Author: gorgeousgael

NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING

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Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

This is the first verse of Stevie Smiths classic poem ‘Not Waving But Drowning’. That’s always the dilemna isn’t it? How to determine that the wave isn’t a cry for help. That brave smile could be a grimace in disguise, masking all kinds of pain and anguish. That stiff upper lip could be holding back a tidal wave of of worry.

Smith herself was often drowning when she appeared to be waving. Deserted by her father when she was three, she lived with her mother and her sister Molly in Palmers Green. She suffered from depression all her life and when her mother died when she was sixteen her aunt Madge moved in to look after her. She wrote in several poems that death ‘was the only god who must come when he is called’.

Stevie wrote  3 novels and 10 collections of poems during her lifetime and.although she never married, was said to have been George Orwell’s lover. She never quite abandoned the Anglican faith of her childhood, describing herself as a ‘lapsed athiest’, and one of her poems contains these lines; ‘there is a God in whom I do not believe/Yet to this God my love stretches’.  She died in 1971 aged 69.

might as well finish  ‘Not Waving but Drowning’!

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.      

FALL

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FALL

 Autumn mornings are best;

The sun smiling low over the gasworks

Flighty leaves browning the common

Kites lark-high over the tree-tops

Coffee and a roll in the old rectory

And you by my side

from my new collection of poetry ’67’.  http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/

 

RACISM AND BIGOTRY IN IRELAND

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BISEXUAL FATHER + RACIST NEPHEW + ABORIGINAL WIFE = RACISM AND BIGOTRY IN IRELAND

DON’T MISS THIS NEW PLAY

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Synopsis: The dysfunctional Kennedy clan are having a re-union. There’s the father, Con, a successful building contractor in London who has had to relocate back in Ireland because of tax irregularities in the UK.  Con is secretly bisexual, although not-so-secret from his wife, Marion, who has known it all along and kept quiet about it. His estranged son, Michael, turns up after five years in Australia with Cathy, his new aborigine wife.  To say his parents are surprised would be putting it mildly. His nephew, Jimmy, also turns up and it is soon apparent that his racist, bigoted views haven’t mellowed any as he has got older. We learn that he is there at Con’s invitation; his real reason being to spy on Marion, who Con suspects of having an affair. Jimmy also has his own agenda, selling crack/cocaine to the local drug users – a plan which backfires when the drugs, which he has buried in the back garden, are discovered by Michael, heightening the already tense atmosphere in the house. Add in JJ, construction manager for Con, whose attraction to Marion must be obvious to everyone except Con.

 

 

http://www.pentameters.co.uk/index.html

 

IN PRAISE OF MONARCHS

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IN PRAISE OF MONARCHS

 He dug ditches in obscurity

Raised ten children to maturity

When pushed he said;

‘I do the best I can. Life’s hard

On the working man, but I mustn’t complain

I’ve got my health, while there’s others

Who can’t stop dying for all their wealth.

All that stuff in China…I wouldn’t give it

If they changed my lot for Royalty I wouldn’t live it.

There’s more to life than being famous you know’.

ROTTEN REJECTIONS

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Here’s what some publishers said about books they rejected. THERE’S HOPE FOR US ALL YET!

ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
‘His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so.’

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence
‘for your own sake do not publish this book.’

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
‘an irresponsible holiday story’

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
‘an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.’

Watership Down by Richard Adams
‘older children wouldn’t like it because its language was too difficult.’

Crash by J G Ballard
‘The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.’

The Deer Park by Norman Mailer
‘This will set publishing back 25 years.’

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
‘Do you realize, young woman, that you’re the first American writer ever to poke fun at sex.’

The Diary of Anne Frank
‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.’

Lust for Life by Irving Stone
(which was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies)
‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’

The Spy who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
‘You’re welcome to le Carré – he hasn’t got any future.’

Animal Farm by George Orwell
‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA’

Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde
‘My dear sir,
I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.’

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
‘… overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.’

 

 

see all my books here:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent

 

PARTING

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PARTING

 The sun also rises over concrete

Over this puff-adder sky

And the pricked-up chimneys

Looking like piss-horns in the stark morning

 

There are no shadows yet

On this marbled plain

So tender in years

But so sparing with love

 

I shiver at the bus stop

Admiring this proliferation of granite;

So cold, so hard,

So like you….

 

 

DRINKERS WITH WRITING PROBLEMS

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BRENDAN BEHAN, seen here with Harpo Marx, often said ‘ I’m not a writer with a drinking problem, I’m a drinker with a writing problem’. His brother, Brian, saw it slightly differently;   ‘What Brendan really was was a painter with a writing problem. No matter in what country of the globe he resided, or how many luminaries he met, the would always be a painter in his soul . If he had remained one for his livelihood, he could still be alive today’. In other words it was the fame that killed him just as much as the drink.

This is a poem that Dominic O’Riordan wrote about Brendan

I remember him riding the air

A mixture of Puck and the goban Saor

With ruffled shirt and hair astray

In Grafton Street on a gusty day

Respectable gents and maiden aunts

Held tightly in their briefs and pants

Lest their bowels might be disturbed

Hearing genius roaring by

Language of love and obscenity

The words he uttered were very simple

“Your mind is as small as a knacker’s thimble,

Scarperer,joxer, fluther, brother

Hold your hour and have another”

SILENCE AT THE BAR

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SILENCE AT THE BAR

 The old man grimaced and silently imbibed his pint

His withered wife glared her whole life at him

And pointedly moved to a seat

At the far end of the joint

 

Two sons, forty and finicky,

Silently contemplated the following day’s races

While the daughter and son-in-law,

Long run out of things to say,

Blew smoke in each other’s faces.

 

Only the children were living;

The girl was chandelier-swinging

And the boy was table-top walking.

“Shhh!” said the mother,

“be quiet you two rascals,

We can’t seem to hear ourselves talking”

from my new book of poetry  – http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/

 

 

A FOOL AND HIS MONEY

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‘Only a fool writes for anything but money’. So said Samuel Johnson way back in the late 18th C.

 Samuel Johnson

 

I would venture to say that not a lot of writers have taken his advice, for there are a lot of fools writing today! Millions I would imagine. Mind you old Sam had a lot to say for most of his life. He never stopped spouting if the truth be told. Here are some more gems; The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.  How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?  I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.  A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Of course he had a distinct advantage over today’s scribblers; he had his own ‘gofor’, James Boswell, who followed him round jotting down every utterance, all of which were subsequently publisheed in Boswell’s  Life of Samuel Johnson. As a young man Boswell had moved from Scotland to London and met Johnson for the first time in 1763. The pair became friends almost immediately. Johnson eventually nicknamed him “Bozzy”.The first conversation between Johnson and Boswell is quoted in Life of Samuel Johnson as follows:

[Boswell:] “Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.”
[Johnson:] “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help”

Over the years, they met frequently, Boswell diligently keeping notes of their conversations in his journals, which were not published until 1791, when Johnson was already dead and Boswell himself nearing the end of his life.  Life of  Samuel Johnson has often been described as the greatest biography ever written.

James Boswell

Final quote by Johnson: ‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is’

 

 

PUT ANOTHER LOG ON THE TV

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            PUT ANOTHER LOG ON THE TV

            Talking gets harder each day:

            Smokeless zones and telephones

            Have killed the conversation

            Now our lies, laughs, truth and tears

            Have all been swallowed whole

            By another monster

            In another shiny console

 

            Rocking-horse to rocking-chair

            And somewhere in between

            The fireplace has become a flickering screen

            Glowering at the world

            Insisting on silence as it reward

 

            Granddad spat in the fire;

            I spit in your face;

            Old lies die hard.

from my new collection of poetry ’67’.  http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/