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.

PART2.

MY BLACK ANGEL

The shadow of my wheelchair is like

A raven an Edgar Allen Poe image

Guarding my hell, my black angel.

I woke and the raven was gone

It turned back into a wheelchair,

Nature is only a footstep away

If only I could walk.

The light floods into my room

And creates a shadow of rain rippling.

They say an English-mans home is his

Castle and this hellhole is mine.

Its 2009 and I live in a middle age, limbo

All I can do is cry,  I cant even commit suicide.

I’ve got to fit into an able-bodied timetable,

I piss in a bottle each day and wheel-

Chair a wheelchair:  I’m as low as a spider

Or a mouse.  Wood louse and beetles highway

My floor, shell-shocked noble beasts.

The blue is crying from my eyes into

The reservoir of loss.

I’ve been waiting a lifetime for happiness

And four years for contentment.

I know these images come up again and again

But there’s nothing else in my life only

Torment and pain.  This is only half a poem

From half a man

THE BLACK HOLE POEM

For Stephen Hawkins

1.

This is the theory of everything.

life begins as a poem.

‘The source, eternity  darkness

 within darkness’, the Tao Te Ching.

a letter of light comes from negativity

and the universal poem is formed

radiating light from dark

and love from hate.

2.

I woke from the darkness of a bad dream.

Why was I witnessing such darkness?

It was like a cancer or a plague.

I was afraid to go back to sleep

I lay there listening to the rain thinking

maybe this went further back?

to Dostoyevsky or Van goghs time

Maybe time is timeless?

like world war one or Adolf Hitler’s name.

Maybe this is as Nietzche said

‘i’ll turn this muck to gold’.

This is the shadow of my event horizon.

A KILL HOUSE

Death: blood guts and brain

All pulped into a grey/white

And cured into a pudding.

A skip of swimming maggots

Above skinned coats of hide.

Pig’s shot and the squeal

Cut and torn from their throats.

Dipped in a bath of scolding

Water and the layer above

Blubber shaved, the parts

Hung in the window like

Decorations on hooks.

Memory hangs like a crucifix

A blood dried landscape

apron-ed on a sawdust floor.

LIGHT LUNCH

These are words dancing on a page

Portraying a catalogue of Hodgkin’s paintings

Under a blue moon a transparent screen

Of colour, a garden of delight.

A face I almost know along these streams of light

Rippling patios and sculptured daffodils

A light lunch, life on a plate.

A lonely spaced interior occupied by a sphere

a framed sky beside a garden of everyday lines

In a world of art in this cafeteria of people

feeding on jealousy, gossip and hope.

Sculpted dreams in a letter of mooned memory,

Humanised movement in a hot country

Swimming in the bay of Naples

Water-falled foliage of misting vibrancy.

In a honeymoon suite, waking in another world

Beside a small good thing that transports a wreath

A glass vase and me reflected from a valley

Looking down at a riveria or an Indian sky,fruit,rain.

A monsooned tangent in tangiers, a splash of paris or italy

a lovers leap in the dark, a water-falled snapshot.

A painting reflecting these words in stilled life

Rain from a bedroom window in the evening in Scotland.

A Blur Of Light

The branches replicate

the landscape, car lights

on the motorway. 

Mans DNA is

but a snapshot

a kaleidoscope.

through the glare

of autumn sun

I see red and green

and orange and blue

spotlights on this road.

My stage.

THE LIGHT ON THE STONES

I retrace your final journey now in a blue car,
Not black, alone on the motorway.
Passing the Maze prison the stench of my engine
Overheating is like gunpowder, spent shells,
Lingering, your dream of Irish freedom.

I climbed the mountain graveyard
Above the violent divided the city,
Above the peace-line that stood between us
In the living -room.

Your plot all weeds,
And wild grass cries out for order.
The fallen wooden cross bears no name;
But you are there. Like a sculptor
With clay I reach inward, my hands
As delicate as salmon wings riding
The white water, struggling
The strong currents of grief.

I brush the soiled tears from your eyes
And you wake in me, swimming
And glistening in mine. My hands
Shape the clay moulding our wounded past,
Emerging in the light on the stones.

What The Doctor Said   by raymond carver


He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong


- Raymond Carver 

A FOX THOUGHT
for Ted Hughes

I imagine a landscape of your poems:
A sacred wood, a Pagan burial ground
Where the eyes of the wild life shine
Blood red devouring it's prey.

Surrounded by the darkness of gothic tales.
Cold moons fall on the winter trees
Drifting behind the black sheet
Of a perpetual November sky.

Winter soil on your chalk white flesh
Deep in the womb of your savage earth.
The nonchalant delight of your toil
Free from the vulvitis noose.

That something else is alive unseen
Black velvet festhers oited in crude sway
Within black rainbows and peck the grubs
From your birds eye tombed vision.

Rain from a broken gutter spout
Unclogging earth and bits of sky,
Your poems gush, cold delight,
The purification of a stagnant well.

FOXHOLE

During that war

I was deep in that

Foxhole in the attic

wallpapered

in propaganda

on the front line

hearing and feeling

every bomb and bullet

as if that war was mine.

Lying here in 2009

shooting my head out

during this pause of peace.

Thinking, what was all that for? 

I’m lucky I didn’t grow

into a bitter man 

I think there’s a little

shell-shock in my family .

Why am I still in this foxhole?