WITNESS
If I bear witness of myself
That witness is not true
There is another who bears witness
And that witness is you.
You are a burning and shining light
My only reason to rejoice
You gave me hope where there was none
You brought sanity to my voice.
If now you should wish to leave me
Where is there another who will believe me?
When I shout out to the heavens up above
That what saved me then, and will do so again
Is nothing other than unconditional love.
THE WAY WE WERE
The picture house is full of it tonight;
‘A TEAR JERKER…THE WAY WE WERE.
See that old woman?
She has three carrier bags of it
To comfort her in her doorway.
Belfast Johnny has two bottles
Of it in his greatcoat pocket
And eight shiny photos of it
Bridging the gaps in his shoes.
The preacher ladles out doses of it
With hot soup. Georgie Best,
Rock-n-Roll, wedding vows,
They are all part of it.
The past follows you around:
Like a faithful old dog
It never leaves your side.
All available on amazon #amwriting
BUNKER ON PORTLAND BILL
This windowed concrete slab
Touching the hedgerows
Bunkered in leaf-strewn soil
Chivvies me
Muskets were reddened here
By shorter men than I
Defenders of a long-gone realm
Stooped between fissured ceiling and creviced floor
What mayhem bedlamed this rocky causeway?
Its cannons foddering the deep
The stun of steel slamming granite
The stench of gunfire turning stomachs
Loose limbs cluttering pathways
Death hovering
All quiet now on this promontory;
Sheep nibbling, tea and scones in the old armoury
Picture postcards of battles fought and won
Day-trippers picnicking
In the shadows cast by the big guns
GOING ROUND THE SUN AGAIN
Going round the sun sixty eight times
Takes some doing
Even if you are merely a passenger.
The first time round was really a blur
No sense at all that we were
Doing almost seventy thousand miles an hour.
Mother said I screeched most of the way
And that the snow piled high
For months every day.
Even the tenth spin;
I don’t recall a lot of that
Except that it was the year mother got fat
For a while, anyway
And then she was thin again.
The years stretched to decades
Still round and round we went
Sometimes I travelled in the company of steel bars
And sometimes I journeyed with the stars.
And there were times when writers came to say
Becket, Behan, Millar, Hemingway
Of course the children came too.
But for many years I have tripped with you.
My father got to number sixty nine;
I wonder how many rounds will be mine?
taken from my poetry collection ’67 PLUS’
available @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
THE GREEN FORGOTTEN VALLEYS
Those green forgotten valleys,
No longer can be seen
Lying hidden behind the tall fir and larch
That have made these brown hills green
Relentlessly marching down the hills
Burying everything in their wake
The dead are long gone from this place
The pike no longer in the lake
The houses just hollow shells now
Where the past ghosts eerily through
The vacant windows and doors
With rotted frames and jambs that once were new.
Back then there was no silence, only the sound
Of human laughter, and bird-calls to each other
The dogs growling at a wayward sheep.
And children’s scrapes kissed better by their mother
Nature is having the last laugh now
Soon there will be no trace of us at all
As the trees come marching down the hillside
No one hears the lonesome curlew’s call.
GWYNETH STEAM-CLEANS IT
Gwyneth steam-cleans it
A powerful internal cleanse
That balances the hormonal levels.
This boil-in-the-bag kind of technology,
Brought by your Guru to you,
Where you sit on some kind of apparatus
And absorb a combination
Of infrared and mugwort,
Is all the rage
In this gadget-filled age.
Methinks this vaginal steaming
Gives ‘getting all steamed up ‘
A rather eye-watering meaning!
DEFRAGGING THE SCANDISK
All this talk about the mathematical concept of infinity
As if it was a numbers game
Real numbers, that is
Not those sets of integers
Or Cardinalities
Favoured by the current crop of God-botherers
Lemniscate my arse
Stop going on and on and on
Infinity is not a number
When you’re gone, you’re fucking gone
PRESENT
Where has the present gone?
Time melts in our hands
Fleeing before we can touch it
Gone in the instant it lands.
TAKE NOTHING BUT THE PICTURES
Our minds are all we have
They are all we have ever had
Be they good or bad
As my thoughts wander towards my life
I feel an energy deep inside
A life-force gathering momentum
Like an onrushing, incoming tide.
There’s a power that will not be denied
And a direction I feel I must go
And it doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things
If the momentum is fast or slow
For no matter how small something may seem
To others it may be a huge overpowering dream
Whose connection is infinite.
Happiness cannot be taught
Nor love bought
So if you must go
Take nothing but the pictures in your mind
And leave nothing but your footprints behind
My Writing Life 