Matsuo Basho

The master of mind.

disability

ROAD TRIP

We dropped L.S.D and M.D.M.A.

I got behind the wheel, the car

was part of me, my foot was

stuck to the accelerator.

We were at Bettystown for

a stag weekend. I tore down

the Dublin road to the air-

port. I drove down the white

line overtaking, overtaking.

Why I remember this I don't

know, this is not a drug thing

but a memory thing. we were

tripping out of our minds.

I'm still out of my mind.

I HAD NO PERSONALITY

                           Lou Reed

RIPPED OFF MONOCHROME

I have tried not to rhyme this pome until it’s very end.

Sex, drink and drugs do nothing for me, my brain in-

Jury but a tiny feather came though my door

And sparked my poetic in-sight.  The jury is out  

Tipped white, it lays abandoned on the floor.

Humanity is torn of, ripped off monochrome

I could surmise where it came from but I’m better

Off not knowing, it’s within the shifting light.

All I need to know is that it is a wild and tender

Touch, the birds still out there in the cold but

The feather keeps me warm, in thoughts of snow.

The feather is in-tri-cate just like a snow flake, there

Are three things in nature in me.

Place, feather, pome, tipped white, tender, home.

ONE ANGRY MAN, ON GOING

His care arrived and seen he was reading

‘Anger is an energy’, he looked at her with

Eyes of nature, one green/brown

And one brown/green.  

Rolled washed and wheelchaired to see a land-

scape of loss and joy, the tree stood bare, alone.

He seen beyond material stuff and in-here-

I-tense, beyond the middle class public school-

Boy way.  He went down his own road, he took

Life on the chin and lost to win.

Memory was not on the tree but his mother

Was always there, she was the apple of his eye

Insight of humanity.

The trees were all he had to go on, they were

The fence around his home.  He shadowed to

And from his computer, as he had no memory

To go on but painting and writing was on his mind

A mixed medium, living sin.  If you believed in sin.

His memory was erased along with dreamscape

Maybe they were just suspended inside damaged

Brain in-jury, locked in.  These words were all he had

to on, they set him free!

NESTING EX-MAS

While the world thinks ex-mas

A scrawny thrush guards home

Below roof tiles. A bird’s eye view

For Santa but there’s no chimney

Pot to get down. A bird of downy

Feathers keeps me warm 

on ex-mas’ eve.

Flying around tinsel town, pecking scraps 

Our waste and there’s a lot to get through.

That frail bird keeps me alive, not thinking

Ex-mas. He is on his spire.

Things are looking up and down. We don’t

Need buttresses to get close to god, we just

Need humanity below roof tiles. Like him

I’m waiting for leaves to return like snip-

Pets of memory. Now I feel lost

Naked, bare, alone but soon new-

Life will be here.

THE QUEEN (Patricia Keogh)

My mother was the queen of holly-
Wood, she walked down the stairs
Every day with the strength of Joan
Crawford and Bette Davis with
The beauty of Grace Kelly.

I woke to that everyday striding
The stairs with innocence
And wonder, every-
Day I faced that.
.
Through good times and bad
She took me here to
Magic. She took me here

alive to give you hope in
Her words.

‘it’s not hard to be civil’!

BAAAAAAAAAASTARD

St fucking Stephen, a man of grace and power

Got stoned, so much for cruc-i-why-fucking-fiction.

 I’m fed up with this indoctrinated bullshit.   

He formed the belief we live today, you people

are being herded like sheep into a capitalistic

religious pig pen, we don’t need sheep dogs any-

more, we just whistle silent fucking night.

I have sat alone for the past two days, only for

my son Glenn and family I’d be lost.  Watching

birds feather fight in a clear blue sky, blackbirds

and magpies and all for a branch, a hierarchy.

Believe in something real like Elvis, John Lennon, Bob

Marley humanity today not two thousand years ago.

Nelson Mandela now there’s a king of peace.

For two days, I’ve had diarrhea, I struggled

on and of the throne, with a broken back

but I done it, that’s belief.

I bet most of you wish I were dead and not spouting truth

the blasphemer, but I live in this hell hole that you created.

For two days now I have sat alone in your sent

-time-mental shite.

HOPELESS HELL

Without hope and with despair

I try another crack at life

Living in a hopeless hell.

I woke from a coma/stroke

Before that day, I would have died.

I don’t recall a writer paralysed

In a wheelchair.  I have no one

To carry on so I write out of blue

black hole, lost in a negative cap-

ability, an optimistic pessimism.

From a prism of headstone view

Kaleidoscope of life, black

Cracked mirror.

ACHING PLEASURE 

Listening to Allen Ginsberg talk

On jack Kerouac: Aching pleasure.

I want to hold my head in hands

And cry like a baby below the sullen

Image of myself but what’s the point.

All we have is a Christian education

I want to cry my fucking heart out.

It’s my party and ill fucking cry

if I fucking want to, an egoless ego

in a multi-verse. Anne Sexton

and Sylvia Plath were lost

in sullen space-time.

Why can’t we talk of suicide, it’s

Got a side to it.  Why do we think

Of god rhyme?  We have been taught

To look that way.  Nil is sullen, I want

To hold my head up and think

of sullen you.

i want to look beyond a christian education

my microwave sight is like an ocean

waving reflection like the sea in me.

 I can’t even pick up a fucking book of

Of the floor with a reference to this

Pome, that says something about

Rhyme reason fucking time.

POMEING

I live in a strange place of non-memory

it feels like I’m on a global ad for gambling

sex, drink and drugs but none of it is aimed at me.

It feels like I’m beyond this capitalist advertising frenzy

even x-mas is beyond me.

 

It doesn’t seem to matter what time of season it is.

No sense of time or place like a shell on a shore

I live without memory and dreamscape

if you can imagine that.

Re-born that Saturday, April 2005 when I rose-up

from the dead, seconds before I was declared stoned, dead. 

That day, I went to the window, my memory

was in the trees, seasoned time came and went. 

I learned to eat and write again like a child at heart.

Words came slow at first but now I spit them out

of my vocabulary without memory, dream or depth.

Dayroom was that corridor where I watched time

paralyzed down to the bone.  Family, friends, im-

Portant they were my portal.

I watched leaves shimmer on trees.  My girlfriend

left me couldn’t take no more, she was my stone but

she found another man who also took a stroke

so she had to start again.  That must have been hard.

How do you live a missionary life?

I wheeled on all alone, gathering words

then they came out of me like leaves today

their bare branching out doing this way and that, my way. 

My words don’t need a critique, they just ling-error on

pomeing write or wrong.

STAND UP ON YOUR OWN TWO FEET

I have only got two fucking footplates.
My father came from nowhere, was
No one came from his mother’s womb.
Dublin, London, Belfast, it don’t matter
I am his bastard son but the buck stops
here, I don’t talk behind anyone’s back.

They say he was an abuser but he never
abused me, anyway can you believe
an alcoholic. I have no right to say, stand
on your own two feet that’s what he taught me.

This is just my side, say. Ok he was a bastard
To me and those around, of that I’m not proud

but to survive Belfast in the forties must have 

made a hard-man right or wrong. Nurtured

By the streets where he came from.

Olde Ardoyne distorted my view and almost
turned me round but I had the balls he gave
me to stand my ground. I don’t know where
this came from, it was charged and driven by
emotion. This is a pome that comes from
the back yard, from a two up two down
red brick house that made me very proud.

I remember one thing him and mum said to me:
‘you can be a bastard don’t be a cunt’, ‘never
Hurt no one’. Between those rough-cut words
Of wisdom, I grew up to be a writer. So, I will
Put the story straight. Buried up there on those
black hills and down there on my bluestone, Lylo.

No more whispers and lies, stand up on your own
two feet, I know who I am do you?

I HAD NO PERSONALITY

                           Lou Reed

UNSONNET 2

These are only pomements, watching daggers cut sky.

Birds are branching out into wild, true, blue, grey

Winter, wintering out. This could never be winter night. 

I put in a search for Hungarian poet Atilla Joseph and got 

Atilla the frog, we are in a sad consumerist state.

His poetry was swineherd poverty, real pigsty blues. 

Even I would have walked those tracks waiting for a train. 

These lines stretch out to greet you, to give you pomes back

thundering down the track, suicide like it was meant to be. 

You taught me one thing, ‘poverty is good for the soul’ but 

you middle class poets wouldn’t under-stand that.

Fly away, branch off into an in-

tense stern stare, eyeing truth 

from the catacombs 

of your heart.

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

For Riley

This pome is for my grandson

The lights are on and the water

Flows out your autistic rhyme.

Riley these are words that you can’t

Say but I will say them for you.  I know

you want to look me in the eye and say

grand-dad I love you.  I hope these words will chance and give you a good will glance.  This is but a blinking eye

that catches words of hope.

I know that you can’t see them

but my door is always open

you switch my light on.

JUST A POLITICAL BLAME GAME

I know I’ve said it all before but

I can’t get my damaged head

round this, do we just accept

That were left out in the lurch

This is the price of peace.

The I.R.A. of nineteen sixteen

Only fought the British because

Their main force was fighting in

World war one.  Did the Provo’s think

They were supermen? 

I was steeped in republicanism, a day out

Was to visit Bowden town or the G.P.O

Oliver Plunket’s grave there were no pic-

Nics by the sea.  Is this the peace that?

I get, being alone locked in without

A good Friday agreement.

So, I lost my home, was dragged from bed

During dawn raids, beaten with rubber

Hoses behind sandbags on the way to school.

I come from a family of alcoholics and I’m in

a wheelchair my father and sister are dead

and it was all just a political game.

 I can almost see myself scampering those back-

Alleys, throwing petrol bombs at brits, running

for my life.  Like a rat burrowing dark, not

much has changed.

UNSONNNET

I am the tock tick of Robert Lowells clock
I go to the toilet every hour on the hour.
I can’t even arrange to go out to a reading 
or the dentist, they have to come to me
dentist/fire-stick. How can I find the right
Words for this pome to flow in and out
of my life, all I can do is just sit here trying
to remember what little I know of the past.
I used to think I was between the earth
and the sky but now I can’t find myself?
You can time me like stroke, tock tick.

BARCODE OF LIGHT

The sun shoots in then blinks behind cloud
The day begins like summer mornings do.
I don’t know where this poem is coming from?
the reservoir of survival, a spiritual source?
No one knows all I just know its magic.

It gives me a purpose and just as I say purpose
The sun pierces my sight and the light shines
on my wheelchair and it becomes my throne.

I am the king of this un-adopted castle
Nature throws its light and I label it Buddhist
Christian or Pagan. You can see why civilisations
have worshipped it. It has the power of an Adidas top
or a 60-inch plasma screen T.V. an I-pod or Nike
brand but this trademark is free.

MILK THISTLE

There are no flower beds
In my garden, mostly
Grasses and thistles
As tall as a man.

It’s sea-men spread from the

mediterranean (silly-bum-
marianum).

Used to cure liver disorders
I wonder will it cure my dis-
Order, maybe it’s spunk
Will seed this pome.

Afterall I’m like a human
weed growing through new-
city cracks between
The slabs.

A BALANCED WRONG

A balanced wrong wont

Make a right but its

The closest I’ll ever

Get. I have lost all

Capability so I live

Here all alone
within negativity.

I aim towards, a goal

Mindset, pomes hold

My treasure trove.

I’ve turned this muck

To gold without living

Snobbery.

STROKE GENE-D

Poetry searches out your

ying and yang

The male and female part

apart, naming the name-

less one

Dis-ability.  

It turned my life up-

side down but 

I turned it around 

 to find-

Stability.

MUM AND STEPHANIES ROOM

I do not think of you lying in Lylo soil

You are just off my Bluestone road

With my sister Stephanie.

Going through your stuff today

Five stroke moments, I found a picture

Drew in your innocent flow and a story-

Book of Stephanie’s. Sad a woman who

Lived in Dublin growing up to be a nation

London through the troubles of Belfast.

All I have is a brown suit case of moments

Realizing I have been doing the same with 

Pomes repeating myself over and over 

Trying to capture a moment of time.

All I got was a darning needle lodged
Beneath my mother’s mothers skin.
Spraying parts of black cabs in London
Working in a fashion house, doing a little
Modeling for the firm and being a skivvy
For no one. Not one derogatory term
She was a true human being and I am
proud to be her son. Beneath all those
papers I found her ashes, she had been
there all along in Stephanie’s little room.

A POEM FROM STEPHANIES STORYBOOK

MY OWN BEDROOM

In my bedroom, I have

A dressing table, writing-

Desk, a bed, wardrobe

And a doll carry cot.

My bedroom is very big.

The Lino is green with gold

And silver leaves. Beside

My bed there is a mat, the mat
Is green to. On my shelf
I have some statues, in front
Of my dressing table, there
Is a little stool.

MELANCHOLY-GO-ROUND

FOR MARK EITZEL

I can’t think beyond myself

This is the singed state, me.

They say I lost all memory

And I dream low on emotion.

So, I can’t project a thought

Not out of my black-whole.

No dream, no memory of

The past, stroke conditions

Me, negativity is my positivity.

Paralyzed, un-walking reflection

The shadow is where the love is.

I know all this I see it every-day

I am locked into dark and your

locked into light, when will you

see me, this is my way up there

is no easy way down, shadow?

For ten years now I’ve killed time

Put it in twelve-hour verse.  This

Morning I unblocked two blobs

Of blackness from my ears.

Hopefully they were the darkness

That I have seen behind my eyes.

I hope that they have found

Their way out of my un-

Balanced lot.

For all those years, I’ve been writing

Dark but I want to find a way, Tao.

Tied to this melancholy-go-round

Writing darkness, headstone ground.
Please-let me find my source!

They say ear nose and throat are linked

Maybe this has found its way, may-

Be these words can find a way

Out of this syndrome.

SHADOW TIME

Her grieving eyes cry of of her face like sun-

dials shadow time.  Her tears fall implode

the folded hand-

Kerchief unfolds.

The future

present, past. 

The moment her hand

fell on her face.

Mother of all time, weeping

Woman, she sheds the tears

Of ten or more world wars.

When will we ever learn

Giving life is torn.

Isn't it sad that I live in others gladness, reading Adonis 

by Percy Bysse Shelly these words jumped at me.

THINE OWN SORROW

Mourn great men, weep not for John Keats

I died with him that day, broken blooms on

The thorny way.  His words thawed not

The frost but he lies in ode to psyche.

His poetry touches hearts and souls

Weep not for John Keats-read

the words that Shelly wrote.  

I can never do them justice, I'm just a boy 

from the Craigavon school of poetry.

Roundabout city by the balancing lakes

Trying to balance my life within greater

Men than me, who am I to eat their words

Just a lover of the moment. 

Seeking shelter from the shadow of his living tomb.

Melancholy mother earth, tremble

In your burning bed, molten mountain

Movement.  He lives, he wakes- ‘tis death

Is dead, not he.  He is a presence

To be felt and known in dark light

From herb and stone.

Death feeds on his mute words and laughs at our despair.

He gazed at natures naked Loveliness.  Plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull dense world.  Shadow

Of white death, a lucid urn of starry dew.

Wilde

At least Wilde Oscar had a little

Bit of sky to go on, I have got

Fuck all!  Like a man locked

in a prison cell without parole

or a good Friday agreement. 

I am empty inside, I don’t even

have the urge to give this

The worthiness of my lone-

someness.

POETRY LIKE SUNSHINE IS FREE

Without memory and imagination

I cant do very much, I don’t even re-

Member if this scene is true?

Three people were shot dead in

Front of me all in the name of god

On the steps of holy cross church

Aged just fourteen years old.

Something is dead inside of me!

I carry this dead image and a whole

lot more.  I don’t have much in life

infants are even afraid of me, did

that really happen or is life just

a lie?  I want to get right up

your goat, to show you

in-here-i-tense!

Stop lying to yourselves, stop

Giving away the world resources

Pretending that they are yours.

We are all born on this level playing-

Field, give humanity a chance

Poverty is good for the soul!

SEXAGENERIAN

Writ I994-I shave this man

In the mirror, grey ashen sullen.

I sweep dyed hair from nape

To cover skin without growth.

In this house, that once was

Filled with life, I turn my mind

And see them, playing in

The bath bathed by her

Kneeling to play.

The razor glides through dead-

Skin, abrasions of the past.

The smell of myself lingers

As blood runs down my chest.

I lost them loved, I am the loser

but so afraid to tell her, but

so afraid to let them know

a bastard so afraid to receive.

After sixty one years I have nothing

The air has long since stank, the car

Engine oil sump seeps on the floor

Enveloping everything in my past time.

Please death stay away a while

While I clear up this mess and wash

The blood from my chest.

GOOD MANNERS DON’T MATTER

I was reading through old poems

And thought I no longer have that

Emotional edge. 

Writing pomes without substance

like a child in a vast lonely play-

ground wanting to be bullied

at least that’s an emotional touch.

At least that can help me

Write it down but this state

of essential lonelyness has

killed me inside.

                                               This photograph is the real me

                                              It hurts me when you lie to your-

                                              selves.  I can stomach the truth

                                                      

                                                      do we just live a lie!

I have been around and round on this un-

Merry go round.  I’ve got to stop writing

This non-sense but I don’t know what

Else to do, I woke from this ejaculation

Surge like a pyroclastic flow, these words are

Like snowflakes the magic is in the moment

And I can’t ever know, all I have is my truth

That you must hear each day.

Can you take anymore, I can’t!

I am truly lost without memory, imagination.

I am not writing this to piss you off, please stop

This ethical medical non-sense, give man life

Death not this shadowy grey matter.

I give you all of me, these words don’t skip

Along I know but this is my shallow mojo

And it isn’t fucking working.  All I hope is

That your humane, maybe humanity

is beyond you, we move within

this moment of molten

mountain rock.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

My mind has passed through another

Moment but it doesn’t even know

And I’ve got to hear that silent night

Shite all over again.

2.

Why have I been left here?

Even my mind can’t find the words

Autumn in me.  Please don’t let

This happen in future, to live

Is to know and I don’t know.

 Please don’t let this happen again.

I know you have your morals

but mine are simple be

Humane.

A BALANCED POME

Woke up this morning thinking

I will write a balanced pome

To get me through the day.

Without any disabled hyphen-

Ated words but then I looked

Around my breakfast table.

A bowl of porridge for these

Cold mornings so my career said

being rolled, washed, wheelchaired.

Hung out beside coffee toast

and poetry, this is not

the tranquil-ized fifties

anymore but every-

day I wake up

In another

decayed.

VAN GOGHISM

‘Clay is the word clay is the flesh’

Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry was raised
from the ground by his brother 
just like a Van Gogh.

I went along the Castleblaney road
For water from a well, I swept aside
The debris and found pure clear water
With the clear vibrancy of paint but 
These are only words painted pure.

Kerbstones like colored flags, painted
Hate like love on the ground.
A world of men and monsters, dungeons
Tanks and barricades, tear gas and rubber
Bullets. Young men with hatred in their hearts.

There are two sides to every tango like
A sunset at dawn, the green so green
And the red so red, blue and gold so blue.
Hate blends into love like night flows into day.
Life is blue and black the color of my way.

Seeing the subtle change of seasons
From the masters of movement.
Captured in the blooms of yesterday 
death in a vase of sparkled brilliance.

The light of nature on the breeze
A birdsong, the color of sky filled with rain
like Anton Chekhov’s foreboding.
The color of light on an eye.

The tree, the sky the oceans detail.

CREEDMORE

I don’t have a personality

                                Lou Reed

Sitting here talking to my-

Self, answering myself.

This is my dark light, void

Of life’s emotion.

Like a chorus of a sad song

A chant of reality, magic and loss.

Free from any dreamscape

to color my dark light, in sight

reverberating blue.  Lou Reed

colored my day because 
memory was taken away.  

What was taken

from us.  He gave to me

to give to you.

This is nothing new!

So fucking sad seen through my tears, my emotional drive.

POETIC THERAPY

I die inside each day

I will not live to be

A snob.  Poetry is

Like sunshine, free.

This is a poetic

Dreamless state.

I live in a state

Black-hole.

My hills cave in

to darkness.

I await a dark 

light pome.

Feel free

Empty me full-

Fiil you.

A PYROCLASTIC FLOW

A Pompeii sub-
stance stone.
Cast from human 
form like a lost wax 
process revealing
Images of death
of you, beaten
By time. Molds 
of you and me.
I see from 
a higher 
perspective 
a mosaic 
of snobbery 
fit in stone.

THE SOURCE

I come from poverty throne

No one like me before 
was ever a poet?

  Raymond Carver gave me

These words writ from a headstone.

Jimmy Simmons 
elegies, polished

Stones seen through 
words of poverty

seen outside academia.

My river flowed from his source

He heard my words, skim

The sea of poetry.