While Away

We who were born at this time of the year in 1966 are now 40 year old Scorpios who one must remember to keep in their good books and not post up any intrusive snaps we've taken of them with a telephoto lense when monitoring their movements via google earth.

A middle aged Taurean woman from the comfort of her bedsit in Antartica now has the technology to undertake such invasive acts. Imagine that? A Scorpio's most astrologically ill suited sign becoming obsessed with our doings and zooming in to drool at us from 25,000 miles away.

But do not fear, I am a reformed oddball, here to help prevent wierdos tracking me from space, by posting a picture I doctored with photoshop - of Berite and Tony bumming around the pink voters banjacksed up in Railway End of Croke Park - canvasing their ideas on next years election and just asking the question, if a GAA manifesto on rugby was lost in the Pussy Cat bagel shop on Phibsboro, Fairview and Bridlington turning near the late night bakery where a poet on stage at the open floor spoke.

Pucker up for one's forties are really one's twenties or - depending on how our candle's burnt - ones sixties come early. So if you're poised for poetic success or just a cardiac arrest as you wait on the call for your word hoarde to shine bright as a new fifty year old talisman claiming 20 hundred's poetry as your own, here are some birthday messages I can send about hope and humanity to colleagues at the Poetry Review or West Lancashire Champion

"Remarkable"

"Astonishing"

"A truly historic event"

"The new Geoffrey Hill"

"The gift of Carol Ann Duffy deconstructing Sean O'Brien's male vernacular in a wave to Stevie Smith"

The talent of Pattern and stature of McGough"

"The complete poetic competent with the professional confidence of an off-page Aoife Mannix or suitless Nick Laird in receipt of state benifits and busking a monkey a weekend with only his aura to magnetize a throng upon the cobbles at Covent Garden ..."

"...his live pulling power has the mesmeric allure of Gearoid MacLochlainn winning the bi-annual Bloomsbury slam by skillfully revealing the geneology of his linguistic DNA with a tigerish Irish noblesse only those whose eye can reason, rhyme and sense what riddle from the celtic fit of ratios found at home will speak a code of sound that breaks the syntax..."

"....the purity of Don Patterson's inner meloncholy mixed with Motion's most hypnotic rural line to create a comedic felicity - equal to, if not beyond, the sublimal wit of South Yorkire's only living troubadour and the people's poet laureate, a hopefully soon to be, Sir Ian McMillan....."

"....these poems draw from the cultural core of language, a flawless energy whose combustible force of internal zeitgeist motors the engine of an incredible art."

"...The next Muldoon. A difference of similarities in titterish grace, double take, wonder and cock a doddle doing to bog Gods from that ancient and mythical place of profund diddlee dee where consciousness meets itself in the entropic mysteriousness of a continually collasping mind.."

"..exiled understudy and heir to Durcan's arch potential of mystic urban notes from the facial-hair free Dennis O'Driscoll mirrored with inplaceness by a Mossbawn bard devoid of a dayjob, paddling in vast pools of knowledge and experiencing heights of unemployability only the most articulate of verse-makers reach to speak favourably from...."

"...his enthralling voice bears a hallmark of clarity and commitment reminiscent of a younger Mahon, Longley, Paulin or Carson - whilst Kennelly's honest echo lilts to ground this harmonious experiment in metrical chiming sprinkled with Ayres' commercial fairydust, striking its note of pure aurality and sounding one lone call from truth's trench above the swamps of contemporary verse..."

".....the image of Sister Gwendolene beheading his hamster during a brutalised childhood in Limerick's Magdalene laundry has a startling effect. Memory- flashes daring us stop, picture, question and sense if the cosmos shops its way seeking balance for our spirit's short drag through life's technological trance."

"Unlike anyone else writing today. The next Sir Nobody."

~

Only joking. I am using a Scorpion birthday as the excuse to lose myself in a bardic bedsit and bare my experimental self, stripped and in search of an audience by posting reportage and the torture photographs from Al Jazeera's website I've uploaded to my new political anti war blog.