These 4 works are by street artists, BAMBI,PLASTIC JESUS, KING ROBBO, PURE EVIL. The works themselves speak more eloquently than any words of mine could.
A lot of people never use their initiative because nobody ever told them to – BANKSY
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ABOUT SINGING
ABOUT SINGING
An unsung land is a dead land
Forget the song
And the land will surely die.
Our forebears, though mostly illiterate,
Made music that can still make us cry
Musical phrases, like a map reference,
And the land read as a musical score
Where singing the land
Has the crowd calling out for more.
The song couplets stretch across tectonic plates
Just like mountains stretch across continents
And someone waving as we pass through endless gates.
*
Pale sand, red rock, burning fire
Everything your heart may desire
Mapping the music
to which everything transcends
This is where the story begins not ends.
Religion, pagan or Christian
Permeating everything, blending,
People sympathetic and synthetic,
Careless and unknowing of secular beginning
Or religious ending.
All the colours of the rainbow
Dressed in human clothing
Aisling, dreang, radharc
And the gift of seeing what isn’t there
When the songs are left unsung
Who is then left to care?
CURE FOR WRITER’S BLOCK
CURE FOR WRITER’S BLOCK
Saying Zanzibar seven times
Very slowly
Is good for writer’s block
Z-a-n-z-i-b-a-r, Z-a-n-z-i-b-a-r
Zzz-aa-nn-zzz-iiii—-
Fuck, fuck, fuck
my books are available on http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
THE SONGLINES
SONGLINES
Labyrinth of impossible pathways
Meandering across Australia
Singing the Aborigines home
Singing out the names of every
Bird, bee and tree
Singing rook and river
Singing you and me
Singing all the world
Into being.
A dreaming track
A path across the land
Or sometimes the sky
Creator-Beings dreaming
Songs, stories, dances, paintings
Petrosomatoglyphs on the land
Leaving huge footprints behind
Navigating vast distances
Through the parched interior
Language no barrier
Melodic contours in song
Passing over the land
Rhythmically beating out the jives
Where the spirits of unborn children
Sing to keep the land alive
Chatwin tells us how it was
The songlines stretching across the eons
People singing their lives into existence
Following signs their ancestors
Had tuned to perfection.
Their roads invisible to us
No traces we could follow
No marks we could discern
No bulldozer dented this terrain
No tarmac spread for…
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THE WILD WEST
THE WILD WEST
The Wild West has migrated east
The Middle East near and far
Where the horse has been superseded
By the pick-up, the land cruiser and the car
They race across vast deserts firing bullets in the air
If there’s a name on any bullet
Well, no one seems to care
Shooting up the town was once the pastime of the bad guys
Now it is blowing up the houses
And killing little girls and boys.
The bombs rain down on everyone and everything
Where once it was just arrows
Fired by some pesky redskin
Looking down the barrel of a gun
Can be intimidating
When it’s eighteen foot long
There are no six-guns or shotguns any more
But rocket launchers, machine guns
And others of such enormous bore
Playing cowboys and Indians was once a pleasant game
But when your opponent must be beheaded
Then it isn’t quite the same.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming; “Holy Jesus! What are those goddamn animals?”
This is the opening paragraph to Hunter S Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. With an opening like that you couldn’t help but want to read on. It’s a crazy, fictional account of a trip to Las Vegas to investigate the dark side of the American Dream. Fuelled with boot full of drugs, Hunter and his ‘Samoan attorney’ engage in a manic, surreal tour of the sleaze capital of the world.
His next book, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail, has a similar premise, though it’s a factual account of a year spent on the campaign trail during the 1972 Us Presidential election with the likes of Nixon, Agnew, Wallace, Humphries, McGovern, Muskie etc. This book brought about the term ‘Gonzo journalism’, where the writer himself is just as much part of the story as his subjects. Perhaps he is even the STORY. We follow Hunter following the candidates, stoned/pissed out of his mind much of the time, trying to make sense of what is going on. We also see the corruption, the double-dealing, the thuggery that is all part and parcel of one of the great circus’s of modern America.
Hunter S Thompson was born in Lousville Kentucky in 1937, eventually becoming a journalist with Rolling Stone, where several of his books were serialized before being published. He once spent a year living and riding with Hells Angels before writing a book about them – Hells Angels: The Strange And Terrible Saga Of The Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs – which made his name internationally. He was known for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs, his love of firearms and his contempt for authoritarianism, and remarked that, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
While suffering a bout of health problems, Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67. Per his wishes, his ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by his friend, Johnny Depp, who starred in two films made of his books.
DEAD POETS SOCIETY
POETIC LICENCE
Dead poets come in all shapes and sizes
Poetic licence reigns in my head
I have my TV, but no TV licence
Could I use my poetic licence instead?
CAFE KNITTING
CAFE KNITTING
In the cafe, sitting
Sipping coffee, knitting
One purl, one plain.
Six women, three men
One man gets up,
gathers his stuff,
And leaves with this refrain;
‘We must do this again’
see my latest collection of poems @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/67-Plus-collection-Tom-OBrien/dp/1500812250/ref=la_B0034OIGOQ_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408093399&sr=1-11
THE SINGULARITY
THE SINGULARITY
The singularity or
To be more precise
The technological singularity,
This thing for techno-utopians
Looking for immortality,
Is it real?
The singularitarians are banking
On it being so,
Seemingly willing to stay alive
For long enough,
By fair means or foul,
To benefit from this man-made God
That grants transcendence.
Artificial intelligence rules
They hope, despite
The doomsayers and techno-dystopians
Who claim it will malevolently bring about
The end of the world.
The end of civilisation as we know it
History and Hollywood are on their side;
Frankenstein, Skynet, the Matrix
Are their testimonials
When AI exceeds human intelligence
Everything changes
A smart AI breeds a smarter AI…and so on
Ad-infinitum, perhaps,
Leaving human intelligence without comprehension.
Driverless cars
Automated financial transactions
Language translation systems
Already better and faster than humans,
The list grows bigger daily.
Who needs humans, really?
THE SHINY RED HONDA…read first chapter
THE SHINY RED HONDA
Chapter one
I was thirteen tall and gangly when I first pulled on long trousers. What a relief that was; I was the longest streak of misery you were ever likely to see in the short ones. It was my last year at the National school in Newtown and the Master used every opportunity to drag me around the classroom shouting “just because you wear long trousers now O’ Brien, don’t think it makes you any smarter”. I wasn’t and it didn’t, but the Master was a law unto himself so I just kept my gob shut. There were discussions about what, if any, further education I was to get. Dungarvan was out I heard my father say; it was too far away and the fares were too expensive. That only left the ‘Tech in Portlaw – and that seemed to totter from one financial crisis to the next.
We were poor I guess; no running water, no toilets, to TV, no car…you name it we didn’t have it. But then, money wasn’t as important as it is nowadays. If you had enough to live on you were doing well. If you didn’t you wouldn’t starve because the countryside was abundant in most of the things needed to survive. Even the poorest cottage had half an acre of land attached, and enough spuds, cabbage and other vegetables could be grown to keep a family from the poorhouse. Hens provided eggs every day, a pig could be fattened and killed; and if you couldn’t afford turf or coal, well, there was plenty of wood scattered about… Continue reading
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