Tim Costelloe & Mark Madden.

Dubliner Tim Costelloe and Belfast man Mark Madden are both writers whose live poetry humanly connects with those hearing them speak their work to life as air and in the ear. They are two  committed artists in whose lives an ongoing lifelong search for the centre of ourselves is conducted through the act and language of poetry.

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Nowhere to sit to ponder days
no silent loss which time betrays
the flutter and flame inside your
breast is not the same.

Nor can you once more emerge
to greet this eye
beautiful and dumb as any flower
untame
a lie
a hidden power

sulking like distance under lilac skies
between deliberation and an urge
between the living and what dies
in this the crucible of our expiation.

Your prayer the fist which silences me
so that I can't pray or even see a fresh
sun licking rivers in the East

Tim Costelloe


~

Make up your Mind

The lapwing calls across the gorse
The air is sweet as wine
Spring grass is rich and cool
But you’ve made up your mind

Before the senses sweeps a world
Both graceful and sublime
Full of all that was ever real
But you’ve made up your mind

Made it all up from what you were told
God and Country, Space and Time
And the glittering screen of the vacuum tube
Where They make up your mind

And you’ve made up your mind what’s important
And you’ve made up your mind who you are
And you’ve made something of yourself
While your true soul floats in a jar

It’s not the world your reason sees
Dissected and defined
Pressed and flat on blank white sheets
Because you’ve made up your mind

Mark Madden


~

Clover in the Dusk’s Light

There’s skulls and muscles sewn into this cool
earth they cut scant harvest from: shall, like
the sea they scatter, rise tall, slender, golden

and a greater sun than that which lit their grain,
went down from heaven fires, will rain on
blackened blocks which splodge
the sky’s already ugly grey to ash.

Already in a distance
in a distant light their ghosts are waiting
and with spectral hands they gather this world
its sighs.

Fergal waits for the clouds to start parting
fade to a blue haze.

He awaits the stars torching the sky’s wide
plains of silver.

It’s spring now. Already scents of her brilliant
summer scatters through the breeze. At night

you can rest – discuss with oneself the janglings
of the day.

Fergal muses on how the awkward curvature
made what her body found proportion shine. 
How the red of flame rose like a real fire

from the black locks of her hair. How meeting
her too was a judgement
and when all beauty must be secret, you can’t

afford the luxury of sighs. Ghostly fizz fills
with the colour of his apprehension – specters
kiss the air around him with their smile.

Tim Costelloe


~

Canto I - The Twins

Heavy wuth lunch the adults drowse
In the conservatory's verdant warmth
Lull themselves with tory cluckings
Belched aphorisms and loose diatribes

Languid you stifle a vaugue ennui
In the folds of your collapsable chair
When from the garden the twins appear
Darting eyes bright, and sure of their prey

Lucy pleading
And Stacey leading
They pull you up and bear you away.

Mark Madden


~

Betrayal.

More the plural of same
though fissure-points ungrasped
through scan in rubble

Cronos
his splash will peel - reveal
and smudge as much these ruins
toa blur - so seek not black spots

on a pink dress as they flutter in
some foreign breeze - nor the
cocktailed eye's florescent paint
brushing antique lights to a modern
splendour.

Justify no lie roller-balled over
diarying night - have mercy, for one
day I too shall pardon, Lord, these
indiscretions of a savaging time

while raindrops sparkle hair
in mirror, while fork caresses
sausages on plate and hands move
pages

innocent at least if not sublime.

Tim Costelloe

~

Canto IV - The Twins

Finally tiring of their prize
They lead you dazedly back to the house
To where the adults loll around
Flushed from a recent game of croquet
All Pimms, white canvas, bestial grunts
Toothless and puce as long-caged wolves
Awaiting the expected dinner bell
To which of course your asked to stay
BVut Lucy Fretful
And Stacey regretful
Point out that your trousers are on the wrong way
And just disappear.

Mark Madden