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?