IRON AGE
Phoenix rises
Cobbled together
By a compendium of pyrites
Forged to link all destinies
Shaped to gird our worlds
And outreach Babylonia
Igneous intrusion
Metamorphic rock
Freed from your sedimentary bed
White heat in the crucible
Running now
Red ingots of desire
Ladled to all requirements
Manacled by steel
This shining age
Rusts towards a new millennium
ANTIGONISH
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door…
Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…
“Antigonish” is an 1899 poem by American educator and poet Hughes Mearns. It is also known as “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There”, and was a hit song under that title. Inspired by reports of a ghost of a man roaming the stairs of a haunted house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, the poem was originally part of a play called The Psyco-ed which Mearns had written for an English class at Harvard University about 1899. In 1910, Mearns put on the play with the Plays and Players, an amateur theatrical group and, on 27 March 1922, newspaper columnist FPA printed the poem in “The Conning Tower”, his column in the New York World.
A very simple poem, yet a very effective one, and a clear example of how ‘plain is sometimes better’.
Text[edit]
SILENCE AT THE BAR
The old man grimaced and silently imbibed his pint
His withered wife glared her whole life at him
And pointedly moved to a seat
At the far end of the joint
Two sons, forty and finicky,
Silently contemplated the following day’s races
While the daughter and son-in-law,
Long run out of things to say,
Blew smoke in each other’s faces.
Only the children were living;
The girl was chandelier-swinging
And the boy was table-top walking.
“Shhh!” said the mother,
“be quiet you two rascals,
We can’t seem to hear ourselves talking”
from my collection of poetry – ’67’, now available @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/67-Poetry-Tom-OBriem-Book-ebook/dp/B00JVBLM9C/ref=la_B0034OIGOQ_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412338420&sr=1-8
and http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/product/67-2/
Taken in the Outer Banks, a narrow stretch of land – sometimes less than 50 yards wide – that reaches out into the Atlantic Ocean for more than 100 miles, including Corolla Bay, in North Carolina.
Nothing much has changed since I wrote this!
AMAZON/KINDLE BEST SELLER
I see that I am at number 1,205,646
In the Amazon/Kindle best-seller list
Again
Last week I was at number 650,249
And the previous week 233,184
Or was that the week before?
I don’t think I have got into the top 100
Yet
I like to see the wild fluctuations in the list
Thousands of points variation
Mean lots of sales, innit?
Though I must confess
It puzzles me a little bit
Because according to Amazon’s
Own – very reliable – sales chart
I sold no books at all last week
And only one all last month
So Amazon/Kindle
Here’s my conclusion
You must be one cupid stunt
Apparently this is the Hemingway-themed layout. Can’t see the connection myself, unless the barn is meant to represent a writer’s garret. Not that Papa ever wrote in a garret as far as I know. He always wrote standing up, on a tall,sloped desk, everything handwritten before being typed up. He was usually an early morning writer, and the location invariably was his bedroom, and he was usually finished by lunch-time. Certainly this was his routine during the years he spent at his villa, Finca Vigia,in Havana Cuba. Years of heavy drinking and high living caused him all sorts of health problems and he blew his brains out early one morning at his residence in Ketcham Idaho in the summer of 1961. Maybe it’s the best way to end it all; not the long slide to oblivion but the quick end from the speeding bullet.
Advice from Papa; Write drunk, edit sober.
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FRACKING HELL
Frack them all
Except a few
And if they don’t like it
Frack them too.
Omagh's 'Shawshank Husband' Dug Tunnel From Bedroom To Pub Over 15 Years.
ITS A CRAZY WORLD!
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.
Have just re-read Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction book Fahrenheit 451 and it is without doubt the greatest book of its kind. Although now more than 60 years old it hasn’t dated one day and feels as fresh now as it did when first published. In fact I wouldn’t describe it as science fiction any more but science fact. Many of its predictions are now fact.
451
Ah Montag,Montag, where are you now?
Steeped in your kerosine world
You burnt the books
The houses and even the people.
Then fire seared your brain
And cleansed your senses
Books were made to be read not torched.
So you ran to the river
The Mechanical Hound snapping at your heels.
The sun burns every day
It burns time
The firemen burn the books
They burn them every day
Ah Montag, Montag, time burns everything away.
My Writing Life 