GRAPH
For Paul Toner
I got a graph of the times of tides
Sitting here at bishops mill by
The the edge of Strandford lough.
Among the disabled crew.
In wheelchairs (chariots)
Walking aids, rollators. An army
Of broken force but with a en-
Abled ability armed with song
hope and positivity.
I went on a journey through
The rolling drumlins, the pretty
Villages contouring the shores.
Outside the blue door, my home
The concrete is cracked like
a fine gel penned line torn
From the atlas of the world
The graph of my tides mapped
coming in.
DISPOSABLE DEBRIS
I fold into a foetus position
And wait for a carer to care.
After I’m washed and dressed
And left at the window watching
A blackbird, my guardian angel
Looking over his realm.
I sit here in the wheelchair in
The kitchen doing nothing.
They say there’s no such thing
As nothing, I watch the leaves
Breeze under a blue sky.
This must be how a prisoner
Feels, the silence must be to
Silent. At least im almost in
This community. The waves
Of cars go by, this automated
River flows to the roundabout
And back again.
You have to go down to come up
Everything disintegrates into nothing.
Man can only cry or laugh into
The well of time. Everything we see,
Touch, taste or smell becomes
disposable debris.
I remember when I awoke from
My tunnel of darkness in a hosp-
Ital bed paralysed with locked-in-
Syndrome. Hallucinating on drugs
To keep me alive thinking:
there was a man behind me cutting
up bodies with a chainsaw throwing
the parts into a skip, I was next.
I gripped the blankets and took this
white knuckled ride of trust, breaking
into a cold sweat i even thought
the nurses were going to kill me.
My mind was like gruelly porridge
Or scrambled egg. Its been six years
Now since that moment my mind
Has began to form into place, a more
Spacious form.
I’m sitting in a wheelchair in an adopted car
Watching the rain ripple the black-water.
In bold red letters against a white
Back-ground it says:
Dead end
No wash.
PART 1.............................. NEW AND SELECTED
OFF THE ROAD
‘A MELANCHOLIC SMILE’
tindersticks
I do not want to face the realisation of my condition
but seeing my grandson made me reflect on it.
Like a child being born and in those early years
the mind forms into something that can grasp language.
That’s the way I felt in intensive care when I woke
from my stroke trying to grasp the language of these words,
it was as if I was reborn an adult. It feels like I’m compelled
to write down these feelings of loneliness and silence.
As if I have to make sense of this scientific term locked-in-syndrome.
They talk about the power of words but these words really
and truly saved my life it seems as if I’m an alchemist turning muck
into gold and I have found the moment between words.
Without god or some spiritual entity I’m creating a positive force
(these poems) as if my life depended on it. As all good truth sayers say:
you have to look inside yourself and laugh at the horrors of life
as Bill Hicks said wherever truth love and laughter abide I’m there in spirit.
I’m a beatnik in this beaten world. This is my new city blues
my road trip of poem sorry my wheelchair trip of poems.
yet why not say what happpened
Robert Lowell
KILBRONEY
A cacophony of dawn
Sang from the forest
And stirred us awake.
The sounds echoed a wild-
Life programme as if deep
In the Amazon from exotic
Creatures exclaiming dawn.
We lay together surrounded
By nature caressing every
Sense erogenously.
INCANTATION
For Seamus
My brother took me over two box’s of books
I rifled through my past I thought was forgotten
Old poems, Dostoyevsky, Kavanagh, Kerouac
notebooks and old diaries.
This was my past before my stroke
the one that was like a dream.
Its funny how I don’t remember
And flicking through these I do
Like an old man rediscovering
Or a child with a time travelling toy.
With a box folder of poems written by me
But the overall sense of them seem to be
Written by someone else.
‘you dabble in verse and it becomes your life’
then one day you take a stroke that almost
stops your life dead and your poems seem
to be written in your younger brothers hand.
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 I just know its magic
It gives me a purpose and just as I say purpose
The sun pierces my sight and the world
The light shines on my wheelchair
and it becomes my throne.
I am the king of this un-adopted castle
Nature throws its light on my soul
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 an I-pod or Nike brand
but this trademark is free.
IN MY ELEMENT
(WILDERNESS)
For jules
I saw the black blue
and mono-chrome
Magpie dance across
The green outside
The window.
Pose on a fence
Beyond this caged
In wilderness.
I’m in my element,
An arts centre
The hide, hiding
On the twelth of July
In the morning.
Waiting for the muse
to ride me bareback
through this wilderness.
MAHAMUDRA
for Kenneth white
‘when the mind finds no place
to stop there’s Mahamudra’.
Mahamudrapadesha
I opened the door to let a fly free
but another one came in
the vastness of grey sky
the old tree contours the wind
the stump rooted among wild, wild, wild, grass
and thistles as high as a man
just off the diamond path that leads to my house
my un-adopted kingdom
the wheelchair slope is all marked like leaf mould
fossils of the past drifting back from nurtured soil
the wind picks up the cars go by and nothing has to happen.
MONKEY POLE......... (the evolution of recovery)
The sun throws
a shimmering
shadow on my wall.
A shadow within a shadow,
an image within a image
like a heat hazed mayhem.
I ponder a book
on the graphic works of
M.C. ESCHER a man way
ahead of his time, his drawings
of rippled water are like
the splash of shadowed summer
on my wall. The evolution
of his surrealism must have been like
the diagrams of Darwins mind,
you have to go down to come up.
Birds become fish and fish become sky
spanning acres of land.
Life is there in that shadow,
Dancing leaves upon my wall.
My carer put me to bed at 9pm (Friday night)
and left me to play with my monkey pole.
My home is like a hospital
there is a wet room and
and a wheelchair and rails for me
to pull up from but not
pull down.
THE OTHER COUNTRY
For Carol Ann Duffy
The other country is:
A silhouetted hill
by a lake in a night sky.
The shape of a naked
woman from your dreams.
I woke up sleeping on
a steering wheel with V.W
imprinted on my forehead.
I drove north and detoured
left always left around a lake
and started back where I began
in dreams.
The star in the western sky
flickered above my manger
Reading Keats, O’Solitude
and your touchable dreams.
It seems as if Keats seen 9/11
in the first three lines of his poem.
As if nothing has changed
in the poetic span of time.
I dwell in murky buildings
but my soul it is free.
In here I see the wonder
that is really the blue me.
NORTH WEST PASSAGE
I.M of Michael hartnett
Rise little blackbird
To the top of the tree
Your song is witness
To pain and joy.
The sky was like a Turner painting
A dusky pink hue, hanging melancholy.
I’m planning to drive to Donegal
And listen to the Lambchop C.D,
This music still drifts me in and out
Of reality. Driving down the motor-
Way behind a horse box as if
The horses head came from a painting
Into my imagination, galloping bareback
Through the Bann and the Blackwater.
Below a bridge where children wave
Across the Sperrins past the raised ruins
And the raised to the ground ruins of history
On the north west passage through the Fairy
Water into another world embroidered
In memory, thatched in time.
`
CONSCRIBED
In Memory of John Hewitt
I drove down the blue stone
And sat by my sisters grave
Waiting for grief to rise.
Poetry comes from the inside
its like trying to make sense
of nothing and make it flow
on the page.
Sitting here beside a river
watching memory meander
and surface there in the current
to wave hello, goodbye,
so rest there Steph and sleep
memory awake.
I am here at home in this
Moment NOW. These
streets are my glens
these valleys are my cathedrals.
I conscribe this poem having
Breakfast of toast tea and tablets
by an un-stained window.
Exiled by the space beyond
That blue door.
When thirsty a droplet of joy
