TWO IRISH PLAYS – READ ALL ABOUT THEM!

NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO POLES is about the dysfunctional Kennedy clan, who 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; his long- suffering wife, Marion; his estranged son, Michael, who turns up after five years in Australia with Cathy, his new aborigine wife. And not forgetting his racist nephew, Jimmy, who hasn’t mellowed any as he has got older. BRENDAN BEHAN’S WOMEN… the play is set in the bar of the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1963 and Beatrice Behan has come over from her home in Dublin to have it out with Brendan ,concerning rumours he is having an affair with Valerie Danby-Smith and is about to divorce her

PRISONER

The ticking clock is silent

Articulating emptiness

Mainspring not busted

Just not required.

Time gulling it over the horizon

Speckled in the distance

The residue left behind

Not worth a light

Over some visionary hill

Virtual reality is real enough

More and more scream the worms

Turning every which way but one

More length, more depth

More leisure, more pleasure

More love, more life

Bur mostly more coin

Nothing prepares us for this

The hand that held the answers

Trembling now before new idols

Knowledge bootless as experience

New waves have old beginnings

But tired dogs own no snap

It’s the rut we’re stuck in, see?

Slow going forward but no going back

Sitting by time’s window

Waiting for the daily rebuff

To come winging by

Sifting little crumbs of comfort

From the embers

Screaming all the way……

READ ALL ABOUT THEM!

Terry, Chris and Larry are three Irish friends in the London of the 1960’s with little in common except their liking for ‘dishonest work’. Chris is a pickpocket in the West End; the time of the first race determines what time Larry gets out of bed; Terry’s aversion to manual labour is so strong that he says ‘I’d rather starve than work on the fucking buildings’. Then there is Bannaher, the big man, the ‘subby’, who is publicising his new pub venture by having a friend of theirs temporarily buried alive in the pub’s back garden. ‘A charity lie-in’, he calls it. Into this mix comes Tessa, blonde, English and ‘out to screw the world before it screws me’. Before she is finished all their lives have changed irrevocably.
It’s a tale of greed and deception that trawls the pubs and building sites of Kilburn and Cricklewood, and the mean street of Limerick.

A LOAF OF BREAD AND A CAN OF SPECIAL BREW

 He sat on a seafront  pew
A loaf of bread and a can of Special Brew
By his side
Speaking to someone who wasn’t there.
Though these day you can never tell
Whether they are or not;
He may have had a mobile phone in his ear.
Then he spoke to me;
What are you fucking looking at, blue?
Yeah, I thought, that figures

And a happy New Year to you too!                                                                                                    

My books on Amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent

available in p/back and ebook on Amazon

THE SHINY RED HONDA is about growing up in rural Ireland in the 1950/60’s, a time of great rural upheaval and change. The creamery, the horse and cart, cross-road dancing, travelling shows, the threshing machine…all their days were numbered. Going to school across the Mass-Path, thinning turnips for a shilling a drill, watching Audie Murphy and Randolph Scott in films that broke down half-way through every reel, being an Altar boy and ‘fiddling’ the church collection boxes, learning to dance with a broomstick as a partner…rare memories of an age of innocence. Who flattened Fr. Sinnott in the sacristy? What was the initiation ceremony at Flahavans Mills? Who was the trombone player in the band who couldn’t play a note? It is also about dreams and aspirations: a young man’s entry into the world of work, and his brief flirtation with the music biz. A story told honestly and uncompromisingly. As it was – warts and all.

Amazon review

katyann

IF ONLY WE HAD TALLER BEEN by Ray Bradbury

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measure out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s great hand come down the other way
To measure Man and find him Good,
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.
Short man. Large dream. I send my rockets forth
between my ears,
Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

I seem to have lost my voice in this video. Ah well, small mercies!

TRUE ENEMY

Those whom the Gods love mostly die young
For time is the true enemy of everyone
The beauty that time cherishes
Is the beauty that soon perishes
And when time and beauty meet
It is always high noon on the street
Something has got to give;
Beauty dies so that others may live
But all dawns prove false dawns
And the payback is still to come
For time catches up with us all eventually
And not just the unlucky some.

WHO IS THAT MAN?

 I feel like screaming

I feel like kicking something

I feel like my head is…exploding.

You  are…your name is…

Ah…David

Yes…David…

David?

It’s there

Buried in that sea of viscosity

That I am scrabbling about in

I can see it

It’s almost on the surface now…

On the tip of my tongue…

No…it’s gone again.

And I am standing in this room…

Looking for…

What am I looking for?

It all reminds me of my grandfather, who,

In his last tortured months,

Was convinced that somebody was forever following him about.

Then one day he spotted his own reflection in a plate glass shop window

There!, he shouted,

There he is!

Who is that man?