a cul-de-sac of poems

etched from inside out

bed-rail piss-pot.  The monkey-

pole shadowed my wall like
a modern day gallows, all these
broken down hyphenated words of wonder.

My electric profile bed lifted me to forty-five 
degrees and I stumbled like a thunder-bird
figure into the wheelchair.  Erratically I fall
into and out of my day.  The end of my story

is the beginning of my tale , I dwell on the edge
of sorrow, on the cusp of suicide.

I dreamed that someone was there
I woke to silence the hum of  the wheel-
chair charging the poets essential loneliness.

I dreamed another world
another street an inner music
I was dreaming poetry
I went deeper
into the shallows
and found another form.

1.


  
       SILKEN

       A single rose emerges.

Plants its indelible mark

   on the corner of my eye.

I want to cut you off.

       Place you on the surface

of my dreams caress your stem

    and smell the fragrance

          that secretes.

            I have you

                 here

            on the bed

              extracting

           Leaves marked

              like freckles

             on your back. 

            Your
quintessential

           silk

        on my lips

       drop

        lets

     of summer

              rain

              fall from

             The petals. 

I place you in a glass on my windowsill. 

The young thorn pricks my finger inserts

Beneath the skin reminding me how to hold

you honestly, tenderly.  I know your vibrant

colour wont last but beside it on the stem

         is another bud to bloom.

SHE

She captures the light

Like a grouped collection

Of solar panels painted

by Picasso.

She’s a necessity, a gulp of water

When thirsty a droplet of joy

in my mood that drastically

changes my spectrum of colour.

She’s life and love

You don’t need the word                              

Happiness.











WHAT PATRICK KAVANAGH SEEN

 or a disused house in county Louth.

  Just up Duffy’s lane over the fields towards Mucker

Kavanagh country the borderlands just a milefrom Hack-
balls- cross, through his poplars over his wooden gate
and I was lost in an old abandoned cottage
it was as if the people had just walked out the door like
a film set of Patrick Kavanaghs catholic Ireland.

I was lost in a world of sacred hearts blood from thorns

and sepia-toned pictures of Jesus, bloody icons littered

every step I took, It seemed as if I had walked into 

his poems in memory of his Mother and Father.  

I didn’t even know what a poem was then,

all I knew was he had the jack of a car and I had 

the branch of a tree and we were out on a mission.

                                                                         

We believed that we were doing border patrols for our     

childhood force the I.R.B.P. Irish republican border patrol

with the jack of a car the branch of a tree and Muttley

the O.C. of dogs.  He was beaten kicked and rifle butted

for years by the British, he hated men in uniform so the cattle

and sheep were men in uniform being chased through the fields

sometimes he got a little close and got the odd kick to the head.

We we all traumatised by Belfast but we were running a free.