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MY BOOK TITLES NOW AVAILABLE
All available on amazon #amwriting
GUANTANAMO DIARY
Just been reading a review of GUANTANAMO DIARY by Mohamedu Ould Slahi. Incarcerated without trial since 2001, he was first held in a prison in Jordan, then after seven months of interrogation he was stripped, blindfolded, shackled and flown to a US airbase in Afghanistan. A fortnight later he was shipped to Guantanamo Bay. So begins a nightmare story worthy of Kafka. Thirteen years later he remains in a segregation cell some 4000 miles from his home in Mauritania. He has never been charged with a crime.
His handwritten manuscript was written nearly a decade ago, all 466 pages, after months of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. It took years for his lawyers to obtain the declassified diary. Slahi asks regularly during interrogations, ‘what am I accused of?’. He never receives a straight answer, and his efforts to tell the truth only anger;
Looks like a dog
walks like a dog
smells like a dog
barks like a dog
must be a dog
In the end he resorts to false confessions to end the torment. He lives in abject terror, suffering sleep deprivation, sexual assaults, beatings and threats against his mother’s life and his own. He is forced to drink salt water, and convinced he will be murdered.
Before the manuscript was released, US government censors pored over it, adding 2,500 black bar redactions. A federal judge ordered his release in 2010 but after 4 years he is still locked up. Why? A must-read for me.
GUANTANAMO DIARY Canongate £20
BUNKER ON PORTLAND BILL
BUNKER ON PORTLAND BILL
This windowed concrete slab
Touching the hedgerows
Bunkered in leaf-strewn soil
Chivvies me
Muskets were reddened here
By shorter men than I
Defenders of a long-gone realm
Stooped between fissured ceiling and creviced floor
What mayhem bedlamed this rocky causeway?
Its cannons foddering the deep
The stun of steel slamming granite
The stench of gunfire turning stomachs
Loose limbs cluttering pathways
Death hovering
All quiet now on this promontory;
Sheep nibbling, tea and scones in the old armoury
Picture postcards of battles fought and won
Day-trippers picnicking
In the shadows cast by the big guns
GOING ROUND THE SUN AGAIN
GOING ROUND THE SUN AGAIN
Going round the sun sixty eight times
Takes some doing
Even if you are merely a passenger.
The first time round was really a blur
No sense at all that we were
Doing almost seventy thousand miles an hour.
Mother said I screeched most of the way
And that the snow piled high
For months every day.
Even the tenth spin;
I don’t recall a lot of that
Except that it was the year mother got fat
For a while, anyway
And then she was thin again.
The years stretched to decades
Still round and round we went
Sometimes I travelled in the company of steel bars
And sometimes I journeyed with the stars.
And there were times when writers came to say
Becket, Behan, Millar, Hemingway
Of course the children came too.
But for many years I have tripped with you.
My father got to number sixty nine;
I wonder how many rounds will be mine?
taken from my poetry collection ’67 PLUS’
available @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
GOING, GOING, GONE
-
THE GREEN FORGOTTEN VALLEYS
Those green forgotten valleys,
No longer can be seen
Lying hidden behind the tall fir and larch
That have made these brown hills green
Relentlessly marching down the hills
Burying everything in their wake
The dead are long gone from this place
The pike no longer in the lake
The houses just hollow shells now
Where the past ghosts eerily through
The vacant windows and doors
With rotted frames and jambs that once were new.
Back then there was no silence, only the sound
Of human laughter, and bird-calls to each other
The dogs growling at a wayward sheep.
And children’s scrapes kissed better by their mother
Nature is having the last laugh now
Soon there will be no trace of us at all
As the trees come marching down the hillside
No one hears the lonesome curlew’s call.
GWYNETH STEAM-CLEANS IT
GWYNETH STEAM-CLEANS IT
Gwyneth steam-cleans it
A powerful internal cleanse
That balances the hormonal levels.
This boil-in-the-bag kind of technology,
Brought by your Guru to you,
Where you sit on some kind of apparatus
And absorb a combination
Of infrared and mugwort,
Is all the rage
In this gadget-filled age.
Methinks this vaginal steaming
Gives ‘getting all steamed up ‘
A rather eye-watering meaning!
DEFRAGGING THE SCANDISK
DEFRAGGING THE SCANDISK
All this talk about the mathematical concept of infinity
As if it was a numbers game
Real numbers, that is
Not those sets of integers
Or Cardinalities
Favoured by the current crop of God-botherers
Lemniscate my arse
Stop going on and on and on
Infinity is not a number
When you’re gone, you’re fucking gone
PRESENT
PRESENT
Where has the present gone?
Time melts in our hands
Fleeing before we can touch it
Gone in the instant it lands.
TAKE NOTHING BUT THE PICTURES
TAKE NOTHING BUT THE PICTURES
Our minds are all we have
They are all we have ever had
Be they good or bad
As my thoughts wander towards my life
I feel an energy deep inside
A life-force gathering momentum
Like an onrushing, incoming tide.
There’s a power that will not be denied
And a direction I feel I must go
And it doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things
If the momentum is fast or slow
For no matter how small something may seem
To others it may be a huge overpowering dream
Whose connection is infinite.
Happiness cannot be taught
Nor love bought
So if you must go
Take nothing but the pictures in your mind
And leave nothing but your footprints behind
GOOD ADVICE
WRITING, DRINKING, WANKING
You can either buy me a drink or fuck off
Were the first words Patrick Kavanagh said to me.
He was hunched over an empty glass in the corner of McDaids,
Gobbing and spitting into the embers of the open fire
I arrived here nearly thirty years ago,
Having spent two days traipsing the road from Monaghan,
But I wanted to be in Dublin, y’know?
Where I thought the real writers were.
Real writers me arse!
They spend all their time drinking and talking about writing
And none of it doing any
He nearly took my hand off grabbing the drink I had got him,
Writing should be like wanking –
Best done in the privacy of your own room
My Writing Life 