VARIATIONS ON A TURD
You see them everywhere these days
Dark mushroom clumps
Sprouting incongruously
From tarmac and concrete
In gutters and gullys
Clustered around lamp posts
And nestled in the roots of trees.
Sometimes they squat
Outside your front gate.
They even thrive on grass!
THE MEANING OF LIFE
At the forefront of knowledge
Is the edge of uncertainty
Where reality is really
Only a projection of information
At the rim of the universe.
There, black holes loiter with intent.
They seek to break the sacred laws of physics
Which, as everyone knows, state
That information cannot be destroyed.
This is the point of no return.
All the information that ever existed is here
And black holes are held at bay – for now
What is inside is not inside
And what is outside is not outside.
We are merely holographic projections
Rendered flesh at this event horizon.
Asimov, of course, knew this
Way back when computers
Were not ten-a-penny.
He knew the truth, or guessed
That the universe is one vast computer itself
And we are merely its slavish programmers.
Though not living out purposeless existences,
As some believe,
But proving that life does have some meaning:
We are the way for the universe to know itself
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 Jesuswill 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
LOVE POEM FROM BONMAHON
God in his heaven never bettered this;
Never hit perfection more square-on.
Rugged cliffs lip the strand,
Opening to fields behind,
The Atlantic, white-layered,
Sweeping into the bay,
Its hurry washed-out
By the tug of sand, gently rising,
Before it.
A tangle of marram crowns the dunes,
Tousled, like windswept hair;
Whilst, on the slopes nearby,
A line of white cottages
Vie for prominence with the old church
Yet, it is the call of the waves
That steals most of the aces;
Those riderless white horses
Sweeping relentlessly in,
With their whispering lisps;
‘I love you, please don’t go,
I love you please don’t go’
And I, watching the ebb-tide dragging them back,
Silently mouthing in their wake;
‘She loves me, she loves me not,
She loves me, she loves me not…’
GIGGS BOSUN COLLIDER
Yeah, I met Giggs
He was a bosun wasn’t he?
Plying the East India route
Yeah, that’s right
Rebooting the particle smasher he was.
I saw him doing it once;
Not much scope for that kind of malarkey out here
I thought at the time.
And what did the rebooting do?
What did it find?
Nothing that I could see.
Maybe because there was something else on his mind
And now they call it the Bosun Giggs Collider.
Large Haddock Collider, I think you will find
So what happened to Giggs?
Giggs? Oh he disappeared somewhere in the South China Seas.
Now he tells me! Do you mind if I sing?
If I die tonight just bury me
In my favourite yellow patent leather shoes
With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat
‘Cos I’ve got the Giggs Bosun Blues…
FETCHING THE WATER WITH NEDDY
Where I come from is who I am:
Tangled blackberry bushes
Smoke rising from a solitary chimney
The pine grove in the distance
And Father shouting
“More water in that barrel”
As we bucketed it from our well
To our asses cart,
Creel-less for once.
Other days Neddy would be laden down
With wood from the nearby thicket
Ash trees, young Sally’s, stumps of furze bushes.
Sometimes he hauled sand and gravel
From the quarry at Carroll’s Cross,
Part of Father’s master plan
To build us an outside toilet.
This would mean more water from the well
To feed the tank on its roof,
Unless it rained a lot
Which of course it often did
In our neck of the woods.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
JOHN, BRENDAN & MOTHER
Dear Brendan,
I don’t suppose you ever realised that I helped myself to some of your First Holy Communion money. Dear, trusting Brendan, resplendent in your new suit and your shiny knees, you were more than happy to hand it to me to ‘look after it for you’. This was after the ceremony when the likes of the Mrs Kelly and Mrs Cummins had patted you on the head and told you what a grand little fellow you were, whilst at the same time placing shining half-crowns in you eager little palm. You could see the other ould ones watching like hawks, to see what denomination coin exchanged hands – they wouldn’t give any more, but they certainly wouldn’t give any less. After about ten of them had passed you by, your hair was more tousled and the stack of coins in your fists much bigger – and my eyes more bulged! And while mother was distracted among the shiny perms and shawls I was able to transfer the load to my trouser pocket. What later came out was certainly less than what went in! And I had added to my stack of Johnny Mac Brown comics before the day was out.
You were seven years younger than me, and looked up to me in more ways than one. Well, you were the baby, weren’t you? Always tugging at my kneecaps, looking to be taken places and given things – and giving father a hard time. He was forever chasing you but could never catch you. You were faster than Master McGrath himself. Still he got his own back when you eventually came inside. Even then you crawled under the bed to get away from him. But he had the answer to that tactic too, didn’t he? Prodding away with the broom handle until you were forced to admit defeat.
I missed most of your formative years; you were only eleven years old when I caught the cattle boat to England, and for the next five or six years I caught only occasional glances of you during my spasmodic visits home. You were becoming a young man and I didn’t even notice.
Mind you, I was preoccupied myself during this period; several spells at HM pleasure meant I had other things to occupy my mind. And when that period ended there were other distractions such as getting married, starting a family and being busy with all that entailed. Before I noticed you were twenty-one and living in London yourself.
You got yourself a job working for British Rail and rented our spare room in Harlesden Gardens.
Do you remember that song you used to sing when you had a few jars?
In eighteen hundred and forty one,I put my shocking pink britches on.
The Kilburn railway had just begun, Working on the railway,
The railway, I’m weary of the railway. Oh Brendan works on the railway.
Just back from 10 days in Israel. The whole country is a building site!
THE PHILOSOPHER
We are all doing time in rented bodies
Daydreaming all night in empty lobbys’
Reaching for something that is never there
Telling everyone our concern when we don’t really care
Rise and shine
Step up and dine
But don’t waste my time
Just don’t waste any time
I never go out but I often come in
I fuck people up but I never quite sin
I dream of reality and then I wake up
To find that some bastard has emptied my cup
Rise and shine
Step up and dine
But don’t waste my time
Just don’t waste any time.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
A car pulls up to a red light
The owner has a feared animal look
Something screeches
For fourteen days now
The tiger has prowled
A gruesome half torso
Floats in a pool of blood
Somewhere close is an imp of the perverse
Buying a return ticket but not going anywhere.
He looks at his alarm clock
Blood red in the four a.m. nearly light
The hands are rotating backwards
Backwards
While all around him the candy-stripes flap in the breeze.
My Writing Life 