to think about what happened the day before. His arse was still sore and every bump in the road reminded him.

Michael began to drift off to sleep when he felt something. He looked down to see Paul's hand on his leg slowly moving towards his crotch, talking about pulling off and buying him a nice meal and ice cream. Michael jumped back when he realised what was going on.

“Get your fucking hand off me,” he yelled.

“It’s ok, Michael. You might like it.”

Michael reached for the door handle and pulled it open, holding the door ajar and saying “If you don't stop, I'll jump.”

He climbed into the back and sat on the floor against a tea-chest. It was worse on his arse, but at least he was away from that dirty bastard. How could he do that if he was going with my sister, he thought. Is there something wrong with me? He liked girls so he couldn't understand what was happening.

They slept on mattresses on the living room floor of the new house that night. Michael woke with his little brother Jimmy hanging around his neck, still fast asleep. His brother and sister’s mattresses were empty, but he looked across the room and saw Paul sitting up smoking. Paul said, “Good morning Mickey.”

“Fuck off,” said Michael.

“Do you want a smoke?” Paul asked, and held up the cigarette, waving it.

“Throw it over,” said Michael.

“I'll give you three if you let me touch your wee brother,” he said.

Michael saw red and jumped out of bed. He ran across the room and kicked him up the face, saying “You touch my brother and I'll kill you.”He left the room carrying his wee brother, who was beginning to wake.

Mickey made new friends and the bitterness fuelled by the fear and hatred in Belfast began to leave him as he realised that not everywhere was like that. He had been out all day with his new friends progging orchards and taking the girls up to Chuhullians castle for a kiss and a grope of tits that didn't yet exist on most of the girls except Lizzy Gaffner, who had enormous tits and beautiful erect dark brown nipples she loved to have sucked so they all took turns with her.

There was a party and sing song going on when he returned home. All the adults and friends were drinking to celebrate his sister’s birthday and the house warming. Michael said goodnight and went off to bed with his little brother.

He climbed into the top bunk and began to drift off as soon as his head hit the pillow. He was lost in his dream world and it was as if he was dreaming about Lizzy touching his cock. His member began to rise, but something just wasn't right. It began to feel like it was real and not a dream. As he began to wake, he heard his Mother entering the room shouting, “You dirty filthy bastard!”

There beside him was Paul with his hand under the bedclothes. She whacked him one right up the coupon and began dragging him out of the room. My father came running up the stairs shouting what's going on. “This filthy bastard was up here touching wee Michael when he was sleeping and you wanted this soft talking

pervert to marry my daughter. Get the fucking animal out of here before I kill him.”

It was a cold November morning. He woke early and switched on the portable TV that only picked up two fucking god damn stations. He made a cup of tea and got back into bed. He picked up his mobile phone and there was one new text message that read: Pervert Bastard. He checked the number. It was the fat bitch he took home from the pub on Saturday night.

While he was bucking her from behind, he watched the fat roll like ocean waves up and down her back with each thrust into her. He couldn't cum in her because she had a fanny like the Liffey—wide, stinking and wet. He pulled his cock out and tried to shove it up her arse, but she got up got, dressed and left. Fuck her he said and deleted the message.

He watched the morning news and heard a priest talking about how they should change the law from Canon to Civil. "At the end of the day, we’re all civilians

who must adhere to the law.” Hang the bastards, he thought.

On his way into town on the Dart, Canon Law and Civil Law itched around in his brain. He joined the queue outside the Dole office and drifted in with the stench of foul beer, smoke and the stink of some of the dirt birds in the queue to collect his weekly pittance assistance. He passed two chapels and five pubs on the way to catch the bus back home. He wanted to stop for a pint but he knew the consequences of that as many a time he went home broke, so he went to Supermacs got some groceries and three litres of the cheapest red wine before heading home.

He filled himself a glass of wine, put a couple of strips of bacon under the grill, switched on his computer, clicked on his music library and scrolled through.

"Misery's the river of the world. If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.” He heard tom waits rattle in a song.

Then he clicked shuffle and got stuck into the bacon sandwich, guzzled the glass of wine, filled another and sat down on the bed. He listened hard to the words of Steve Earl's, John Walkers blues, "I'm just an American boy raised on MTV. I've seen all those kids in the soda pop ads, but none of them look like me."

He remembered something he'd read somewhere, "Never hate your enemy, it clouds your judgement". He tried to remember who said it but he couldn't. As Steve

Earle began to chant, he lay there feeling down and empty. The image of his dead sister entered his brain and left like a hologram. He drifted off back into nineteen seventy five as Lou Reed hammered out "There is No Time".

3.

he was now 14 on a Saturday and he was at the markets in Dundalk selling toys and Novelty goods from a wallpaper table. He'd just came out of Woolworth's

with his pockets full of pencils, pens and anything else he could sell for money at school. He had his eye on some dinky cars for his little brother when the grey haired man offered him a job.

It was cold, drizzling on and off so the punters weren't out in force. They both sat on milk crates behind the table filled with the goods. The man reached across and put his hand on Michael's knee below the table.

“I'll take you to a nice hotel in Dublin. We can stay there for the weekend. I'll take you to the pictures and I'll treat you", he said, moving his hand further up his leg.

“Ok,” said Michael.

"I'm gonna go for lunch,” he said with a rotten smile on his face, lifting the milk crate and reaching into the shoe box with the day’s taking. He took out some notes, put the lid back on and put the milk crate back over it. “Sit there,” he said. “Guard that money with your life. We'll need it for Dublin and I know exactly how much is in it.”

When he disappeared around the corner, Michael rose from behind the table yelling "Everything must go. Get your bargains here!” he shouted like a professional trader.

People began to gather around the stall and he sold the lot in no time. Everything went for next to nothing. Anything the people wanted to pay, he took. He dandered off home with a shoe box under one arm and a folded up wallpaper table in the other. The images began to fall thick and fast through his mind and the pen was scribbling unreadable words down as if he'd found the fast forward button in his brain and had pressed it twice.

A priest was getting a dig up the head in a store room in school. A man in a fruit factory had his hand stapled to a crate screaming. A man with a butcher’s apron was fucking a dead pig. A hand reached out to grab him from behind a tree he stood beside having a piss. he ran the man through the streets and into a primary school grounds where the man stopped in the shelter. Blood was splattered all over the grey concrete and the red brick walls, ripping one of the 3x2s the kids sat upon on wet days, beating and beating and beating the man to a pulp.

He dropped the pen and reached under the bed and took out a length of blue nylon rope stood on the chair and tied it onto the heavy duty hook he had placed in

the ceiling fixed to the rafter. He tied the noose around his neck and spun around 360 degrees like a ballerina on tip-toes, looking down on his world and kicked the chair away.

The last thing he heard was the chorus of Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues by the Eels singing, “God damn right, it’s a beautiful day” and the last image to flicker through his mind before his sight went from red to scarlet then black was the priest swinging in the park hanging by a length of blue nylon rope from the rose garden arches. His trousers and underwear around his ankles, the stem of a rose bush sticking out of his innards dripping with blood catching the light of the moon flowing over a fifty pence piece on the grass.

Tuesday, 16 May 2017

NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH

Pat looked from the third-floor window of the block of red brick council flats, she watched the bridge part in the center over the murky Thames to let the cargo boat flow through. While watching the bleak surroundings, she wrapped a small porcelain figurine in newspaper, lost in thought unaware she twisted it so tightly it tore. I will miss my family she said to herself and a thought of sadness came over her, the grey enclosed summers day, the factories surrounded her landscape pumped filthy fumes, its best for the children she spoke as if answering herself. She shook her head as if waking from a hypnotic trance and wrapped the figurine in another sheet of newspaper and placed it in the half-filled t-chest that stood on the floor beside others already filled. The pictures were removed from the wall, the unsmoked stained squares stood like a stamp of approval to vacate the premises.

Suddenly she stopped packing to make tea and smoke a cigarette, she sat on the sofa, she picked up the framed photo of her dead brother beside the photo of her father dressed in an Irish army uniform. Just twenty-seven when he died of T.B. The same age as her brothers smiling face jokily he sat on a toilet on a building site. A lump of emotion formed in her throat as she eyed her handsome brother taken just twenty-seven before he fell from the ladder to his death, a true friend she thought for life.

She remembered holding his little hand, just an infant but wild and carefree. He let go her hand and bounded into the river grabbing the great white swan by its webbed feet startling the great bird flapping its massive wings, honking and hissing in a frantic state trying to break free of the boy. The majestic bird ascended into the sky with infant jimmy hanging by the skin of his teeth, let go jimmy, let go she yelled wildly from the bank of the dodder that ran through Rathmines, Dublin. Look at me patty I’m flying, he let go and splashed into the river. She gripped him with all her might, she looked after little jimmy while her mother made up for her measly pittance of widow’s pension cleaning the houses of the rich. Ridden with catholic guilt that left a gaping hole of grief in the wife and five children. Times were hard for a young family in Ireland as it grew into a state of independence. She remembered her father’s Irish Army uniform and his death as a young man, soon after the family went on the cattle boat to England. After the death of her husband Ireland had nothing left to offer her family and the news of England Where you could earn three or four times came ashore and spread like wildfire. Attempting to look into the future in the used tea leaves but dealing with the bare facts of NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH plastered in your face everywhere you went.

Saturday, 1 October 2016

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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!

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!.

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.