SOMEWHERE BETWEEN US IS A ROOM
Somewhere between us is a room
It has six sides and no roof
‘Why is it open to the sky?’ you ask
I myself wonder why
But rather than show my ignorance
I say it is because it has no door
‘But I am in a wheelchair’, you say
‘I cannot be expected to pole vault myself inside’
‘I can make it four-sided’, I say
‘And we can use the two spares as ramps’
‘But it is eight foot tall’, you wail
‘Okay, forget it’, I say
‘It was only for a coffee anyway’.
PUT THAT FAG OUT!
Now Jeremy Clarkson
Is someone
You could pee on
Particularly
When he is not on fire.
SWEET TEA
Every month a ritual enactment
For the rent man
Mother, floury nose and doughed-up hands,
Smiling practice-perfect
Us children banished to the scullery,
A whispered ‘don’t you laugh now’
A silent prayer
And the teapot ready
Beside the rent book.
Every month ‘good morning Mrs Moran’
Lovely day to be sure’ and
YesI will have a cup of tea, thank you’
And every month a glowing red nose,
Lit up like a hot coal.
Every month silence from the scullery
Until the day little Tommy fell off his perch
And tumbled through the scullery door
To land in a heap in front
Of that illuminated face.
And then mother turning,
The sugar bowl in her hand
Saying – much too casually –
‘How many sugars would you like on your nose?’
PAPA’S TRIBE
The wives and mistresses
All mealy grins and doughy skins
With their ever-wet holes
And their second-hand sins
Watching as the mirror butterflies their faces
Twinned with depthless images of themselves
Wronged women staring back in anguish
Each flopped vacuously on vacant shelves
Leftovers or left behinds
None are sure of which is which
All of them are certain of one thing though;
It’s one of the others
That is the biggest bitch.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
COMING OF AGE
Twenty one years of it;
I thought you might cry enough
You know – the tough gets going
When the going gets tough
But not a bit of it;
We are still going strong
I have wronged you on and off
But you have righted all the wrong
I hope you never get sick of it;
That love will carry you on
Me? I’m already in the thick of it
Clearing the path for another twenty one!
MURMURATIONS OF LOVE
There was a starling sky
Yesterday over Rye
The arc of cloudless blue
Quite frequently changing its hue
as we watched the songbirds fly-by
You and me walking hand in hand
Along this wild and windy headland
The starlings singing high above
Sketching their murmurations of love.
Patrick Kavanagh was born in the village of Enniskeen, Co Monaghan on 21st October 1904. The son of a shoemaker and small farmer, he moved to Dublin at the age of 35, where he lived in poverty for most of his life. He survived on handouts, bits of journalism, and being supported for a time by his younger brother, Peter, who was teaching in the city. On Raglan Road is a poem about his doomed love-affair with Hilda Moriarty. Hilda was middle-class, the daughter of a wealthy Kerry doctor; he was a penniless poet, uncouth and unwashed, of small-farmer stock – indeed, a small farmer himself, who had forsaken the plough for the pen. His finest poem ‘The Great Hunger’ was so controversial that he was threatened with prosecution under the obscene publications act. Always a controversial figure, he was hated as much as loved in Dublin, and his long-running feud with Brendan Behan is well-chronicled. To Behan he was’ the fucker from Mucker’, while Patrick maintained that the only journey Brendan ever made was ‘from being a national phony to becoming an international one’.
ON RAGLAN ROAD
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
SAYING IT IS THE HARD PART
The secret is to be casual;
Matter-of-fact words can
Sometimes inflame the senses;
Not straight away, perhaps,
But later, when the hurly-burly
Of conversation has had time to sink in
Maybe the trick is not to be seen saying it;
‘I love you’ is such a difficult phrase
To force between clenched teeth
Fishing in Corolla Bay, The Outer Banks, North Carolina. My first try at fishing! The stripey giant on my line is called a DRUM – apparently! I did put it back when I unhooked it!
There’s a lot of controversy about cop- killer Harry Roberts being released soon. Some might remember that he shot dead 3 policemen during a robbery in Shepherds Bush in the 1960’s. Well, I was mistaken for Roberts during that time he was on the run; (he was subsequently discovered hiding out in Epping Forest). I was working in Barnet – quite close to Epping forest- in a pub and one day found myself surrounded by armed police in the public bar. Someone had reported they had seen Harry Roberts in the bar! Of course when they saw me and checked me out they realised it was a mistake. One of them said to me before they left, ‘don’t worry too much but you just saved yourself from being shot’! I needed a stiff drink after that I can tell you!
Oddly enough that wasn’t the end of the matter. In the late 1980’s, when I was living in Leytonstone in East London, I worked with a guy named John Roberts, and in the course of a conversation with him in the pub after work one evening he told me that Harry Roberts was his uncle. It’s a small world.
THE SHOOTING SEASON
“Let the slag have it Harry”, said Jack
“The bullet hit him just below the eye;
He slumped to the ground;
I could hear my heart thumping;
The air was electric”.
Those callous words are B movie speech
Yet the episode is of immense distress
A policeman – one of three-
Gunned down in broad daylight
On a street near Wormwood Scrubs
On August the twelfth
The glorious twelfth
The first day of the shooting season.
My Writing Life 