GILDED BIRDS
The only beauty left
Is the struggle for perfection
Beauty is asking to be used
Real beauty endures
Like a rhythm or a cadence
Or a sphere
Beauty is an unknown face
Somewhere, in that place
Where something has happened,
Or will soon.
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DAWNING
DAWNING
‘Silly old fool’, someone
Shouts in your wake
And in the brilliantly-lit
Cube of time ‘old’ is dangled
Before your eyes
And won’t go away
She called you old! And
In the instant it takes you
To turn around and see
The solitary young woman
Bend down to retrieve her parcel
It dawns on you that you are
Nearer the end than the beginning
Much nearer
It comes, not creeping in the dark,
But galloping unstoppably
Over the horizon
And you never see it
Silly old fool
JESUS SAVES
I wrote this piece of doggerel whilst watching a boring football game last night
JESUS SAVES
There is no doubt it is a penalty
A trailing leg caught the number nine
And upended him right on the spot.
Jesus shakes his head;
So stupido, our centre half
So bloody stupido.
Jose de Jesus will be our saviour
He tells himself
Blessing himself three times
Calling on his grandmother, his grandfather,
The Holy Ghost, Castro, Pancho Villa
And all the saints in Christendom.
The penalty taker glares at him
If looks were bullets he would be finito
He is stupido too, he thinks
Smiling his little smile.
He sways this way on jelly legs
Feints that way and flops his arms
The ball is struck, the aim is fine
But Jesus has read the striker’s line
And….oh yes….
Jesus saves – this time
UNTITLED
UNTITLED
An unmanned comet passed
By my window last night
Steering by our moon
Stealing love
Its journey will be long
from my new collection of poetry ’67’ – http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
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 others gain
No buildings stacked with pure disdain
To leave wrecked nature in their wake
The lines were left to all for free
If our blinkered eyes could only see.
Yarralin, Walujapi
Black-Headed Python
Rainbow Serpent
Native Cat Dreaming
Arranda, Kaititja, Kukaja
Unmatjera, Ilpara
Ley-di-ley-di-ley
Long lines
Ley-di-ley-di-ley
Songlines
BAD POETS SOCIETY
Wordsworth wrote The Prelude
And it was all right
But it was a prelude
To a load of s***e
(Kingsley Amis)
Amis clearly wasn’t a fan of Wordsworth! Is writing bad poetry easier than writing good poetry? Probably not – and it’s just as time-consuming. William McGonagall could probably confirm that!
William Topaz McGonagall was a Scottish weaver, poet and actor. He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who seemingly couldn’t care less of his peers’ opinions of his work.
He wrote about 200 poems, including his notorious “The Tay Bridge Disaster”, which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitations from his work and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall’s skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his verse remain popular, with several volumes available today.
McGonagall has been acclaimed as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms are that he is deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. In the hands of lesser artists, this might generate dull, uninspiring verse. McGonagall’s fame stems from the humorous effects these shortcomings generate. The inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary and imagery combine to make his work amongst the most unintentionally amusing poetry in the English language. His work is in a long tradition of narrative ballads and verse written and published about great events and tragedies, and widely circulated among the local population as handbills. In an age before radio and television, their voice was one way of communicating important news to an avid public.
He died penniless in 1902 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.
The Tay Bridge Disaster
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!/ Alas! I am very sorry to say /That ninety lives have been taken away/ On the last Sabbath day/ of 1879/, Which will be remember’d for a very long time/.’Twas about seven o’clock at night,/And the wind it blew with all its might,/ And the rain came pouring down/, And the dark clouds seem’d to frown/, And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-“/I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay /-
There’s more – a lot more – unfortunately!
FRIGHTENING THE CROWS
FRIGHTENING THE CROWS
I once knew a man
Who frightened crows for a living.
In between, he brewed cheap beer
And stole old books.
He cycled the universe
Looking for answers;
All he found was a cold grave
When he was thirty nine.
my new collection of poetry is now available @ http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/
JACK REACHER IS NUMBER ONE!
I love serial character in books; you know, Inspector Wexford, Rebus, George Smiley, Kay Scarpetta etc
My favourite though has to be JACK REACHER, the eponymous hero – or is it anti-hero – of the books written by LEE CHILD,
Jack is a drifter, a loner, travelling across the USA, finding trouble without looking for it wherever he goes. I don’t know how many books there are to date – probably around 20 – but I have read most of them; ECHO BURNING, PERSUADER, THE ENEMY, ONE SHOT, GONE TOMORROW, 61 HOURS to name a few, and I am always amazed at how gripping and addictive they are.
A former Major in the United States Army Military Police Corps, JACK quit at age 36, and roams the United States taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous situations. The paradox of JACK is that he is both a big bear of a fighter , and a thinker, whose mission appears to be to right wrongs and defend the weak.
JACK always uses an alias when checking into a hotel. In earlier stories, this was usually the name of a lesser known ex-president. In later stories, he more often used baseball players’ names.
Since leaving the Army, JACK has been a drifter. He wanders throughout the US because he was accustomed to being told where to go, when to go and what to do for every day of his life from military childhood to military adulthood. He also felt he never got to know his own country, having spent much of his youth living overseas on military bases and at West Point. He usually travels by hitchiking or bus. As a drifter, the only possessions he carries are money, a foldable toothbrush and, after 9/11, an expired passport and an ATM debit card
JACK has the uncanny ability to know what time it is, at any time of the day, without referring to a clock. He often uses his internal clock as an alarm, enabling him to wake up at any time he chooses. He is a skilled marksman, and is highly skilled at fighting, enhanced by in-depth technical and military knowledge.
All in all JACK REACHER is the perfect all-round hero
THE DANCE OF THE CRANES
THE DANCE OF THE CRANES
Long-necked and longer-legged
They shimmer among the reeds
Crazy-dancing in the breeze
High-stepping, wing-flapping
Bouncing high in springy leaps
Then a pause
To step lightly here,
Tread gaily there
Duets in the sun
Heads bowed.
Balletically symmetric
It ends in a crescendo
That is electric
It is love they are dancing about
This joyful abundance
Knowing no bounds
Feeling no pain
You and I, my love
Shall soon learn
To dance like the cranes
see all my books & plays @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
WRITERS AND THE CHELSEA HOTEL
Dylan Thomas
Bob Dylan, Sid and Nancy, Leonard Cohen, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin were among a long list of artists and musician who stayed at the Chelsea Hotel NY at one time, adding to its reputation as a decidedly bohemian enclave. Musicians and artists dominated the headlines through the 13 decades since the Chelsea’s construction in 1884. But the grand hotel-for-the-arts on New York’s West 23rd Street has inspired literary works as well, and often it was the writers who shaped the narratives on which artists working in other disciplines based their work.
Below are a few of the writers who stayed there:
DYLAN THOMAS “Excuse me,” Dylan Thomas apologized, following a terrible fit of coughing and retching into his rusty Chelsea hotel sink. He suffered from a medical condition, he explained. “I think it’s called cirrhosis of the liver.” The popular Welsh poet drank too heavily to produce much of literary merit during his numerous stays at the Chelsea Hotel.
BRENDAN BEHAN Alcoholism had not only gotten the Irish playwright and novelist Brendan Behan kicked out of Algonquin and Bristol Hotels by 1963, it had also destroyed his ability to hold a pen. At the Chelsea, though, the choreographer Katherine Dunham and her dancers were able to nurse him back to health. At the Chelsea, the writer dictated Brendan Behan’s New York, a lyrical tribute to his favorite city, into a tape recorder when not singing Israeli songs with the poet Allen Ginsberg, dancing in the halls with Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, befriending Eugene O’Neill’s ex-wife Agnes Boulton, or carrying on affairs with male and female lovers while managing visits from his long-suffering wife as well.
Brendan Behan
JACK KEROUAC It was one of those nights of “metropolitan excitements,” Kerouac wrote of the night in 1953 when he and William Burroughs encountered Gore Vidal at the San Remo bar. Already drunk with joy over the publication of Burroughs’s Junkie, the two writers eagerly incorporated Vidal into the night’s revelries. But as the drinking progressed, Burroughs peeled off–leaving Kerouac and his handsome fellow writer to muddle-headedly resolve to pay tribute to their predecessors Thomas Wolfe and Dylan Thomas by consummating their friendship at the Chelsea Hotel.
Jack Kerouac
THOMAS WOLFE “The desire for it All comes from an evil gluttony in me,” confessed Thomas Wolfe, who had moved into the Chelsea on Edgar Lee Masters’s recommendation and whose rumbling, Southern-accented voice permeated the corridors as he paced the floor each night dictating scenes for a novel. To Masters, who invited Wolfe down for a nightcap occasionally, the writer seemed a force of nature, loudly decrying the changes he saw in his countrymen in the wake of the Depression. America had lost its way, Wolfe insisted.
ARTHUR MILLAR Arthur Miller came to the Chelsea in 1962 to escape his disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe, but once he started writing, he found he couldn’t duck his history quite so easily. His new play, After the Fall, was meant to explore, in this post-Nazi era, the individual’s responsibility for the fate of a fellow human, but it soon became clear that Miller was also exploring his role in Monroe’s self-destruction. Even after the announcement of Monroe’s suicide, Miller denied the true identity of his play’s female protagonist.
Arthur Millar
ARTHUR C CLARKE In 1965, long-time Chelsea veteran Arthur C. Clarke checked in for a stint at the hotel, pounding out 2,000 words a day on a novel-length accompaniment to 2001: A Space Odyssey, his collaboration with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick had tried to work with Clarke at his own office in Manhattan, but after one day’s work the writer returned to the Chelsea to draw on conversations with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller and others for inspiration for his work.
WILLIAM BOROUGHS William Burroughs and his close friend, the Canadian artist Brion Gysin, arrived at the Chelsea Hotel in 1965 to market a new invention, the Dream Machine, a contraption consisting of a spinning paper cylinder with slitted sides and a light bulb inside whose purpose was to create a psychedelic experience for the viewer without the use of drugs. When it failed to make them rich, the pair turned to a new collaboration equally in tune with the Chelsea Hotel zeitgeist: The Third Mind, a exploration of the synergetic power of creative collaboration.
My Writing Life 