Bi-Polar Bob

In the beginning was Playschool and the World at War
Jackanory Happy Days, Swap Shop, Magpie, Tiswas

- with a more risqué group of grown ups -
and Spit, the fictional dog of
a comedian Bob has not met

although there was time
during a prolonged bout of Z cars

or was it Van de Valk?

Bob barely remembers
because he’s hooked to TV
Henry Winkler in a scuffles leather jacket
as the perfectly quoifered gentlemen
and utter dream to watch.

Happy days are yet to come
and Bob keeps detailed notes.

Fonz is in 70's sit-com, playing it
straight in welcome Back Cotter
as Bob; up to his eye-balls in schizophrenia
begins
his first upward swinging
bi-polar episode; composing a letter -

"Dear Mr Winkler
you do not know me and never will
unless you visit ward 11, the Vale hospital

where, in this gallery of corridors
and locked wards, I wish to connect with your prescence
via the telephone.

I will be unable to speak, due to an ongoing medical
condition which prevents me from doing so;
but I can be there, listening to you
silent, alone and willing you on, as the man of my dreams."

Not the Nine O’Clock news is on
- a comedy unknown to watchers
of war veterans
and seniors
sat behind desks -

Standing up just wasn’t on in the days
when news was more sombre.

SHOW THE BIZ

Tonight's the night
showbiz is coming
to take me away
and shoot me to the stars

Who's that in the corner?

Is it the head of Sony,
Decca,
Music for Pleasure

here to make my fantasy breathe
and become as real
as the stout swill
my foot has just stepped in?

And what about her?
The blonde just sat down on that couch
ferreting around
in a minimally chic otter-skin suitcase?

Is she fishing out a contract?
My pact with the devil?
I'll sign on the dotted line

as long as I'm made to feel wanted.

The Departed

In Martin Scorcese's latest hit movie with Leonardo Di Caprio, Mark Whalberg, Matt Damon, Ray Winstone, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Jack Nicholson playing Irish-American gangster Paul Costello - Jack gets to wear a range of hats and dark glasses as he swans about the Boston underworld being filmed in a soft light.

Slipping into his faithful psycho-joker persona, pensioner Jack kills, giggles and cusses with a stella ensemble of crooks and cop scumbags, two good men and a colleen police psychologist who slips between the sheets with both bent dick Damon and honest plod Di Caprio in this flick with a plot full of cops, toppings, choppings and sock-cookers swapping insults and banter as they chase each others tails in Scorcese's take on the Irish-American gangster myth.

Jack's kindly lit scenes occur in dark, deserted and dodgy areas. In abandoned industrial estates smoky bars and dim-lit alleyways Jack oozes his OAP allure of sheer unspeakablness to all within his orbit of violence, drugs, murder, conspiritors and a rat in his crew - in the form of undercover old bill Di Caprio.

But Jack too has his own man undercover. A goodfella in the shape of Matt Damon - his mole in the elite detective unit of Boston PD, who he’s been grooming for the role since childhood. The perfect way to keep one step ahead of local law enforcement as he goes about his business of crime and cocaine fuelled debauchery with young women in their full flush of human beauty. Well this is la la land

The cat and mouse plot moves with a pouncing pace as the charachters romp through quickly changing events acting at the top of their game, keeping us on our toes and guessing right up to the final twist.

So deep is Leo's undercover no one but Martin Sheen and Mark Whalberg know who he is and Whalberg is on red hot form as Mr nasty cop to his nice plod partner and boss Martin Sheen, hamming it up as the only one of two honest police officers in the picture, Di Caprio's character being the other one.

Ray Winston turns in his best performance yet in a yank accent - as second in command at gangster HQ and Nicholson's chief chopper, shooter and executioner of those who piss off crime king Costello, who runs his empire with the cunning of Michael Collins and the morals of a cartoon villian.

Scorcese set the precedent for screen-violence with his true story of mob supergrass Henry Hill in Goodfellas. A classic flick some claim is his best - certainly one of his finest - which reigned undisputed until the deliciously horrid imagination of Tarantino topped the king of seventies indie-realism with Pulp Fiction and redrew the rubicon for comic book banality on film.

Even the able - but usually pedestrian - Baldwin earns his paycheque and carries full thespian weight, with a decent performance of a detective who embodies the moral essence of Scorce's corrupt vision, where everyone's a huslter for cash or glory, and usually both.

This wheeels within wheels outing accurately reflects a brutal force spinning at the heart of the Irish condition. A place where verbal sport is the national art and the serendipties of life so unbelievable they're an invisible DNA in the ambience of a didlee dee reality too complex for most outside the culture to grasp.

Well worth watching.

Bardic Bulletin

I fought tonight at a front line of love - O'Connell Bridge - in the basement trench of the Westmoreland on Westmoreland Street and sought shelter with others wanting to sing so strongly of survival we left as one.

All are free to attend in any capacity they so desire, be it verbal artist setting the air ablaze with speech alone or a listener seeking to hear live poetry - in all its formatts and shades, from the downright dire to the most entertaining wafflers warbling in Ireland - dedicated and doing battle in our capacity as the soldier fighting for love.
at a front line where dreamers practice their public oral craft.

It's on every Tuesday and tonight was my fourth time back after an extended 10 month absence. The crucial fallow period in a part of one's poetic cycle in which the real and unconscious work is done by an annonyomous, absent voice - when all is undisturbed and the elements of chance and time work on silence in the environment where ghosts decide.

Gerry was there - as always - MC, heckler, stand up oral brawler, lover of the word and Dublin's premier abolotionist of the state subsidised wine and cheese brigade at national poetry HQ in the Iveagh Gardens.

The right to open one's gob and speak freely is the is the only one we share and Jo Jo was there with Birch, Fintan, Natasha, Jeremy, Mike and many others. It was a full house, much better than the first week when only four of us spoke.

Raven did a new one and is still number one in the absence of he who shall remain nameless, also absent tonight. Raven is from San Francisco and is Saul Williams stage partner whenever he's in Ireland. He holds his own with Saul and his performance sensibilty is second to no-one and when he speaks you listen enthralled. He is an old pro who cuts it live every time, almost. Tonight he was in the best form I'd witnessed for a few weeks and nailed a new one he wrote in the last few weeks.

Mike spoke of our contemporary poetic culture written in a verbal ink - with air on the stage to a sound of cheers and - by the end - jeers, giggles, wise cracks and bellylaughs.

Deep print crushing victory of making words echo ones inner feet treading its brew from humanity's turning cauldron of motion spinning upright bardic personae - some barred from the party for speaking of a stock jaded character routed to a truth in a million.

Come on down, all are welcome and I strongly advocate you attend as this venue will play host to the Leinster heats of the first All Ireland Live Poetry Championships in the early part of next year.

Would Brenton gum mug go boom to a one woman audience dancing her reflection as shades at the nemeton stir?

Let us dip under the polish glossed radar and blip them as we booogie in anima mundi. Go star in his mind and reverse its polarity with a bit of oogum boogum

~

throwing shapes on wet pavement outside the Mixer or Vinyl, six o'clock Sunday morning at an apple stall on Inverness Street in Camden, London.

Brenton the unsweating luurve god in de riguer poser mode and his electric posse from the ballroom, flared to thrill all and couffiered

poised on the inch between sinking or floating, perfection or failure
a film of lacquered grace.

SANDERSON BECK

I cycled along the coast from Sutton to Dublin. It was dark, around 1am and very windy, but I heard a tune out to sea, though it was so softly sounding and the wind so raw, that I could not sense where it was coming from. Maybe it was coming from Howth, 1500 or so meteres to my left over the sea. Maybe the wind was blowing it over from there from a session on the hillside. After a short while I began to suspect it was not originating from an outside reality, but from the otherworld - sirens out at sea communing, or the first glimpse of a blueprint delineating what score beyond human consciousness my soul is tuned by as it plays in this world.

I was hearing a tune - no doubt about it - and whilst the first two notes where always the same, after they sounded the tune played a few more - very swift notes - and then trailed off beyond the edge of hearing, but kept returning, never playing the same snatch of tune twice.

Once I passed Bull Island I sensed the force disappear and it only came again once more, twenty minutes later as I was moving out of a wind swept Dublin bay and into urban shelter - after I thought the episode had ceased - and I took it as the sigil for me to engage in the act of writing poetry from the source who sung to me in Sutton when wind and dark where one.

~

This is a found poem. I got the text from Sanderson Beck, who is a 59 year old peace activist advocating non-violence and love as humanity's only way. He has been in prison many times for campaigning against war and murder, most recently in 2003 after speaking out on Bush's war. In March 2003 Sanderson was arrested whilst advocating love and peace outside Vandenberg AFB, where they were using computers and the space command system to direct the shock-and-awe attacks on Iraq.

His writings cover the full span of human history and his knowledge is vast. The perfect library in which to learn accurate information focussed and aware of how it all fits together. A real life saint amongst us now, whose life has been nought but promoting goodness and learning of the wider human relevence and spiritual love .

FOUND POEM - SANDERSON BECK


Zenophan said Pythagoras stopped
the whipping of a puppy because he

recognised the soul of a friend in
metempsychosis

is not a self-proclaimed wise man
but one who pursued wisdom

through friendship. A philosopher
with knowledge of

Egyptian - Chaldean - Magi
and their spiritual secrets.

My constitution in
the Italian city of Sybaris taught

immortal mystery - understood in
souls returning til harmonious peace

is all they construct. That art won
number is the universe's law and

unity the law of God.

~

Plato's three component psyche of
appetite, emotion and mind

trace to Pythagoras's wisdom
through friendship

(philia means freindship - sophia
wisdom)

and a spectator seeking truth
has the best role in life's game

~

Diogenes Laertius when put up for
sale as a slave - cried for someone

wanting to purchase a master for
themselves and Socrates addressing
Pythagoras
said

"Don't stir the fire with a knife
the passions and swelling pride of the

great or step over the beam of a balance."

~

Philo heard

"If the soul is diverted from its course
it enslaves itself and makes whose soul

it is a slave to a host of masters."

~

Did Diogenes love of goodness
transcend his fear of death or think

Euclides colic - Plato a bore, Dionysian
performance a peep show for fools and

that the bad - even if prosperous - still
live badly?

~

Zeno - godfather stoic - taught while
pacing back and forth in a collanade

stoa is porch and

"A friend is another I" he said.

~

Senneca was a Quaestor in the reign
of Tiberius and Caligula - jealous of

his oratory - tried to kill him, but
Claudius banned him instead until he

was recalled from Corsica by Empress
Agrippina - tutored Nero, appointed

Paetor - got rich and counselled

"No matter how many you slay, you can't
kill your successor."

Senneca commited suicide at 65 -
believed love and fear do not mix

"live for the other person if we wish to
live for ourselves and no-one can strike

terror into others and still enjoy peace
of mind."

~

Climb the hill of understandinbg
walk easy with learning - study forward

and back - for friendship between the gods
and the good exist and the primal source

of all mind is spirit.

"Vanquish ignorance with good sense,
gain freedom from slavery and the gift of
ruling well."

Diogenes said


~

Dio Chrysostum the sophist was loved by
Emperor Trajan

"..as himself though I do not understand
what he says."

~

All sound a tune unique to them
and a whistle plays within
the gift of hearing how to play it.

SANDERSON BECK

TRACKMARKS

Trackmarks
Linear stigmata of addiction
Tomorrow's scar tissue constellations
disfiguring the body of work
Phonetic glyphs
of abstract correspondence
Their outlines traced in blood
Shrinking from the spike
or splattering across the page
A ring a ring o' rosies
Moments when the final things are said
Exposed in a brutal waterslap of clarity
In the coupling of the sinful
and the divine
There's a fine line to be crossed
Sequences of discrete
but regular consummation
inter-penetrating the punctured bodies
with the syrup poison
of transgressive desire
Wasping decorations
Fading in time from some
Long lost personal campaign
Along cablestitch flesh
Lesions where the world
has entered us
These tender spots
Rubbed by unconscious gesture
Til they stand chafed and pert
Prized in their shame
Less they scab over
With our ability to be touched
Behind the scenes of the crazy ward
in all cried out lucidity
Doubting Doctor Thomas
Pressing our wounds
in the chemical light of analysis
The marking on our skins
The words we choose to speak
The nettle of awareness we nurse
Haphazard paths through the wilderness
Creasing the undergrowth with bruised stalks
Discernible only by the spoor
of some animal long passed
Tiny clues to unknowable awareness
Patterned sigils in the drying clay
Trackmarks

MARK MADDEN

TRACKMARKS

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.

~

Untitled

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

PATRICK kAVANGH CELEBRATION - 2006

There is an old saying here, along the lines that "it's through the shelter of each other we survive..."

...the we

~

heard above on Fodhla, Banbhu and Eiru's shore. Look them up. They're real dealers in a genuine craic factory cum casino. Making it happen on demand in their home where live poetry is living. They come from all nations and have the combined passions of a big apple, Birmingham, Alabama, Clint Frank - saw by KFK "...score four touchdowns in less than two quarters, against a pretty good Princeton team." Playing ball in Boston College. An alumnae of Cardiff dockers at punch up in a pub with Leeds miners

and Manchester's Arsenal
supporters. Hear Celtic 'n Rangers -
Giants 'n Redsox, Yankee stadium 'n

LA Hells Angels singing in the
Sydney opera house Newcastle,
Belfast or Liverpool Empire with U

two. United to roll our sound of
sheer reality. An all-inclusive one.

~

Dublin. Friday 1 September.

Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2006 - Fleet Street - above the Palace Bar.

Second year. A lot of hype. Photographer in attendance. 5' 5" tanned and toned 'n with a fella. A fellow photographer, upstairs in the Palace by accident. Lulled in off the street by our night's energy. Arty beyond belief. In Dublin myth happens. This home of dream. Joyce 'n Beckett - Wilde 'n Shaw. Freud said the Irish were un-analysable because life to them was just story, tale and talk. These four Dublin writers nailed spoken word to page with a true ring. Snapped "the passionate and transitory" reality from which we draw for poetry and fictions on the page. Shut the books up and speak our print to live in ear and off the page.

~

Druid Paddy. Dominic Taylor. The White House. Limerick pub hosting weekly poetry Wednesday night. Broadcast in CD quality, online several days later. The world's very first one. Stunned us to silence with only two of his works. One, a love poem to his wife. Humble and honest and a true spirit of Munster. SW Ireland. Rugby. Limerick. Thomond Park - 31 October 1978 - Munster 12 - All Blacks 0. Incineration ground. An event for the plot of John Breen's global smash hit play - Alone it Stands. Humanity as one unbeaten at home in the European cup for well over a decade. Utter fanatics.

Dublin. May 2006 - Lansdowne Road. Munster V Leinster semi-final of the 2006 European Cup. A unique game of Rugby. Immediately fabled into an all time classic. Munster fans sung Low lie the fields of Athenry through electric megaphones. No Shit.

A proud steward and Leinster fan tried to fix a withery stare upon the main Munster man singing into his megaphone, leading a gaggle of war-painted bodran players. 20 in the heart of the hardest of hardcore support. Upper stand V. North end of the East stand. Munster fan's are 110% unaware or caring of the Leinster stewards desire for less enthusiasm at sporting events. Munster's passion seized me and we hollered at full cry. A joy to watch. Munster. Michael Collins. Keano. Play to win.

~

Higgins - O hUgin is a premier name in Bardic literature, particularly in the West. Sligo, Clare, Galway. Kevin Higgins is a class act. Leader of the pack. Total poetry, direct and without apology. Life’s knowing wink of intimacy in immediate connection. One main force for good in Connacht. The wild west of Ireland. Atlantic crashing home after its three thousand mile run. Mayo beating Dublin for the first time in 100 years, at this years All Ireland Football semi final at Croker. 80,000. Sheer mesmeric nature. He does not wilt beneath the flame. The real thing and man for a crisis, with an unflappable poetic sensibility Remember the Artic Monkeys? Beatles? All the cool bands you dreamt of being into at the start?

Nor Ulster man Mark Madden, who has made it happen as a poetry organiser in both Copenhagen and Vancouver. Total commitment to live poetry. Owner of the Arcadia Coffee House Belfast. Have you experienced Gearoid MacLochlainn on fire yet? Mark's red hotness gushes from the same source. Weekly live performance and desire, to horrify straights with sheer talent and total commitment. Forget the idea of poetry being a lonely wandering, on a cloud above an unconnecting audience. Saying how wonderful the entertainmnet was when all were bored shitless. Bluffers beware.

Have a Gander

~

Making it happen. Aint seen nowt like it. His life is write and recite. Now. As we blather. At the Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2006 on Friday night. Mark swinging from a stair platform at the Palace Bar in Fleet Street Dublin. His posession beneath the glow on our warm inclusive stage, plugged us all in as one mad zapped bunch of pure class poetry lovers. Mark Madden was completely electric, as were many others lashing out art and living poetry to life from 7.00 - 10.30pm.

~

Glenn Gannon. Son of a sixth generation Dublin flower seller climbing Kilamanjaro for charity. Yeah, that’s right. Venturing up a mountain. One man and a dream so insane and positive it was just meant to be. Reading from his award winning autobiographical short story My own Isolde. Just one of the stars who shone there.

Andrew Clark, a flute player working on the front line with bandaged fingers and who sung one of his own ballads, which welded all there in a oneness rarely experienced at most gigs of poesy. No shit.

~

The ballad's central protaganist was Balor - a one-eyed god of myth his eye a laser gun eye, killed by Lugh, who is the sun deity of the Tuatha de Dannan, who came and did the talking here around 1500'ish BC. Vanquished by the Sons of Mil. Milesians. The final wave of mythical invaders to appear and reality as we prove it begun.


~

Terry Cosgrave said he was there as a poet, only in the sense of a Latin American country boasting the most ratio of poets to population on earth, 100%. It's the law that all citizens of the state are poets, until proved otherwise. Like here.

~

Razoring up a throng to enthrallment with his magic, was Mark Granier. Tales and gags in adundance. Sinking bullseye ‘n urban reality with a feline one liner slinkiness and smootherity, all there tittered in as one.

This was raw and amazingly live poetry. We grains containing galaxies of void and light thermaled there last Friday. Spells were cast and launched at the centre darling in lar, so say coz we're all feeling it now my toys. We all whirled away in mythic contemplation of how life's blueprint letters in the roll. Rock me not to torpor, for I am at home in a space station orbiting earth. Now. At this mo - so stop, in the name of love. What more in the nameless surrender of we folk and tiddlers, toddlers and teasers weakening a bond with the local community watch tower concentrating energies and monitoring what moves.

~

We gave a serious account of ourselves. I was at the door ushering in gob-smacked normal people, unable almost to believe reality beckoning from our stage.

The crammed venue physically forced a spotlight of corner to occur. A speakers corner of full inclusion. This is why the night was a success. Because all were treated equally. Everyone got their moment in a spotlight, however humble they be. PJ Brady made sure of that. PJ played Kavanagh for twenty years in a one man show. Played him on his hundreth birthday in the church at Innnerskeen, Monaghan. Cavan man Patrick Brady from a few miles down the road - playing Patrick Kavanagh on his centenary day, just yards from the grave.

The Heart Laid Bare was the play. The monologue culled from Kavanagah's own poetry and prose. A reconstruction. As close to the horses mouth as can be. Kavanagh came onstage that night, and on Friday. PJ

"Are there any here who have not spoken and wish to do so? Please come, share from the stage. This is what the event is all about. To show reality. Give a platform to the dis-possessed. Folk who feel and love. All of us."

~

Poetry happened.

~

The butterfly and hawk eye of logic wrestled accident. WB dropping muffin forks, tea cosies and a goldfish bowl upon the floor of Lissadel in summer. Window open and a giraffe shaped tree draping its branches either side of the two doors. Like a tucked swan-wing.

Patrick Finnegan, like Kevin and Rita Higgins, a superb Galway poet, but unlike them, not in the first flush of manhood - with a fair few knocks along his way, but still a legend for those lucky enough to hear his work. He sounded a mesmerising poem and gifted his huge live talent to give all there a fair jolt. Literally in gasp at Paddy.

~

I have been going mad alone here in front of my screen Gloria Jenkinson from flat seven 306 Fleet street London, circa Scottssboro maiden.

Come fly with me. Bring an apple flower scented with a Du Luc full bottle region, where we spent a winter wrapped in one another's arms. The whirlwind approaching did not ruffle us. Curled coiled critical of only the cold and uninviting tenderness of a seven day holiday and work-break in Bayside.

~

We had harpist Brenda Molloy and mandolin legend Sean Og dipping in and out of the mix with the perfect timing of one whose life is nought but sound. Music, poetry and song in the Palace, whisked to life and literature by poesy's vibe and Kavanagah's spirit alone


~

Under the tunnel sheltering from a whirlwind.
No doubt it will happen one day if you come again my sweetest of Scottsboro roses, scenting Alabama in white cotten. It may well be much cooler when you touch down this time. Fleece are needed. A warm jacket, hat and gloves to fully prepare for what happens in the day.

~

Now are the last days of summer.

UTwo

You too

love in print. Desire. Speak. Affirm reality and myth, hear
"One" in the music of what happens. Thermal reality.

Earth and the Unforgettable Fire. All nought but a good sun,
warm, dry, wet and never cold. Nirvana.

You too.

~

All because of you who move in mysterious ways. Gloria.
Even better than the real thing, believing life returns

when we breathe no more and pass to shade. You be loving
first fan

companion letter. Me and you two'ish proof that in print life
is nought but confusion, sh! Listen, knowing-ones rattle and hum
sound.....

~

ing.


"All along the watchtower.....All I want is you." Too
logical a signature from an artist of sound

believing music is a gift bestowed by a good -
Sun-Faced-Bono-Ogma.

Ogma?

~

I am he. God of sound - music in Irish myth.... Group?
Tuatha De Dannan - pronounced two-a-haw-day-donon.

On the land?.... 300 years, circa 1500'ish BC.
Knowing-ones. Know about sound. Spells. Do magic

in language. Change physical shape with words
alone.
The Sons of Mil? Orphan's. Invaders from the sea who
came and seized power -

circa 1000-500'sh BC...Vanquished then banished TDD under-
ground. My clan - now faery or wee folk. Sons of Mil? Fifth
and final

"wave of of invaders." I taught them to write in Ireland from 5C on. First
recorders of her civil law, written as myth "happened." Fresh from

memory onto pages time forgot. Fact.

~

I, me, we, Ogma - call me what you will - plays a simple 3 string
instrument of magic. Each sound has the same effect on all listeners.

Sound from String one. Listener feels joy and only love. Boogie.

Travolta happens; action, natures force, dancing to Jacko. Off the
Wall. Thriller. Springsteen at Superdome; Lansdowne or Croker,
deadly.


String two. Utter sorrow; terminal misery, zero jiggy - torpor
of all time; the sound for suicide. Ballymun flats 100 feet up,
jump.

Pluck three? Lull all to slumber with this note, strain - string
call them what you will. I sound reality.

~


My trained-noise-workers had a thousand years in print.
Before that we were druids. Made magic with voice only. No ink.

Filidh. Plural of ,fili or "poets", who scribbled an unbroken path for
centuries, until the 17'th
collapsed society abruptly and we stopped for a hiatus or caesura

~

We paused. Scorched earth forced us to flee and surrender beneath my

~

wave when a take-over bid with lots of teething troubles kicked in
and we lost generations, as Penal law replaced the code. 100%. We

became outlaws at home when a stroke of the quill on a bill made it
illegal to speak in gaeilge. Our native tongue. A simple contract

written in plain English for subjects, unable to speak it. What about
Status Quo?
Only on paper; making a show with no native fans in attendance, happen.

Anglo had to import his own. Plants. We were driven mental by a support
act's demand for top billing on our stage. Anglo, ceaselessly plucking my
string of woe.

"Subjects" begging monarchy to stop. Calling for "play-fair" and the
return of ourbono life. Ogma to stop the misery

chord. Noise joy; in the uninterrupted status quo of a good
reality conjured from myth Anglo made illegal. No shit.

~
All Because of You

Monday - Mount Temple School notice board, Larry puts it up.
Saturday - September '75. Seven kids in Mullen's kitchen. There
about the ad.

-1985 - four onstage at Wembley. Live Aid. "I have climbed the highest
mountain, I have run through the field.."..from the dressing room,
through the wings

only to be with you. Up the scaffold. Silent; hugging a world
who came that day. Larry wasn't happy. He thought of walking off

stage. He wanted to play; for me to sing. Let the planet hear Gloria
"in the name of love.."... Party Girl. I Will Follow. Us. U2; who
happen

at Landsdowne Road, Ballsbridge, Yankee Stadium, Redrock - latest hit
from the catalogue. Mid-eighties. Miami. Crocket and Tubbs undercover

in a speedboat. Don in white linen. Wham at the height of their power
Bowie and Jagger "dancing in the street" - Phil Collins to Boston by
concorde.

~

Peter and Ivan only lasted two weeks after first rehearsal;
or was it a month?
Dick's brother - Dave - who happens from the platform - Edge

happened in the core that July weekend. He too is part
practice; life, creation; call it what you will, Larry.

Love deposit here; immediately, please. "It's a beautiful
day.."

~

drop beneath my wave, stay addicted to faith
sound the magic. We’re all - word for word - as

good when spoken simple, direct and kind.

Sincerely Yours

~

Julie Andrews and U
2 on top of Howth hill.

Over and out for now; lover, letter-in-law. Go beneath

~

break feet and walk with St Paul and I. Mind that bag
of mint imperials; or are they the oil-rig toffee Jackie

Stewart "doodle doo"d about; in the pit-stop on
Saturday Grandstand, or was it Tiswas?

~

Mirror-mirror on Arthur Scargill's wall, make Art fairest
of them all.

Answer in song; if Arthur was "...in a
hotel room in New York City, round about the time a

friend of ours, er - Little Steven - was putting together a
record of Artists Against Apartheid..."

~

..or at the miners conference in Scarborough at a Wheels
of Steel disco? Rod Stewart on the karaoke? "Wake up Maggie

I think I 've got something to say to you...". Hollering for
fights
benefit night at the train station, Doncaster branch;

or was it Maddison Square Garden, Art sung "..about a
man in a shantytown outside of Johannesburg, who is

sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa.
A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up

arms against his oppressor. A man who has lost faith in
the peacemakers of the West, who argue and fail to

~

support a man like Bishop Tutu and his request for
economic sanctions against South Africa."

Arthur was heard - at his bungalow in Scunthorpe, for tea
and a Sarnie. Chicken in a basket later that night, when

he starred on the picket line with Billy Bragg,
demanding a bitta wedge. It was only a quid.

"Am I buggin' you? I don't mean to bug ya..."

or was it a tenner?


~

28 JUNE - 05 - UNFORGETTABLE

Dublin dusk; getting together, darkness imminent
at the canal.

"OK edge.. (David Evans)..play the blues."

~

The Edge's sound; music, what "happens," call it what
you will Larry and Adam

is "a preacher stealing hearts at a travelling
show;" hinting of an apocolypse..now, in the air

at Phibsboro. Croke Park. Croker. 80,000. Monday
outside the ground.
A full house. Pride. "This song is not a rebel song,

this song is...the news today; I can't close my eyes
and make it... New Years Day. Not one a dud. Totally

amazing; or was it, flat? Not happening? No, no it was
the night love came to town, leapt around the stage in

crepe-lifts and transported them through a prism of love
to Van Diemens land - where the streets have no name

and raised a silver lidded keyboard, in the snooker hall
on Camden Street; where dolls hang out, sniffing my talent.

~

I forget her face; pale, refracting daylight through the
candle we lit to commemorate the B52's, Vietnam, Ned

Kelly and Wham, or was it Wigan with Culture Club supporting?
He does not keep loaves and fishes in a fridge near Killiney

Boy George does not go the Forty-Foot, New York, Red Rock.
In Benidorm He is incognito, in shades and baseball cap

under the blood red sky of Alicante; at a water park, Bono
John Lennon - Helter-Skelter - telling Bono go back to

the top of the slide Then you stop and you turn and you go for
a ride Then you get to the bottom, then you.. see me again.

~

See?
The Beatles

Bono and you too want me to love again. Hear September daylight, cool
breeze at Sandycove. A dream to be the free man "who come in the name
of.." Bono

Love. Touch the ground where JFK, his brother Bobby and Gaybo spoke
"Mrs Byrne got diamond eyes.....what more in the name of.."

..JFK, mobbed from New Ross to Phoenix Park in '62. The Late Late
live. Gaybo; in the ruck, squeezing to get near. Have you read

Gaybo's autobiography Marilyn Monroe? Read behind the lines or
tossed off some to Clarke Gable, Ralph, Larry Lamb, Olivier
Elton or

~

Lord John. In the Hyannis Port compound? Sixties. Bee Gees,
Massachusetts, Miles Davis and John Coltrane at the Mixer. Down

to the marina in shorts and a kagool. Picnics, on the beach. Swim.
Ball games; sandwiches, find unrehearsable, love

"All I want is you,"

and two cans of gargle?

~

Or was it ten, that night at Croker by the canal Gloria. Beautiful
Day. One. The one that goes on and on. The White Album

Abbey Road. Regents Park. Zoo TV. Tourists take pictures of the zebra
crossing. It's pissing down; Shaune Ryder's no smack.

Sir Bob - "One" is on the radio, sing

"I don't like Mondays"

~

Bono.

gives and is as all should be. Ogma the good god is the one you
want to be

Peace upon you too; balance of grain containing galaxies of
void and light, guide me to the music of what happens, please
be good.

Happy Monday's, here to happen.
Bono

~

Sir

~

my servant
awaiting a cipher to number for a modest sum, "did you

come here for forgiveness; did you come to raise the dead,
did you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head"

and plagiarise? Poesy's Page - arise Larry; Bono, Adam, the Edge
and please.

You too?

~

or is it U2?

I know

~

Edge is not the Bono and Bono not the Edge. Adam is not Larry or he
Adam Ant.
Larry made it happen. He put the note up; I accept Mullen is

nothing without me, or me him. Only voice, gifted lyrics, Ogma's
word

~

Sound.

Enconium for John by Mahon and Cronin

Dear Reader

The piece below is from a few weeks back. A blip in technicals means my current stuff's moved href="http://www.trampdiary.blogspot.com">here

Monday - Church - 7pm

God of speech Anthony Cronin joined with literate deity Derek Mahon in a prime piece of church property (built in two years at a cost of £5000 and opened for worship on Sunday 14 June 1863).

To make John Betjeman speak on Monday evening? I hear you say?

Off course
those dividing iambics which tick bombs of opinion to explode on-screen in various free-of-all-verse forums throughout cyberworld,

were given an hour long airing;
fifteen minutes after I arrived on foot and realised my destination was a compact walk-up prayer-hall on the SW corner of Stephen’s Green, and outside whose doors a trail of suits assembling in obvious number, witnessed a man unseen for some months in such ratio.

~

When Cronin comes to work it's a full house of gossip lovers who relish the real thing,

and Deggsy’s global reputation mixed with Tony’s gags meant many came early to guarantee a spot at the lock-in.

~

Both A list repositories of their nation's poetic lore;

one of whom staggered ducked and dived round Dublin,
London and Paris with literary legends in the first swill

of his manhood, 20 years before many senior
warblers were anonymous newbies learning to rope
poet's at the Palace Bar.

~

A frisson of potential exclusion briefly fused through the thickening queue of punters on the pavement below the large gothic stone portal with doors designed to withstand a battering-ram,

due to abruptly shut when evening prayer began,
so I thanked creation for guiding me to exit my flop hutch of composition 10 minutes quicker than when non-gods appear in more quotidian and emptier space.

~

A liminal flux was palpable during the 30 seconds in the go-slow bottle-neck I mistook for a dash to basement seats

and breathing a sigh of relief as I left the patient and orderly autograph mad punters entering their names in a visitors book

peeled off from the queue to a stage
where Ogma's word moved through two who connect

with the last rites of Greg's beatification at the gobs of Chris and Mick in the Surgeons,

as so many so desperate to attend a reading
I'd not witnessed since then

John Betejeman
- massively popular poet and hack's ghost
emanating an odour of iambic ectoplasm I whiffed when a plural god kicked off behind a pillar blocking my view.

The perfect position to leave with no fuss, should boredem call or a need for the jacks.

~

Cronin is an icon whose fantastically long poetical pedigree and orbits are unique, varied and have accessed all ear and tongue from Taoiseach to tramp. On a generational scale Seamus is to Anthony as Cronin to Betjeman.

But whereas John B’s gift -of/mak/ing/verse-cause/un/ease- is underrated by those who do not work in this form and can not write in regular iambic for toffee, Tone C's prose equivalent ability is conjuring up cut-glass barbs of
ice
windy intellectuals blow in fear of

a talented cypher cutting their quill.


~

Cronin and Mahon are not legends in the first flush of youth like Aisle 16 or the thick crop of bruisers on net-boards new talent writes on, so vive voce was never a backable odd in a religious space built for a few hundred.

On an international stage Dek's poems are read and Tone by comparison is unknown; but his influence here is instantly audible for all who witness this remarkably real-life conduit offering poetical insight for all; whoever they are and however they write

and although he got lost in a line or three, his sound of sheer sincerity and acceptance when collapsing mid-stumble served to convey only extra layers of vocal poignancy on a day whose celebratory depth of meaning filtered through loud-speakers to even the most cynical of butt-parkers crammed on the pews avid and rapt listening for myth being lured to life from seven pm.


This hot bed of tolerance was a congregation of all ages, from geriatrics down; there for a service from two maestros speaking John’s word at a temple,
whose art I heard Ogma invoke in an hour long enconium.

~

Just hearing them both blowing breath was instruction enough; and with Tone in arch-poet mode to a faster younger understudy doing it straight

John Betjeman spoke to me through Mahon and Cronin, the octogenarian colleague whose speech god gifts a laboriously acquired form few write in

but plenty who do not, or will not

dismiss and
misunderstand
as they cannot

find faith or write verse
in the hard won line drawn
from John's page lots don't write
of or on.

~

So
tell me what ratio
of silence to sound

will burst a poem
and lash out your sense
in my world

"I betcha da moan
and not laugh with a metrical system
second to none and unknown to"

John
the middle man of English verse who seems
so tame

when he does not bluff but
presents a logical system of
ratio.

_______________________

Disable this BBCode

notify me to post off
and syphon your mind
in his signature style,
smile and

profile attached to a
public 'n iambic view of
life on a train from
Tufnell Park station
moving through Highgate and
Haringey

to woodland, heather and a
hearthland on heath near
an ocean our two
feet dip in and
out of at will.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

Hi to all the people I am trying to get invites off. Mary my sister painted this and I would be very grateful for any assistancce you can give me in coming to your event. I need a pretty quick reply as I have to give at least six weeks notice. Thank you very much.

WHAT A DAY

TONY AND GEORGE

Monsters trapped in human bodies jostle
war with world peace and un-tether your song
of hollow moral concepts swaddled
in a bright cloth of defunct language gone
daft in the spirit of this modern age.
Neo classic pillars of abstraction
with your artless blather of throwaway
lines, sow fear with the proliferation
of words like right punishment, vengence and
retribution. Bruiser gods raining word
shells upon our consciousness, blow minds bland
and sanitise banality to purge
your hearts of accountability when
debates cease and the naked dead return
your dividend of talk in crisp cold flesh
packaged in body bags and draped in the flags
you have hijacked. Come, hoodwink citizens,
lead them to believe your cause is just and
unrelated to commerce or cash black
gold below the surface of desert lands.

Haiku

Let the mask slip and
see the goddess of your mind's
mirror reflecting

~

Written rules of life
in true poems no eye can
dismiss or reject

~

Just like the sequin fella with coulouring felts who uses public consciousness as a canvas to re-draft and re-draft until the instinctively mathmatical backwash is freed from wrong computation and the last post radically different, in syntax, smoothed to an ungrabbable ergonomic.

Is that a word? Have a butchers. Lets talk of the afterlife and those navel gazers caressing the seeds of time free druid pawns and playthings of love-mating irregularities under the thumb of t'other half, tell of in tales of Tony at chequers and Marlon starring in a Hotton pub.

What plots and intriques on the dark bank of Acheron when we cross with our oblos eagerly thrust to the boatman.

Shall we talk of the dead?

~

Sunset strips filter through window slats
edging across a bone white wall

and beech wood floor with mole knots
dotting the faded grain.

As dusk draws darkness in
peeling back the pith of light

opaque forms appear in pale shadows
and cast a chill spell in the night air.

A ghostly clan seeping from the
otherworld through pictures on brick
visit the room

filling the hours before dawn with an aroma
of spirits, spectres and long silent ancestors.

Their fuse of flesh life lit and left as
a pyramid of past we’ve no cognisance of

is the human history of reality chaining our
existence to an unfathomable entity.

A void of unconsciousness
no man or woman will speak of until they
speak no more.

~

Love you all more in the otherworld.

Vicki Feaver - Guardian Poetry Workshop Siren

The monthly Guardian Newspapaer poetry workshop is very prestigious.

~

To hygienically stick your mental jizz in the bonces of the bores on that board, be skill-less and tick boxes in one of the numerous contemporary dot to dot career manuals lost minded rhyme-smiths and fully homogenized poets of the lyrically pedestrian unfunny line swear by, for inspirational instruction.

Randomly add a pick 'n mix content of your colour-in influences, then order (un-mangled) a syntax by numbers in dum-de-dumbed down, dim mind-numbing "I am"s, whose relevance can be immediately read as an example of the school whose one compositional method produces oeuvres instantly appraised by the oolamhs we imitate in our poems, original and interesting or cack-handed crap.

~

I posted a recognisably simple fledgling piece to Vicki Feaver, flapped it in past the midnight deadline of July 31. Sent because I desired to swipe for myself her visible poetic gift, coolly exuding from a highly professional online portrait. From this picture I deciphered her crackable psychological code, which the remote power she yearns to encounter when scribing her speech, revealed to me through a working method Amergin supposedly spoke and wrote of over ten centuries ago when Celtic rhyming was a craft akin to quantum mechanics; harnessing electricity an ungraspable concept and television's logic, a magic whose truth only extraterrestrial gods could blueprint.

Audience unable to believe what you are reading, see

the de rigueur smoulder of her stark, no-nonsense, full frontal mug-shot in natural black and white, like some still life sixties siren slipping into a post office on pension day. Gasp as the massively frozen ability behind her straight lipped chilled out stare overpowers you with OTT visual audacity and cold raw talent; oozing from her unashamedly age loving face, framed by a superbly creative hairdo, nestling next to what looks like leaves; themselves appearing to burst with vitality merely by basking in the nearness of such an unadulterated aura of pure “Vicki” vibe, fissured to nuke your post-modern mental motor when gawping at her poetess head-shot.

When my eyes first fell upon that light-generated representation of her physical form, I became instantly impelled to toss her a hand of thin-line free-verse, written last year during late spring when composing a draft idea for a bird sketch, as I stood waiting at the railings of Russell Square one Saturday morning in May, at 3am. A love god called Aonghus came and deposited a sustainable splodge of lingo jizz my mind then propagated to the finished poetic thought-flash of words my muttering mouth formed as a mechanical pencil wrought along the page doing its thing.

~

Two months ago I sent a ghost poem to the editor whose inaccurate spelling accidentally lobotomised the hard-drive of her mind and re-configured her inner pen to automatically craft bland-on-demand dribble she’ll leak when asked to come 'n hack for the rags.

As you may not know, I have an otherworldly nodal-implant harvesting the mental technology our scribble through time programmes, and was hoping to impress Esther with my universally unique state-of-the-art hardware, which has an unlimited capacity for telepathic upload.

I was serial-stalker keen for an online relationship to occur, but alas, her system allows only wrong-word psychological software now, as all the poetic bits from her brain were removed, which, due to an IQ down-grade in the subconscious section of her grey-matter-motherboard, I now possess.

Unfortunately, Esther is a black-hole of poesy at the mo and won’t be capable of running up goods from her gob for the foreseeable future. She is in desperate need of any verse-cells from those with a spare poetic intelligence, who can help correct the cock up via the medium of reading this text.

Make sure she's topped up to her previous capacity by sending your unwanted language skill to her non working areas at the earliest opportunity. Until she’s re-booted, all her opinions remain obsolete and have been safely debunked by a knowing one at the edge of life's barricade.
~

Feeling somewhat glum at my blunder which inadvertently deprived Morgan of her talent, I fell into a mild depression, significantly deepened when the net-negative benefit of her poetic transplant became apparent - and after drinking heavily for the several days I spent alone in the attic foolishly gazing at a 10 foot blow up of Ed's face, extorted from a terrified trainee at Supersnaps - I came to mistakenly believe that the one constant my life lacked in the upswing of its manic state, was a textual relationship with Jane Duran.

This was because I misconstrued the instruction of my Devine Emanation Council operative who oversees the recruitment of human beings, like me, who work for their various business organizations, trading and trailing a blaze in telepathic communication markets throughout the galaxy. My psychotic state, coupled with the chemically altered parameters of my consciousness, meant I imagined Alan - a middle-ages Moorish instructor who bashed out Yeats’s wife's automatic blather - instructed me to jerk some hip 'n savvy electric text her way. But I mistook the message when under the influence of a 2 litre torpedo of 9% ABV scrumpy, and his actual advice was -

"Don't bother. You've no chance of scoring. She needs a full re-bore which may fail and render her an unworkable write-off."

~

Such is the state of my mind, it is constantly hallucinating a group of composite Guardian poets having continual inconsequential coma-thons; the most immortally minded egos engaged in terminally dull intercourse with a cultural void and textually insatiable artist who was the banal verbal star of a spectacularly unexciting group borgey at "Dim Slob" Loink Oxley’s funless depression festival in a North London cellar last November.

Gushing forth from lip 'n nib that forgettable winter night, was Jean MacMillan, boring all within earshot to slumber with her pointless genius for putting people to sleep whilst extemporising nursery rhymes and simultaneously remaining cognizant of seven different conversations, occurring in the filthy and fully equipped dungeon hot tub during that comatose night of non-stop torpor.

As Jean held court in the centre of the whirlpool she told the ghost of Edward Hughes to remove a jester's hat from Laurence, Hardy, Hemmingway or Auden's oeuvre, for her to wear in the joke-free Jacuzzi. A hat, of course, was semblanced from Pam Ayres' daft heyday and Jeans plainly crafted art and Barnsley wit regaled us unconscious once again until we woke and weirdly found she’d morphed into a fascinating she-male character whose talk no longer bored us but explored the boundaries of earthly existence.

S/he said telepathy's just mental adventuring into the unknown, and as s/he told us of what comes when we dare surrender blindly to the word by instinctively stepping into a circle of faith reserved for us alone, an unknown poet in the corner conjured up Ogma, a word-deity meaning the good god none there had heard of till that night, who enlightened us with the hardcore uncut logic of creation as s/he fell silent and Ogma spoke -



"Oh all ye genuine thinkers who flap language revealing the methods your muse revels in during the joy gushing forth speech, come surf to my one stop language shack stocking genres from Langpo to metrical verse. On offer - verbal compatriots - is free and safe lunacy top ups with every fibre spent believing..." -

~

...it will be fun to compose as many poems on this board as we can when the next Guardian bore appears offering us their insights into and examples of poems.

Basically have a group writing session where we e mail our efforts to whichever personality poet's mug-shot is pasted up on the least wanted page; not written with a view to submit them, but to generate material we may send in subject to our desire to gift in stuff anytime up till the deadline. I will send my efforts in to whoever's picture pops up next.

It's just a thought I want to warm you with, as this place could do with a bit of group action and effort for the mutual poetic benefit of all who will chance to give online writing exercises a go. The concept of failure or loss is factored out, I sincerely believe, when groups genuinely engage in a joint artistic enterprise of this nature.

I sent the poem below in with I LOVE YOU VICKI in the subject field and this pre-amble

Hi Vicki

Please forgive me for being late with my work, but I was seized last night by several drunken transvestites who wanted to dress me up and shoot me in an outfit which may have meant I've made it onto page seven of the Big Issue. Out of fashion section. A pastel number which really accentuates the line of my arms and waist, in such a way which doesn't draw attention to the fact that I am 27 stone of sheer flab.

I was also high on heroin and crack cocaine after being abducted at straw-point by a number of christian milkshake enthusiasts who got a bit carried away when they saw me waving me Wotsits at two very well known nonentities I will not mention here, but who have been saying untalented things about online dominoes.


This confident dice I currently seer falls favourably. It is steered by an accurate eye and makes straight aimed throws cast at the intellect’s bullseye in a tossed offering adhering to the creature ethos of your online poetry workshop. Verse-truth pervades where words lie folding in dreams blown real by breaths of imaginary air Vicki


LATE MAY DAY

A fluttering
above
in the skin
soft slither thin
leaves of a
beech tree

alerts her to
a bird in the
branches
over-hanging
an oak bench.

A grey
feathered fledgling
awkwardly flaps
falling to the pitted
tarmac and nestles

its downy breast
against a coping
stone border of
the oval green. A
cricket match ends

as the birds first
flight from its nest
into the unknown
traffic of a new
world view

begins. The creature
takes its bearings
from earth level

and looking into
the depths and
complexity of
existence

anchors an
eyeline securely
on the confusion
life's nexus of
glimpses distills

across the freshly
stretched backdrop
of a silent dumb sky

offering no
foothold of slender
wood poles with
which she can measure
her ascent through
understanding

up to God's hand.

Basement George

He knocked at two am; a light rap on the grey door accompanied by an incoherent voice strung out on cocaine, mumbling a request to

- open the door; let’s talk. -

This was the first time George had made a personal call or crossed the hitherto strictly amicable and neighbourly divide Ray had expounded so much mental effort on attempting to create, with diffident nods and friendly smiles calculated to ingratiate himself with George, in the hope of creating a social buffer built on mutual respect.

Ray wedged in the earplugs trailing from a small plastic radio, turned up its volume and began praying for a different reality; one sound proofed to insulate him from the dysfuntional behaviour of nutters like George. He tried to focus his mind on a drunk radio-caller mapping out his booze fuelled vision of tackling anti-social behaviour to Pat, a snappy sounding jock manning the graveyard shift at the decks of Talk-Sport Radio, station of late night chat.

- Well, sure, they should be making laws against it. Ban the lot of them completely. Street rats going about the place terrorising honest hardworking people just for the fun of it, thinking it’s brilliant craic and a great gas all together. Filming it on their mobile phones and putting up websites about it. Scum, that’s all they are. -

Unimpressed with Ray's failure to respond, George struck his fist on the door and re-entered his room with a muffled curse, loudly slamming his door and, as he threw himself onto the bed, hurling a tirade of abuse at the flimsy partition wall he kicked upon landing.

Pat was engaged in his usual routine, playing devils advocate to an idiotic caller named Terry, his voice effortlessly oozing the soft bland burr of sophist reason weaving along its 107 FM path to the ears of insomniacs and night-shift workers throughout the city. The background moan-fest and signature of Sport-Talk’s early AM show.

- So you think the government should introduce legislation in relation to this problem Terry? Some kind of anti-social behaviour law? ASBO's maybe? That’s certainly one way of addressing the issue, and one which our listeners will no doubt have opinions on. If there’s anyone out there who want to have their say on this topic, give us a call on the usual number. -

It briefly crossed Ray's mind that, if he possessed a phone, he could call Pat and acquaint him with his own anti-social situation of being the unlucky neighbour of George and closest witness of his slide into chemically induced madness, fuelling an aggressive paranoia now directed at Ray through twenty millimetres of jaded plasterboard the colour of dog dirt fawn; functional, like a dump. A picture came into Ray's mind of holding up the phone so Pat and his fellow listeners could hear George's routine, imagining the manufactured concern in Pat’s glib response as a hollow empathy filtered out of the radio’s tinny plastic speaker to scratch at George’s deaf and drunken ears next door.

Trying to remain silent Ray began dressing as Pat and Terry continued to chat about the possible connection between hooded tops and anti social behaviour; one which Terry believed to be obvious and the intrinsic links of which he began to expound upon with all the eloquence of a man trying to argue the existence of extraterrestrials from inside a portable toilet.

- What do they be wanting to have the hood up for when its warm? They can be only up to no good. -

- Could they not have the hood up because it’s wintertime Terry and they, understandably, have the desire to remain as warm as possible, which is what the hood is there for in the first place? - Pat, not unreasonably countered.

Terry seemed oblivious to this interjection of sensible comment, blithely waffling on and unburdening his load like a conspiracy theorist railing from the stump of Speakers Corner.

- Well, I watched a news report on the RTE about a gang of young ones in Westport who do nothing all day but happy slapping and now everyone in Mayo’s too scared to go into the town for their shopping. Pensioners and disabled people too terrified to leave the house for the fear of it. Grown men unable to walk the streets because of it. It’s complete and utter madness. They should be shot. -

As Ray slipped into a pair of lightweight mountain boots whose robust clunky soles and stout tailoring offered full comfort and equipped the feet of the wearer with a trusty sense of protection, Pat began working up to a predictable denoument, preparing to cut Terry and his unconvincing argument loose; discard him into the ether after a a last word salvo of synthetic outrage had completely rubbished his opinion.

- But Terry, you can’t tar everyone who wears a hoodie as scum, - said the record spinning chat king, in a register of professional insincerity honed by years of late night blathering to oddballs and weirdos,

- I, and many others, including numerous friends and family have worn hooded tops on many occassions and neither I, nor any of my friends and family, as far as I’m aware, have ever mugged or felt the urge to physically threaten anyone when wearing one. Do you not think, Terry, that you are going completely over the top here; that the opinion of making hoodies illegal and shooting people for attiring themselves, in what many people consider practical and comfortable clothing, is an extremely illogical one which can serve society in no beneficial way whatsoever? -

But Terry was unswayed by this artificial voice shifting through the gears of midnight reason and told Pat he was firm in his conviction that hooded tops should be outlawed and withdrawn from the racks and shelves with immediate effect.

- It’s the only way to stop it. - Terry said, impervious to the critical flaws Pat had isolated in his theory.

He sounded drunk, lonely and increasingly deranged. Another sacrificial lamb from the dial chained masses, functioning as Pat’s verbal punch bag; a fish in the barrel-offering to be slaughtered at the altar of late night radio.

- If it was up to me I’d be making them illegal tomorrow. It’s too dangerous not too Pat. The whole country’s going to the dogs through young ones who’ve got no control and can only think of mobile phones, burgers and runners; hiding themselves and smashing the place up. Vandalising, sniffing glue and taking all sorts of mind bending drugs. -

Terry was beyond redemption and Pat began working up to the inevitable blow off, crunching the logistics of Terry’s vision by concentrating on the fact that criminalizing hooded tops was a very impractical enterprise to embark upon.

- I’m sorry Terry, but I don’t think that’s a sensible idea, or one which has a chance of working in any way whatsoever. I would strongly argue that it is in fact a pretty stupid idea and one that no rational normal human being should hold, as it would be an incredibly foolish and effectively impossible undertaking. -

The first sound of Terry's attempted rebuttal was instantly cut off as Pat disconnected him from the airwaves and cast him abruptly into the night with all the aplomb of a pub landlord slamming the door on a sozzled patron. Ray pictured Terry's booze befuddled brain taking a few seconds to realise what had happened and imagined him aggrieved; like the kicked out drinker who had spent his money and time boring a pub manager before the sudden pushed exit left him facing a locked door instead of the late night lock in he had been expecting. Pat’s voice effortlessly segued into a flirty timbre for the next, female, caller; switching to a register leaking an homogenised brand of airwave magnetism male DJ’s aspire to imitate in their quest of becoming radio emperors and housewife heart throbs.

- OK, we’re going to have to leave you there for now Terry and take a call from June somewhere in the South of the city who wants to tell us what she thinks of hooodies. Hello June your though to Talksport. So, June, what have you got to say? -

Ray slowly laced up the boots and reclined back on the bed fully kitted out for a night street roaming. Excellent footwear to keep out the cold November chill of a windswept seaport.

June began pouring out her opinion with a cliché, telling Pat how a few bad apples were giving the rest of the kids a bad name; but just as she started to warm to the theme by giving the example of her own teenagers, who were all law abiding hoodie wearers, "Hot Legs" by Rod Stewart drop kicked its way from George’s stereo and through the wall in a sonic boom, drowning out June’s voice and Pat’s sudden switch from love god to attentive asexual conversationalist. Pressing the earplugs tightly down with the tips of his fingers Ray tried to suffocate wrinkly Rod Stewart and concentrate on June telling Pat about her perfect family, closing his eyes and searching his mind for faith.

Rupert the Man

Rupert Loydel, the head knob of the Langpo press Stride publishing was getting a kicking from the bores on the Poem UK site, where they witter and gossip, so I stuck it to him as well, as I am in that frame of mind to be positive about my dislikes.

~

Rupert came to do a reading at Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK (My home town) when I was in the third year and the poetry class (all 6) were told we could have a gig doing support, but I was the only one to avail of the offer, along with a few MA students.

I was the last support slot before Rupert and, as was my practice at the time, delivered my five minute set from memory, eyes closed and mic clutched in hand for the first one -

Take that trip to where your spells can cast
themselves and linger not too long upon the way

some thoughts may be too far researched then
wrongly shape the words you feel a need to say.

What's inside is abstract and precision with the fit
of words helps refract a potential multitude of

meanings one soul spark of thought can dazzle into
life on its journey of translation

from mind through mouth to audience before you-

At this point I opened my eyes to see an audience and continued to finish -

held from spellbound to disinterested

depending on
depending on
depending upon your words.

I then did the other two, a metrical sonnet Aughton, and a section from a performance poem Moods Are Passing Clouds. I had put about an hours rehearsal time that day into the five minute reading from memory.

During the delivery of his metallic 40 minute reading only one poem, about his dad, was spoken in a way which afforded genuine connection between him and his audience. The rest of the reading was about as unexciting as being stuck on hold when phoning the tax office, and his mask that night seemed to be one of professional misery and the above-it-all-torture of an under-recognised and self declared linguistic giant amongst the 20 or so names which constitute the Langpo landscape UK side.

The following day, because Rupert was such a heavy hitter, he did a workshop with both the MA and poetry classes, and I detected that, beneath his grumpy facade, he was actually pissed off for real, and naturally convinced myself that this was due to the high quality of my support the previous evening.

The format of the workshop was like doing factory work and it was made clear to us that the stern hued, foreman faced literary squib before us was a man whose workshop leader MO was of a no nonsense or leisurely chit chatty type, as he had public transport considerations to think of. An uncuddly George Sziertes from the opposite side of the lyrical track. (George is always droning on about trains and what happens on them, but never buses.)

A commercial enterprise of art by numbers. Poetic construction using a method equivalent to the dot to dot or colouring in book, which involved Rupert playing snatches of songs on a tape recorder, and the participants who he had deigned to share his being with, writing to barked commands as the non-rhyming genius of meaningless verse bestrode a small section of classroom floor like a caged animal, exuding the magnetism of one whose mind was utterly focused on catching a train back ino the bowels of SW England.

The enterprise resulted in a bumper number of turgid works the more generously minded would call "workshop poems", but which were in effect, a collective outpouring of complete shite, manufactured by a random lengthy conveyor belt-like process of robotic collaboration, where Rupert took on a camp commandant role, issuing instructions and orders with a quiet and authoritive control, furthering the impression of poetry I had been recieving from poets in the UK during my three years study. Namely, that it was a very serious business with no real place for japes and titters, unless the crack or gag passed muster and had been grunted assent in an exclusive kind of way by an imaginary panel of laugh assessors who, far from wetting their knickers with my mental efforts at releasing the titter gas, would have had me horsewhipped for gross unfunniness.

~

It was a tough old slog that afternoon, with a distinctly rushed feeling to it. A marathon session of poetry making, with Rupert's mien being a mix of Mein Fuhrer and straight faced gentlemen joke-hater doubling as state executioner, with an overall demeanour suggestive of striding through a 1930's Berlin patio door dressed in leiderhosen and trench coat, barking out short snappy orders to keep the precise and long-winded poetic compositional method of his own devising running on time. One of what I presume are many methods used, which have led to the results in his own, massively under-read ouvre.

~

His aura that afternoon could be likened to that of the seasoned sex worker who is always seeking to finish early. He was there, he did what was expected of him and immediately exited, with no conversation or pretence that the exchange was anything other than the business of creating pointless poems no one believed in, but which helped pay the bills one acquires in a life as a poet of no importance whose work will be immediatley forgotten once consciousness slips into the big beyond. Indeed the only use of his method would be when the participants became creative writing teachers who could palm it off on other wannabees themselves as a legitimate mode of gang bang creation.

Fill a few hours on the time sheet, or turn it into a full chapter by utilising it as a group exercise in a how-to-write book they would call a manual, thus making it appear to that the art of poetry is nothing more than a commercial skill one can pick up. Like becoming a mechanic or accountant. Just read follow the manual's instructions, do the 101 exercies and hey presto, you are a poet. Forget meter and all the usual stuff that's been the foundation for centuries. Rupert the one man revolution had decreed that all that jazz is rubbish. The methods have changed, not because they involve hard work and above all ability, but because all the contemporary poet of the Langpo school needs to do now is to pick words out of a hat and put them side by side, and then back it up with unreadable criticism which contains absolutely no meaning.

~

The night of Rupert's reading was the one when I acquired my first bona fide fan. A bricklaying poetry buff from Kirkby, who approached me and offered to buy me a pint. I took him down to a pub in Ormskirk and we bumped into Gavin, a mate from childhood and I dragged him over, telling him the craic. My fan was of the opinion that Rupert's reading was rubbish and stoked my ego all night by saying how great mine was.

He was quite interesting for a couple of drinks, until he started showing me his own scribblings, when it dawned on me, that in my rush to obtain the trappings of a real poet, I had overlooked the fact that my fan was in reality, a lonely middle aged divorcee who lived in a bedsit; much like I will be when success beckons and I go up in the world by moving out of the homeless hostel.

Finoula, Caoimhe and Nyree

Let me twist you the tale of Finouola, an amatuer rhyme-smith and TV hack who attempted to pull a fast one by having a gas time at the expense of Caoimhe Masterson outside an art gallery, after getting the hump when her right to be the sole bore drone and over-sensitive moaner who got upset if the tounges of others weren't permanantly ensconced in licking her praises, was questioned by the mere fact of Caoimhe's existence.

Caoimhe had heard Finoula's ouvre several times over and indulged Finoula's predilection for pontificating to all within earshot about what's what according to a philosophy of reasonable sounding bollocks and plausibly carted out bullshit, but had kept her counsel on the socially disruptive manner Finoula displayed when putting people to sleep with her outpourings of unrequited love and doomed relationships, because she detected that behind Finoula's mask of bonhomie and good cheer was a soul suffering from a desperate case of human inadequecy, due to the tragically unfemminie condition of alopecia clearly balding her pate.

To compensate for this Finoula invented herself as a Neo-Romantic dreamer; a twenty-first century Christina Rossetti, who concealed the less savoury tenets of her rampantly misogynist amour-dogma by constantly kissing hands of the opposite sex and acting to the hilt the role of a genteel gentlewoman who places personal integrity and honour in personal relationships at the nexus of all things.

This however was a cunning mask, constructed after a lack of romantic action during those all important and formative teenage years had left her with a highly developed sensitivity to failure in the realm of love, which manifested itself in the cod-Romanatic manner only a full strength dreamer could sustain over a prolonged period.

~

After a poetry gathering in the said art gallery, Finoula invited the meagre assembley back to her gaffe around the corner, with the sole aim of plying an Armenian Irish teacher with wine; the modus-operandi of her unsophisticated seduction technique. Nyree had been imbibing the cultural vibe of Dublin to a full capacity during the course of his 6 week long sojourn to the land of myth and poesy, obstensibly with the intention of assembling ideas for lesson plans, but behind his academic facade beat a heart in search of writerly excitement in the place with a hot claim to being a significant global home of the imagination.

Finoula, believing that Caoimhe's presence at her scruffy bachelorette pad posed a threat to her creating a drink clouded tete-a-tete ambience in which she hoped to get intimate with Nyree, had suddenly and casually mentioned that Caoimhe was not on the guest list, by attempting to conjure a bogus set of, what would no doubt be delivered as, acceptably persuasive reasons for inviting her to stay away. Finoula's strategy was based on informing Caoimhe of some petty slight Caoimhe was unaware of enacting against Finoula.

But Finoula, whilst acknowledging the seemingly trivial nature of what she had now termed "the insult", would attempt to dress it up as proof of Caoimha's inherently gross and uncivilised nature.

For this contrivance to be executed successfully, Caoimhe would have been the sap of any exchange, blithely nodding and taking on board Finoula's commensenscally sounding comments, no doubt with a parting shot by Finoula about

"Have a think about it Caoimhe. You can't insult people like that. You are quite welcome to come around in a day or two, but I feel I have to stand my ground on this point."

Caoimhe would then wander off disconsolately homeward, pondering and searching her mind for the defects Finoula outlined. No doubt inwardly promising to try her utmost not to be the insensitve oaf of Finoula's depiction as Finoula staggered back to operational HQ, the surface epitome of artistic decorum. But beneath the placid facade, her mind peddaling furiously like a bitch in the fullness of heat, plotting to steer Nyree onto the outside sofa on her extension roof, where she could begin the pawing assualt on Nyree's matrimonial integrity in earnest.

However, sensing the utter phoniness of the moment, Caoimhe felt a surge of anger and injustice and was unable to stop herself from forcefully telling the several stragglers from the poetry gathering, when asked by Nyree

"Why has Finoula barred you?"

exactly what her take on events was, which involved informing Nyree in a short sharp burst the truth behind the subterfuge.

"Because she wants to get you back on her couch and give you what for before you go home in two days time."

Caoimhe then flipped her index finger at Finoula, with the parting shot,

"Go fuck yourself you prick."

Caoimhe stepped away, diginity intact. Another tale in the personal myth kitty she could recite over the coming weeks. Finoula's limp attempt at hot airing up some lame comment, broken before it began, the slow realisation only a true insult brings dawning on Finoula's shocked face as the eight second whisp flung by Caoimhe took effect.

~

The life of a poet is a funny thing. As Yeats said, the more sincere the life the more sincere the poet, and Caoimhe tries to uphold this as a central philosophy. But one aspect of the writers life those at the hack end of the business fail to fully grasp, is that there are two components to poetry; talk and text. It never surprised Caoimhe how seldom the supermarket minded dot to dot poets, the non-oolamhs who struggle to understand the true calling of the craft and vision the fountain well from which it springs, seize this salient point.

Whaddya reckon?

It's another hot one today. Probably going to be a record summer here, as it is very unusual to get it so sunny for such a prolonged spell.

~

Another litany of disaster has occured which gives me the perfect opportunity not to post. My computer crashed a few weeks back and I eventually bumped into the guy who bult it and sold it me and saw him for the conman he is. Then I sat on my Mp3 and bust the LCD screen, and it will be three weeks before I get it back. Then when I went to upload my first podcast from the art gallery readings, I discovered I would have to shell out some dough to continue.

And the irony being that the week before last was the busiest and best yet. A singer songwriter breaking up the spoken word, lots of new voices and there till 1am; smoking indoors and having our fill of ale from the offy, which is 4 times cheaper than the pub. Plus all the arty vibe of painters and their politics.

~

I read the rest of Heaney's ouvre over the weekend, and got a much clearer handle on him. I only knew up till 1980'ish and after reading Station Island, his trajectory as a poet becomes very clear, especially when read in conjuction with his prose. His essay on fellow contemporary Northern Irish poets Place and Displacement was written in the same year as Station Island, which is the transition of his voice into the higher stream of poetical thought, where he manages to free his mind from the cultural bind of his own part of the world, by invoking an alternative realm equal to but apart from the actual: a world he can sidestep into and strike, as he says, his "own note".

This is effectively him "at the top of his bent"; the langugae of an oolamh coming through and plain for all to see. I learnt quite a lot from this read and only wish I had my computer on which to work, instead of this public space whose novelty has long worn off. Now it is only a place in which to avoid the stares of giggling tourists chasing chimeras of real Irishness one can so easily conjure, stun and pull their minds to mine with. Like Dunleany's Ginger Man seeing life devoid of pretence and unable to escape the cold reality of its transient warmth, via linguistic magic understood in all its naked form. Stripped from myth and uncertainty so many believe its essence is imbued with and clouded by.

Maybe I am just giving myself a summer off after five years hard graft. Starting in the dunce stream without a thought in my head to call my own, and now managing to convey a spiritual realism via the imprint of emotions which are moving away from poems of personal concern and towards the cynosure of an unexpected and previously unthinkable force. The originating "fountain" of spirit Heaney's Station Island finishes with. The outside-of-self silent raging light of creation swimming fate strokes upon the life-lone canvas of time we move through.

~

If I had my books to hand and time to ponder I could explore this more fully with a greater insight and eloquence than at present, but I can feel a change upon me. A taking stock and gathering. Once my computer is fixed I will gather together the entirity of my 100 plus poems on one document and start on the next phase. Wind up the curtain on the getting published stage and send out a manuscript to the names I know cannnot critically combat me to unbelieve my gift.

If any publisher out there wishes to harness their reputation to mine, please contact me with an offer.

~

Actually, I detected a cooler breeze when crossing the Liffey after lunch in Focus Ireland, the homeless charity restaurant, where a dinner costs but 1.50 euro. Today I had a chicken salad with bread and butter pudding and custard for desert. If I went a few doors down it would have cost 20 euros for inferior quality fare, such is the topsy turvy way of gaelic culture. The alternative was roast chicken, spuds, carrots or fajita vegetable wraps with cajun sauce, all fresh ingredients and delicious, but only available to the very addicted, poor or enlightened.

The poetry has been flowing thick and fast, as I have been a very busy bore of late, witnessing and reading the word. As I type I am listening to Brendan Murphy, this years Cuirt slam winner. He is from Liverpool and will be going to Chicago in October; the prize he won.

This is as part of the Whitehouse poets podacst, which was recorded in June.

In the last few weeks I have seen Paula Meehan, Evan Boland and numerous others, unknown in the main, but a lot of them, red hot. The art gallery gig has been going well and I have a podcast ready to go online once I pay up the dough to the blogmatrix site. I cut up the readers poems into verses and have snippets of 20 seconds or so, alternating male with female and backed by a trippy Led Zep intro I looped.

Last night we had 15 turn up and the week before around 25, but as I sat on my MP3 player last Tuesday and it is getting fixed in Germany, I was unable to capture the magic of Dave the singer, Raven the San Franciscan genius, Bashra the South African and all the others who commune in that Francis Street Temple of Art.

Tonight I will see the Salmon poets at the Writers centre and tommorow I will go to the Yeats exhibition at the National library.