Extract from work in progress

 

 

Most People are Fucking Cunts

 

Most people are fucking cunts. That is the truth of the matter. I mean, instinctively, when someone approaches you in a public space what is your immediate reaction when they do? Do you sigh, internally, and think to yourself, “Now, what does this fucking cunt want?” or, do you smile with anticipation saying, “Now, who might this be?” 

If you are in the latter group, you are a naïve fucking cunt and I don’t want anything to do with you. You’re probably the kind of idiot that is all pervasive on social media apps like Face Fucking Buke!

You know those idiots that want to friend you and you have no idea who they possibly could be! Why would you do that, why in the name of god would you want to befriend and entire stranger who would then have access to all of your most private content, including most probably pictures of your family and friends?

Such is society today! I don’t get it. This shit could only have come out of the USA. Silicon Valley my ass! I was born in Cork in the Republic of Ireland in the late nineteen sixties so this means in extension that both my mother and father grew up under two arch cunts; namely Éamon de Valera and Bishop John Charles McQuaid.

Now, as you’re probably of that particular generation that grew up on purely visual images over overtly detailed written documentary evidence, why don’t you just Google those two names and go look at their visuals.

Tell me, what do you see? It’s all about the surface now baby, purely superficial superfluous informational content. Wouldn’t want a nice boy or girl like you now to start actually using the old grey cells. Why, that would almost be bordering on the almost criminal now, wouldn’t it! Thinking, now that’s a very dangerous exercise.

Take physiognomy, it used to be considered a science back in medieval times when basically what you saw in front of you – Facebook – was what you got. Just scroll down through them, all the thousands upon thousands of faces that you can see.

Go on scroll and scroll, the infinite loop that is what they call it, isn’t it! You can go on like that for infinity. Ingenious shit. Just go into any public space and they’re all at it. I remember about twenty or so years ago commuting into town and I remember very distinctly looking around one particular morning.

I was coming up on the DART from the southside. Back then I was living on the southside. Everyone had either hardbacks in the palm of their hands, not paperbacks, mind. Hardbacks! And they were not just sports biographies. You know, no they had history books, economic texts, political magazines, literary tracts, novels, and even poetry collections for God’s sake!

Now, everything is reversed. I’ve flipped to the northside, couldn’t handle all that middle class western aspirational bullshit, any longer. Now, I’m up here in a former Viking settlement founded back in the 8^th or 9^th century AD, and people on the commute are all doom scrolling on their fucking iPhones as if paper, not to mention books, never even existed!

 

Doom scrolling! It’s a fucking joke really as the world is literally going down the proverbial toilet bowl as I type, I mean literally! There are multiple wars and they are all somehow,  it would appear, related so that the world, in both the east and the west, would seem to be spiraling into an escalatory negative death drive, which is both extremely exciting and at the same time really bloody scary.

And, while all of this is going on… you have the whole WOKE thing still going on! I mean, it’s a fucking joke, the whole thing. On one side of the planet you have some poor bastard with a foot on his neck while someone else is slicing off his friggin’ ear, all LIVE – "Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!"

And then, in  another neck of the woods you have some pretentious asshole standing by a photocopier talking whole miles of horse shite about inclusion and inclusivity in the workforce and what s/he means by this is that s/he is actually standing on top of the heap looking down from their moral Olympus shitting in turn ten times of crap down on everyone else, and particularly if they have a fucking penis….!

To be continued 

Caliban

 

                                                                                      

Caliban

 

 

“So, you have a penis protruding between your legs,

Which means I take it you want to fuck me, at some stage!

What an absolutely revolting idea, how primitive!

You know, I can self-fertilize, and have a “wand”

 

For the other thing. Good God, I gave up

Fornicating with fools like you long ago!

I got tired of telling you to drop the seat,

Or to pay attention to me when I was speaking!

 

Who needs the aggravation… Besides, now I have

Friends on all the committees. We’re in power now!

And you poor fools can just fuck off and

 

Consider your history, make amends.

Crawl back to the table, on our terms!

For you now have become the new minority!”

 

 

de Vowels - poem

                                                                                       

 

 

de Vowels

 

 

With the first look you cut me cleanly,

Both assailant and rescuer,

Haemorrhaging now into Life

Like the Mystical Rose.

 

I now a cult of One, the eternal Loser –

An alchemist of old seeing

Symbols littering the universe

Leading me only ever onto You!

 

Keeping relics, these fetishes,

After the great abandonment,

As proof positive of your actual presence.

 

Making offerings on sacred feast days,

Holding weekly masses,

Praying to you alone, inside the Walled Garden.

 

 

Chris Murray's latest collection Her Red Songs, reviewed by The Gombeen

Her Red Songs

Chris Murray

Turas Press

( 87 pages)

 

If we start with the title, we must always start with the title, these are songs! The poet would seem to be reminding us of the very intimate connection between poetry and song, which I would say has largely been lost when one considers the amount of prose, as opposed to prosody, which has slipped into contemporary “poetry” these days. The irony being that while I write this, I am finishing an almost year long study into the prosody of the seldom read French novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline whose poetic lineage goes back to chanson de geste and Le Roman de la Rose of Frech medieval poetry and which was to have such a profound influence on not only western literature but on western notions of chivalry and what we understand in a modern sense as romantic ‘Love’ today!

The second thing I should like to point out is the dedication to the poet Evan Boland ( 1944-2020). Chris Murray has been curating Poethead now, a website that is dedicated to publishing the work of women writers and poets, though I should also point out that she has also published the work of men. Feminist though Chris Murray obviously is, she is not, thankfully, a man hater. She is essentially a humanist and this is born out in every sense by the multi-dimensioned nature of her writing.

The first cycle of poems, for example, are named after the ancient Roman deities or gods that were known as Lares. In Roman times, rather like in places like India today, gods were everywhere. Domestic Gods, in short. There was the god of the kitchen that one prayed to or worshipped in order to help one with one’s culinary endeavours. There were the gods of the garden, dwelling in the wells and in the plants themselves so that despite being a pagan society spirits, and so spirituality, was everywhere and I think this is a very useful key into unlocking the very complex and delicate structure of this latest collection of poetry by Chris Murray.

As with her previous collections, the poems in Her Red Songs are delicate micro-structures yet which prove themselves to be remarkably robust, as well. Murray the poet has a background that is as complex and multi-dimensional as her poetry. Being at one time chorister, stone mason as well as poet, these very different experiences inform her work. I think the stone mason is ever present working behind the scenes, as it gives her incredibly delicate imagery, as Murray is essential an imagist, the stoney flintiness and robust inscriptive sonority to each piece.

 

 

 

 

I.

 

Ferns, once

 

We awaken in our bodies,

their smooth hurt, winged.

 

The mourning dove awakens too,

her back to the city,

 

she curves into the rain.

 

 

There it is forever inscribed, the image! I can think of very few poets writing today in the English language who can imbue a poem in so few words with such power and force and yet with such incredibly delicacy. It is this twin act or power and delicacy, a Heraclitean element, that runs through not only the entire collection, but which also runs through the entire body of writing that Chris Murray has written to date. While I am on this point, when will a publisher in this country finally wake up and publish a selected works of this most remarkable poet, who has already several collections to choose work from to date. As there are recurring themes and techniques that readers who are familiar with the poet’s work will see in Her Red Songs, and if a selected works were to be brought into the light this very hallmark, the sign of a true poet, would be so readily seen.

For example, all of the rather curious punctuation typically involving colons : forward slashes // or even | or dashes - … all the very curious signs that Murray brings into her constructs are on display, indeed seem to take on an even more elaborate and altogether essential dimension in the work. Let me show you, here is another poem, complete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coda: Leaf // Settles

 

jewelling | nowhere

her    Garnets

tempering  |   scarlet

on     steel

sky –

a     Leaf

there

is