WHEEL-CHAIR ART

COLOURFUL BLACK BLOOMS

For Franky

I woke this morning to cold water music trick-

Ling my room full of black full stop blooms.

That’s what i‘ve surfaced to every morning
for ten years, a symmetry of black full stop
blooms to start my day, like womb dreams
blotches before my eyes.

I heard yesterday my friend Frankie died, Frankie

Was in my stroke group, I remember that smile
behind his roll-later handing me a cup of tea
and sitting beside me and the woman who took
nine strokes that you saw in her eyes just like
the colour of iris’s blooming in my head.  

 I had to stop going it was so depressing when those
friends began to work my mind when I closed my blue
door alone, that place wasn’t a nice place, I woke to that

symmetry of un-colour everyday like the colourful wall-

paper of my youth.  Why is life so harsh, we

have to have a release mechanism to

let our friends go. 

I always remember those blooms from my child-

hood like a wreath for Frankie.

I’m there in spirit mate.  The cold water music sounds like

a cortege, why is life such a sad son of a bitch.

I’ll always remember them blooms those colourful black

Embers of life, my funeral pyre, his smile will trip you in

The long grass.

 

            POETRY IS LIKE SUNSHINE ITS FREE

It all began the day my Father died, when they lowered his coffin into the ground, he gave me the gift of life.  He was the catalyst like the last piece of the puzzle that formed within me, the final stanza in the poem that had been within me from day one.  I don't remember to much of England, just that those first six years were full of love peace and security that held me together during those times of war on the streets of Belfast in the early seventies.  A time of total confusion being put out of our home by an angry mob carrying the flag of my country, a little English boy bullied in the playground until I kicked back and fought my way into the community.  The English son of Irish parents who moved back to my fathers home in 1967, an English boy growing into an Irish republican family.

The clarity of wonder in the undercurrents, as if the soil that surrounded him in burial became the sea where I almost drowned as a boy, a seven year old running for ice cream.
I slipped by the boat-port and went head over heels into the water, struggling to grasp the ledge of the world, I fell exhausted through the water it was so beautiful and serene in there dancing with the seaweed in the worlds current.
A passing tourist seen my blurred image and dived in to drag me out and pump water from my lungs, administering the kiss of life, I awoke with a crowd around me.

'Where is the ice cream', said my brother and I told him of almost drowning on the way losing the money in the ocean.
we ran off with our buckets and spades to catch crabs in the
rock-pools.

I never thought of that day until now fifty years later when I realised that my fathers death was the culmination of so many incidents that brought life into my words.  The reason why I was given my mothers Dublin gift of turning negative to positive vibes.  He was the reason why I came down the motorway in a blue car not black from Hannastown graveyard on the hills above Belfast , having words with myself or maybe he was having words with me.  'Hey boy, get your act together and do something with your life, don't be just a message boy or a bin-man or a screen-printer or an electronics engineer.  He is the reason I made an office to write in a box room to read and re-read and write and re-write for ten years before my words seeped out into the publishing world while rearing a young family, telling my wife and friends I wanted to be a writer, they must have thought I was mad.

The words of my hero Ray Carver began to forge in my mind
like the language of his ordinariness with the words of Frost and Yeats and all the greats of literature like Wallace Stevens who said, 'The theory of poetry is the theory of life'.  Maggie thatcher the bitch done me a favour and made me unemployed to read all the great literature in the library system.  The reason why I went to, 'The poet's house', to study under great poets like Jimmy and Janice Simmons, Medbh mc Guckian and Martin Mooney.  To meet and talk to other writers on a one to one and feel on one to one with them.  The reason why my words broke into the world of writing, Jimmy Simmons and Janice awarded me a scholarship to do an M.A. degree on creative writing, poetry.
Jimmy I haven't even got an o' level, don't worry he said and sent a letter with my words to Lancaster university.  I swore from that day, because Jimmy and the poets house believed in me, I would teach creative writing free and give others the chance awarded to me, I'll never forget him and the words he said to me, 'your poems are your autobiography'.

THE LIGHT ON THE STONES

Edited by Jimmy Simmons

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.



RAY RIVER

Although I'm here in Donegal and not Yakima

Washington state, or in Dublin reclining

On the Banks of the Grand Canal.


I feel a sense that Raymond Carver

And Patrick Kavanagh are here with me

Following the Ray River to the sea

Of this poem.


The winds sway the reeds reflecting

On the rippling water, on a bend a stream

Flows into the Ray, cascading on the rocks.


I love the music of this place, the silent

harmonies of the source, the spring

Falling from high on Muckish Mountain

To where I sit translating nature to poetry.


Further on another stream flows in ever

So quiet, secretly subtle, like the clarity

Of wonder in the undercurrents.


I'm here at the sea, the reservoir.

Tory Island looms black, remote above

The wild white waves, poetry echoing

Across the golden strand.


The colours of a rainbow rise from the sea,

The intangible essence that lingers here.

The blending colours fade to blue

And I feel a slight tingle on my fingers.


I look down to see a multi coloured spider

Crawling across my hand and the open

Pages of this notebook, as if that

were its only purpose.

The clarity of wonder comes from these poems written for my M.A. at 'The poets house' by the Ray river in Falcarragh, Donegal.

 

BLOOD RED

Then

She kissed the infant in the basket

Left him by a blood red door

And thundered off into the night

Along the cobbled street to some un-

Known freedom.  That was nineteen

Thirty’s Belfast, this is 2014.  All the birds

Go their own way, the flying black, brown

and monochrome sons of the north like

navigators of their own mind.

Now

He wasn’t nested and nurtured, he didn’t

Even know his own mind.  Just left there,

Abandoned in a two up two down, terr-

Aced world.  The bastard son of a bast-

Tared son who doesn’t know his own mind

But he’s writing this down in the hope

That one day this will be true and yes-

Terday won’t happen today.