This date got me thinking of identity. The base datum made when rooting first our mind into place and culture. The signs we follow and/or connected with, which guide us along life's path.

Childhood would appear the most logical time for this to happen. When we consciously decide what to buy into. The base line Datum we take our bearing and measurement of self from. The one we trace back to and start from again if we decide to try a new track.

~

The Englishness i grew up in, was a one which defined itself in opposition to the notion of southern Englishness: a northern one. In this model, total Englishness was a duality I did not ultimately connect with, because my parents, like Morrissey's, are not English.

~

This is why we were unable to connect, because our home life meant it could never be. Most children reared in the Irish culture in England, have this confusion in their mind to various degrees. How can we connect to a place whose imperial past so colours our perception of what Englishness is?

England had a lot of colonies and some who come to England through this link, may have a fundamental beef with Englishness as a cultural force for good in their lives, depending on what vibe of Englishness was doing the rounds in their home nation. Often they have come from a place with a history of English subjagation.

~

It always seemed to me that the bottom line of being English, was being happy about being a subject of another person. I know that technically the english are not subjects but citizens; and it seems the contract between individual and nation went through a lot of change since the sixties, when everyone began wising up to the reality that English life as a citizen was preferable to being a Subject. improved Education made people see the truth, and improved standards of living -- whilst the technology boom meant the rituals, magic and theatre from a non-technological past stopped happening, once people got free of being the playthings of monarchy.

~

Some think we are the playthings of politicians and global business. Daddy's boy george the second, whose idea - some say - was to expand his familial business interests by becoming the pres. Tony on the fag end of his seventies sixties trip, sincerity slipping beneath the accumulation of cock ups. Plus his datum had a rock-star-messiah complex going on, but unlike the real thing, he had only the costume of political office in which to perform. Suits at all time.

He couldn't slip on a pair of wraparounds and slip into the oval office for a chat about third world debt like his template - Good.

~

This is what Morrissey could be doing if he returned home to his culture, instead of throwing gladioli about the stage his dream built, swapping faxes with Alan Bennet when he lived in the UK. Before he re-located to Los Angeles and became a hispanic icon in a bewildering twist upon his path. His innate quality of being to effortlessly astound all who follow his doings.

~

Rupert Murdoch has a gas with the lads about how to keep the billions happy. If Morrissey's on page seven, ten, ignored - and what news to broadcast.

~

Morrissey's looking good on being a vegan. I saw him on on a TV chat show and it was clear his years had been well chosen. Maybe he could join me and you in our garden of Eden dearest?

Stephen felt excluded from the fun and games in Hulme. Spent all day dreaming of being himself, alone in his bedroom, one poster on the wall. Johnny Rotten - God Save the Queen and a facist regime Sid felt a part of before overdosing in the centre of his and Nancy's whirlwind. Died like her majesty's mother, an icon of englishness.

~

Sid James and Barbara Windsor.

~

Plurailty of tongue - come, speak of england and sound what is heard in anima mundi. Mint the noise of imperial coinage, pull from the purse, pocket and cauldron the spirit you control cover or stir. Spend it abroad with us.

Yesterday and today, when cycling up Dame Street to Lord Edward Street, I saw an elderly man I used to live in the next room to, when I was a resident at the Iveagh Hostel on Bride Street, pictured above. He is a schizophrenic with cancer, and has deteriorated significantly since I saw him last. He doesn't look like he has long left.

He is one of those people who we know to see but have never spoken to. Like in any town, some people we have known by sight from childhood, but never a word passed between us. Strange, and yet, entirely human. A common experience.

I lived at the Iveagh from July 2004 to December 2005. It provides direct access accommodation in single rooms for 70 single homeless men with low support needs and there are 125 single rooms providing long term accommodation.

I moved there in July 2004 a newly (2:1) Writing Studies and Drama graduate, right after finishing university in England, living in a small room in the basement for the first six months, where the 70 short-term homeless men are housed; and then on the first-floor for a year, in the room next door to where the man I saw on Dame Street yesterday has been living for many years. And as a lot of the other long-term residents there also have. Some have been living in their ten-by-six rooms for forty years. And happy to call it home.

I moved there with the practical and romantic notion that I would test myself as a trainee three-year old barely between bardic grade-one Focloc and two MacFurimid ('son of composition') student-poet in Dublin, whilst living with society's poorest, of which I was one. It was a practical solution to my then homeless situation. As though I eventually got educated, I was for extended periods in my twenties prior to getting educated, in a series of similar hostels and in the same boat as all the men living week to week in the Iveagh, who I lived with for the first 18 months of being in Dublin.

I moved out after Brian, an alcoholic in his fifties, on one to three bottles of Jameson a week, discovered he had inoperable secondary cancers throughout his body. Brian was a really kind man, who everyone liked because of his openly honest nature, and at this point, I instinctively knew it was time to move out and look forward with my dream, that decanted a kilometer away to a self-contained studio-room on the first floor in a Victorian terrace off the South Circular at Donore Avenue.

Long term the Iveagh hostel is not an ideal venue for inculcating healthy eating habits. And with minimal cooking facilities making your own food is the exception. If I am honest, I am too much of an emotional coward, and though my moving out had been slowly on the back-burner to-do list for some weeks, I was spurred to move out the second of those final few weeks with him facing a swift and sudden end.

I was too spiritually weak and afraid and had no intention of witnessing someone i shared alcoholic tendencies with pass on in such a sorrowfully tragic 'private matter' before my inexperienced eyes. My emotionally privileged existence, being a happy reader and doggerelist in the life-long swim to Segais Well, I knew couldn't handle well -what proved to be- the month-long terminal decline and his death within weeks of being diagnosed after going to a doctor with excruciating headaches.

Before this however, the Iveagh offered a perfect balance to my writing. The writing kept me sane and the homelessness helped me keep a balanced perspective after arriving at the height -and through the final four years- of a mass cultural delusion and toxically tragi-comic social ostentation and default crassly nouveau riche Celtic Tiger affections - when sporting in the then new literary form of pseudo-critical spontaneous online trolling/freedom fighting in the battle of Ideas and on inherently unstable and shifting speculative sands of the discourse with poets at various literary-topic talk-sites I stumbled across and began writing and publishing linguistically innovative conversational doggerel at straight after arriving in Dublin and becoming a resident in the Iveagh homeless hostel.

~

When a well known poet dies, there is a brief outpouring of condolence, but not for the homeless men in the Iveagh.

The poem below was occasioned with this man as the human agent propulsing to life the fictional Sweeney of the title. And on this day of all days I think it appropriate to remember the forgotten men like the one I saw yesterday.

A Stray

Sweeney spat flakes of monologue
to an invisible foe in room 108
before he took the plunge.

A flyer of thought
who'd lick round corners like a knife wind

sweep up shined steps
and cyclone through swinging doors
of the red-brick kip called home,

trailing an underbelly-aura of tramp-glamour
through the smell of pine-fresh floor-polish
lining corridors like the yellow smoke
of Eliot's Prufrock.

He'd wake to reality's nightmare
cursing in a feral wheeze or grunt
and shout about

"cunts....bastards....lazy wankers dying of cancer"

then bang a wall with his fist
and start the day dissolved in tears.

He never socialised
or idled with others

just the one time of a long chat with himself
in the communal area, before Oisin complained
to a warden, who shut him up,

stuffed him back in his dressing room
where he worked on the final scene.

A plasterboard box left whistling
as he stepped onstage at the shelter
deep acting
at 8 12 and 4,

dressed in a drab bundle of grey rags
clutching a mug

with a look to no one
and none to him.

What demonic cause sucked his life
away behind the eyes
and forced his lips to pucker gumward;
curdle twisted words in his mouth
and draw sweat onto the one shirt
he ever wore and never took off?

Years of liquid cosh and ECT
beat and drained Sweeney's blood-bound scrap with life

nuked his mind and buckled his passion
on an anvil of despair

razed thought to a desert, where a phantom's whisp
baked his nut to the brain-scrambled recipe
a frazzled garda scraped from the pavement
and time struck from the memories of residents -

this spirit passing to assemble at the  House of Donn.

Arghhhh!!!!! mmmmnn... yummmy yummy yummy.. lurrvve, darlink darlink darlink,
squiffy super dooper... oh my god oh my god oh my god !! arghhhh

.. gimmie gimmie gimmie -- let me touch, let me touch, let me touch, let me touch - the hair, hair, hair, so so fantastically blowy blowy blowy...arghhh, arghhhh....ummmm, yah yah

come, come, come, need me need me need me. arghhh!!

yes, yes, yes -- want want want want - need need need...arghh!!!
oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.. arghhhhh!!!

..die, die, die dying darling darling
let me love you one more time, upright darlink be mine tonight

Mandy motion one more time
darling, darling, ummm mandzie

mandzie wimby womby bemby wemby
noh ! noh ! noh ! arrghhh !!!!

wickle mamby
darlink you poor thing, come mandz
let mwee make it becker wiv a wuvly wickle floral print

checklist --- hair, teeth, hotpants, esturay mahnday
dahrlink gonna gwiv yoo a B, B, E and moors of mockle main,

any day noo mah gwin yiz
twickle madnzie, twixle yiz iz soo intellectual that yiz iz
gonna git made into a star mandzie, darlink,

wiv a nickle tatterz caterpillar dwess,
ummm..

I cannot go on anymore living the lie so, hello.

Ireland 3 - Sweeden 0

1 Mar 2006 ... Steve Staunton the saviour of Irish soccer, starts his reign in charge of the Republic with an impressive victory in a Wednesday night friendly in Dublin's Lansdowne Road.

~

What you are reading, is Seamus Kennelly and Brendan Heaney making believe, you too can dream of being the one who flies under night heron wings, blushing above memories and cemetries holding the fuse of they who came before and make us the people we've become.

Of course, I no longer know if this blog is a good idea. I have no readers, there is no chance, it seems, of a poetry editor snapping up and selling my work, so it is not as the worlds number one writer I must dabble, but as a bundle of breathe and brilliance from the outer making the inner real. The gods without are the cause, but the location is within this skin and bone container claiming:


Self and Imagination

war and peace colliding in a fictional realm of grace
sheer gliding linguistic citizen, invisible the crown

hidden within literacy, an owner, community, calm
verbal pathway belief leads you to - ruby lip lover
unseen juganaut of faith - dreams and freedom

bouyancy saviour v Ireland, happening printed
by inner sidhe, and the vacuum a language sailor

in shadow and shade, tree like in peaceful wooden
scenes, twig witchery bog breath druidical spacer

breathes. Magi gathering beneath stadium eaves
a night the saviour appeared in a friendly. Passion

play, coyote like shyness, the diametrical opposition
in essential flux, perfect harmony of itself, yourself;

friendly being and true native spirit - fair play, phwo-
of 40 thousand witnesses coopered to it, the love...

Next game, was a 0 - 1 drubbing in May at home by poorer Czech opposition, and in the stadium, the saviour's golden one-game honeymoon, ended in bitter recriminations, in what became an unceasing wave after wave of woe for the spirit of soccer on the island.

And when the man appeared pitchside, and not making it happen by a sheer belief alone, many fans lost belief that one game had given. It was a fluke, some said, the team played so well that first frozen March spring evening, dark and bitter, but still, the unexpected result. One voice roaring, home.

The on pitch action, spoke far far louder than the saviour getting it wrong.

The greek strain in the tragedy, appeared in the next match, Hera and her locks of woe in a three tri con of pure belief the saviour was before the fall. The consensus in the stadium was, the saviour was shown up for a chancer; and prophetic doom voiced in the Sun and stars on which the fans affirmed, gave rise to the belief that it had all been a cosmic jape, at their expense, and thus: none were happy.

Slowly, the underperforming saviour became subject to a vicious campaign of bile and brutal satire, some claiming of which, he was deserving, and the professional soccer pundits, jihadic hacks and windbags practicing their dark journalism, exhaled their crushed longings and hope on this man of tender years, in a relentless torrent of begrudgery and brooha.

Thus a failed saviour, he had to be, and the talk turned to ..hey, get real and sack the turnip breathing thick git, before michael barrymore nicks his job...


However, in the hour of need, when all was lost and the saviour had took to taking long walks to ponder his next move in the intolerable hot house of highly volatile public opnion, an even greater act of supremely divine intervention occured. The random miracle everyone knew in their most secret of selves - it is clear now - and collectively held similar pictures within the immediate and central same border or dernier or some such natural tide mark of anarchy this island has -- manifest in the exterior form of events which made reality seem but a handmaiden to the saviour's Fate.

The soccer magus and saviour from Drogheda was delivered a galactic intervention needed to rescue him from the off pitch antics that stemmed from the underperforming players who he was unable to motivate. The human man behind the saviour mask, appeared; after a comatase drunk - in clear dire straits beyond the one the saviour was facing - drew a replica firearm within the saviours personal space when he was pacing the Louth shoreline in deep professional turmoil, the night before the next game, wondering what woe was to appear on the morrow in his war with the hacks.

And what did was so bizzare, it was a miracle of sorts, because at the next press conference, on the morn before that fateful August match, after the fake gun had been pulled on our saviour by an irrate - not fan; but bewildered fellow countryman with lunatic tendancies when in drink - the saviour was very upset, but his deeper spirit not only flickered, it flamed....

He, actually - couldn't care about the personal trauma, of the imitation arm in his space being wove around by an inebriated upset person, which the saviour properly copped onto sharpo, but the grief it gave his parents and family, the press intrusion had caused...

But that night in August 0 - 4 Holland at Landsdowne Road and post 1 - 0 away in Suttgard to Germany, the saviour was doomed to a long drawn out goodbye in a war of attrition with the armies of enemies ranged against him. Alas he was slowly sacraficed, for underperforming, some say, in his role as a miracle worker with shorts, shinpads and ball.


Eight fair years, honest blooms, if you ever find us
bleeding, declare by the dead generations that give

the living their claim, the pipes are laid square, gutter
spout pointing downwards, a temple of telling tales

by the door post and stories most tender, border lying
straightlines drifting to the very terminus of an image

amazing to see, the under-line current that will affirm
the island queen of memory's annointed Her leaders,

following the straight bowled knowledge from Tír
na Og, in the name of god and of the dead generations

from which we receive an aul tradition, land of eternal
youth, a mythical place existing on pages time forgot

the singular straight line, visible in a captioned image,
lives and will prove with nought but light and air,

no roman came and smashed the altars, but the native
men and women aways here. And so the transition from druid to fili and the bardic to soccer culture, was not a renty one of heart break and pain, but joyous, some say. In the dark ages, Ireland - renowned for being the beacon of light, hope peace - for peace light and hope, is nought but belief..

A four square canon of greats the rest of the globe may shake their head in bewilderment at. GB Shaw? Heaney? Doyle? And the others?

For all our faults, to give hope to others not resident here, we must do good things; be putting hope into the world.

The globe is full of men mongering doom, but none have a right to fix the boundary of another's intellect in the quest to stop our heart beating, cuisle, so declare the right of us to a belief in oursleves and control of our destiny.

None can make us believe a book is any good but our eyes alone; and of the best irish poets ever to have practiced, and who did so in the - now forgotten - bardic culture that existed for 1200 years, Gofraidh O Dalaigh is an arch ollamh, William Carleton the son of a seanachie, so read and believe a mind crossing can place de facto dictator at number one, any it wants.

gra agus siochain.