Home - A Poem that Somehow did Not make it onto a Poetry Ireland Poster on the Theme of Home...!

Home

 

 

 

A place that is all the more unrecognisable now

 And where poor migrants arrive in the middle of the night

Deposited outside former hotels and country manors

Outnumbering certain townsfolk that wake up uncomfortably to them.

 

A place where the streets of the capital are littered

With tents of the homeless set up outside government buildings

And where the guards police with their hands in their pockets

When they not are called out by the government to arrest peaceful protesters

 

Who are merely trying to assert their most basic human rights.

Home, a place where the leaders are now spoken of as "Elites"

As they are now so mistrusted for once elected they are merely full of deceit.

 

Home, a place which I don’t recognise any more

Where everyone’s a poet, being equal and all,

But somehow I don’t bleedin’ buy any of it.   

https://www.poetryireland.ie/poetry-day-ireland/discover-poetry/poetry-day-ireland-2026-poster-poems?mc_cid=d44ed2ecde&mc_eid=dd01598669

 

Baudelaire on Romanticism

                                                    The Setting of the Romantic Sun

 

 

 

Isn’t the Sun beautiful when everything freshly awakes,

Like a silent implosion exploding in greeting !

And so Happily then are they who with love

Can bid its departure daily, as in a dream !

 

I remember!... I saw everything, flower, source and furrow,

Fainting beneath the eye like a heart which is palpitating…

-        Run towards the horizon, it is late, run quickly,

To catch at least an oblique ray of light!

 

But I pursued the God in vain which was retiring;

Irresistible night was now establishing its empire,

Dark, humid and funerary and full of trembling;

 

An odour of the tomb and of darkness reigned,

And my heavy feet trod on the edge of the swamp

That was peppered with unforeseen toads, mollusc cold.

 

The Persians - an extract- after Aeschylus

 

                                                                           

Chorus :  Lord Donald, teeming West’s would be Master,

                Now trumpets daily his X

                With his Psychopathic Minister of War

                 Whose generals systematically retire,

                  The confidence in their government

                  Unlike the price of gold, plummets

                  Inwardly and as swiftly as a doomed

                 And as expensive as an F 35,

                Un-dazzlingly and as ungodlike

                With Hamster like eyes and candy child

                Looks, all Sugar-Daddied and Epstein

                Stained, calcified in dental horror;

                A laundry list of sailor’s complaints

                Stoking fuel fumes in the Persian Gulf,

                No longer hurtling chariots nor rocket fires

                Of famed Washington, but announcing laundering

                Issues and toiletries before docking in fair Cypress

                While Ares, the real God of War,

                Bulleting all foes to Hell and back,

                And a strait of men in white jackets

                Who’ll face them down?

                With what weapons, and with what tele-screen

                 And battle cries; can they open the Sea?

                Meanwhile Persia’s army – the Persians !

                The unstoppable Persians!.....

               

                    

 

TRANSMETROPOLITAN - Extract from my novel in progress The Heraclitean

 

 

 

Transmetropolitan

 

 

 

Black only had to hear the first few frenetic chords strumming from the very first track on Red Roses for Me and he was back in Kilburn in the mid to late eighties, a bottle of the oldfortified wine in his pocket with visions of Kerouac playing out through his mind… the poor bastards in the squat, all stoners crashed out on a night smoking Hashish looking at Paddy totally uncomprehendingly, for he is on pure alcohol and cigarettes while they are caught up in the sweet early morning languor of the cosmos, but Paddy is unforgiving, he just hears the pumping bass lines of the riff and the snare drums rattling while Shane puke talks and sings about storming the BBC…

 

What willya have?

I’ll have a pint

I’ll have a pint with you, Sir!

 

His feet tap tapping on the old wooden floor, carpet motifs all paisley in design half faded their exotic eastern promise just as jaded and misspent as Said had so eloquently said, all oriental visions of the Other stoking mere subjugating White power fantasy. Though looking around him Black could tell that his own hours an even minutes were ticking off to finitude, the surrounding bodies around him having long ago since lost patience with his Mad Irish in London fantasies. Well, fuck em’ he thought. He had always known that it would be the case with most of them, mere sheep for the most part their mutton like minds fuelled with ecstasy tabs and House Music. Raves mon. That’s where their minds were at, what was left of them at least, depraved hedonistic cunts that they were; all cheap sex, betrayal, violence and alcoholism. Fuck it, he thought leaving them lying there on the morning carpet sun streaming in illuminating the debauch like a poem by Baudelaire or possibly Rimbaud. Who the fuck cared anyway, Paddy Black was long gone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBJ8C6jWhVA

( Lyrics Copyright, Shane MacGowan, The Pogues, 1984. )  

The Inheritance

 

                                                                                     

The Inheritance

 

I disdain to be published by ideological publications,

The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland and their associative presses;

Good shite, when did poetry in Ireland become so respectable,

Even polished with all the veneer of corporate marketing ?

 

Where so called poets in their hundreds, possibly thousands,

All minority groups, of course, from trans, gay, non-binary

Black and above all ….Feminist ;

One writes with a clitoris these days, darling, not a penis!

 

To hell with that. Everyday, I reconstruct my Oedipal origins,

Eroticizing my way along the quotidian.

Out there on the plains of absolute boredom

 

Are stationed an army of women who are truly Vitruvian;

And their aquiline limbs sculpted a very specific way

Invoke both the caves of Lascaux and Baudelaire.

Dark Matter

Dark Matter

 

 

The absence is an ever -expanding wound

Moving outward in concentric ripples or waves,

Expanding ever outward into the unlimited darkness…

 

The darkness, which is equally reflected inward,

Keeps spiralling in a parallel vortex as the outward continuum…

Thus, caught in a double gyre, woman moves.

 

Her bitch reacts, she a rogue asset doomed

To be an agent for progeny and the procreation of the race.

She seeks out a mate or partner in a systematic process of elimination

 

Till she finally comes across a potential mate,

Which she assesses fulfilling multiple criteria.

While you, ye dumb fuck, y’ just wanna splurrrge!

 

 

Armitage Shanks! ( 021225 )

 

                                                               

                                                                    Francis Bacon, from Triptych, 1973. 

Armitage Shanks!

 

 

 

O the solemness of the solemn solemnity,

O  upon my rostrum, my heart skips a beat beat;

May my platitudes be as unending

As the cascades of turds dropping into my Golden Throne!

 

“We’re doing everything we can to return our …”

The sphincter contracts and expands,

From labials to labials expelling shit, expelling air;

T’is all the same in the mouth of a sycophant.

 

And, yes, what of John F. Kennedy and the Monroe Doctrine?

And what of NATO expansion in all of it?

150 000 000 turds are falling into the golden pool!

 

And yes, what of John F. Kennedy and Marlyn Monroe?

“Don’t Cry for me Hibernia!”

Egad, I think I’ve got another stool!