BOOKS

LOOKING FOR GOOGLE

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LOOKING FOR GOOGLE

Driverless cars

Headless chickens

Oops! mind that blind…

Oh, what the Dickens!

The lingua franca

In Google we trust,

In God if we must.

Look, no hands!

It’s not a boast

It’s a statement of fact,

I don’t drive, it’s all an act.

The phone on my table

Speaks in eighteen different languages if tasked

And can answer questions

(Sometimes before they are asked).

Now they have sent ten thousand

Helium balloons into the stratosphere

Seeking all the disconnected;

Wi-Fi for all – and soon

They could – in theory – I guess

Set up shop nowadays on the moon

This is their ‘toothbrush’ test;

“Focus on the user and all else follows”

Culture and success go hand in  hand;

If you don’t believe your own slogan

You’re already in no-mans land.

PARTING

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PARTING

The sun also rises over concrete

Over this puff-adder sky

And the pricked-up chimneys

Looking like piss-horns in the stark morning

There are no shadows yet

On this marbled plain

So tender in years

But so sparing with love

I shiver at the bus stop

Admiring this proliferation of granite;

So cold, so hard,

So like you….

SEX, CHOCOLATE AND STATINS

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SEX, CHOCOLATE AND STATINS

Want to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke?

The answer is to have more sex,

At least two orgasms a week.

This will reduce your risk of a cardiovascular event,

But only if you are a man.

For women – well, you have to take your chances!

Eating chocolate can also reduce your risk

As does listening to music

Though Nessum Dorma might be more beneficial than Taylor Swift.

Moving out of the city, living with others, having a good boss

Also helps;

But men with a high orgasmic frequency do best of all.

So forget about Statins;

Chocolates, Vivaldi, and bashing the bishop

Are much more beneficial

And a lot more enjoyable.

WORMWOOD

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WORMWOOD

Wormwood isn’t here

The sign said, rather waspishly.

It wasn’t the Wormwood I remembered;

Scrubs Lane on a wet Sunday

The outback in West London

No buses, no cars, no people

Just limp grass, acres of the stuff

And, oh yes, the finest redbrick edifice

Victoria’s henchmen could construct.

No rotting bodies in here, my friend.

Not Newgate, not by a long shot

Though debts must still be paid

And some may still get laid

Lord Alfred Douglas lay here,

As did Charles Bronson,

Keith Richards, Leslie Grantham.

And  George Blake

Scurrying along in his traitor’s gait

Till the day he pole-vaulted to freedom

More or less

Before waving goodbye

To his English life,

His liberty and his wife

And all those Wormwood scrubbers

DAFFODILS

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DAFFODILS

I saw Christ nailed to a tree

In an East London churchyard

Weather-beaten from looking,

While the adjacent graveyard

Played host to a thousand

Sloping stone soldiers.

There, daffodils bunched together

And it made me wonder

Why the graveyard should display

Such a profusion of yellow

When the churchyard itself

Was barren of colour

LETTERS TO MOTHER AND OTHER DEAD RELATIVES -extract

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LETTERS TO  MOTHER AND OTHER DEAD RELATIVES – extract

Dear Mother,
There weren’t too many occasions when I pleased you in life. My fault not yours, because we both know that I wasn’t what you would call ‘a dutiful son’. I probably pleased you when I got married, and when I gave you your first grandchild, but I think I pleased you most when I became an Altar boy.
I imagine you saw it as a kind of status symbol: because when other mothers boasted ‘my son is going to De La Salle College’, or ‘has a place in the Christian Brothers’, you could now reply ‘my son is an Altar boy’ with a certain amount of pride. And there weren’t that many of us in the vicinity – no more than a handful – which made it all the more gloat-worthy.
Even the Master acknowledged our special status; taking us up to the church several times a week after school for rehearsals before letting us loose on our first Sunday. He took the part of the priest himself; although he didn’t ‘gown up’ for the role. But I guess Fr. Sinnott, the parish priest, would have viewed as sacrilege the idea of somebody rummaging around in his wardrobe. Still, we were put through our paces until we had mastered our roles; bell-ringing, bringing the water and the wine, and, of course, learning to chant the responses in the appropriate places. I can still recite chunks of Latin after all these years – and I still don’t know what they mean.
In due course I discovered the pleasures of wine-drinking. Thomas K and myself usually served together, and as altar boys were responsible for filling the jugs with the water and wine to be used during the Mass. When the parish priest officiated, very little water but nearly all the wine would be used. However, with other priests it might be the other way round, and we were often able to transfer some of the wine to a spare vessel we kept concealed in a recess, topping up the priest’s jug with water.
We returned later and retrieved the wine, then sat amid the gravestones drinking it. Sometimes it made your head spin, and when we added the occasional Woodbine that I had fecked from your box on the mantelpiece over the fire in the kitchen, everything started to revolve. Trees, poles, even the gravestones; whirling around so fast you had to hang on tightly to something for fear of taking off.
Being an Altar boy had other rewards too; particularly when we ‘officiated’ at weddings, funerals and christenings, where, afterwards, you could guarantee that several shiny half-crowns or maybe even a ten shilling note would be pressed into your greasy little palm. Not that I depended entirely on these fairly infrequent occasions; I quickly discovered that the collections during Sunday Mass offered a steady source of income. I am sure you will recall that when the filled collection boxes were placed by the Altar rail it became our job to take them to the sacristy and transfer the money into the bags waiting there. Once inside, I found it quite an easy task to deflect some of the coins into my own pocket. And afterwards I was able to stuff myself with Rollos, Crunchies and bags of Tayto’s on the proceeds. I wonder if it ever crossed your mind that your very own ‘God’s little helper’ had become a thief?
Not all special occasions paid off, however. Do you remember the time that M’s latest child was being baptized and she couldn’t come into the service because she hadn’t been churched? I always thought that being churched was the result of some serious transgression and for many years I wondered what M had done. It wasn’t until much later that I learned it was a purification ceremony that the church carried out on women who had given birth. This is what I read.
‘The woman who has just had a child must first stand outside the church door and only when she has been solemnly purified by sprinkling with holy water and the prayers of the priest is she led back into the church’.
Apparently it goes back to the middle ages when the church decided that women who had given birth were unclean and therefore had to be ‘cleansed’. I had often seen women before, dressed solemnly in black, kneeling in the vestibule at the back of the church after Mass, waiting for the priest to come and attend to them, but it never occurred to me that the church was punishing them for having children.
I still remember how ashamed you all looked when the priest said the baptism couldn’t take place until M had been purified, and you all trooped away to Cullinanes Pub to put down the half hour wait. I suppose you had ‘a small sherry to settle your nerves’.
I had the task of following the priest about with the vessel of Holy water. He placed a lighted candle in M’s hand, and recited the Gloria Patri and the Kyrie as well as the Our Father before sprinkling her with Holy Water and inviting her into the chapel with the words,
‘Enter into the temple of God, that though mayest have eternal life’.
However, he made sure she was veiled before letting her pass, and I have since read that women who refused to cover their heads were often ex-communicated.
I think this was one of the few occasions where no shiny half-crown changed hands.
I never stopped to wonder at the time why there were no Altar girls. I suppose it was to do with the Church’s attitude to women even then (this was the late 1950’s) as exemplified in the ‘churching’.
Thank God things have changed a bit since my youth.
Your loving son
Tom

available in paperback & ebook on Amazon

AUTOMATIC WRITING

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AUTOMATIC WRITING
by
Tom O’Brien
(written in a two-hour against-the-clock frenzy one summers morning in ….  a long time ago)

Why is me? Why is god? Bad grammar I know, but syntax isn’t everything, is it? Syntax…must look that up, not too sure what it means. It’s as if this pen has a will of its own – I am merely sitting here watching it trace outlines on a virgin, amazed at what I am reading. I wonder if Trollope employed this technique in his writing? It sure seems like it; he wrote 3000 words every morning before work. But why go on about it….everyone knows that old chestnut. Duncan McDaid, who was he? A footballler in Askeaton? No, that was the McDaid clan from Northern Ireland. Good footballers, but hard to stomach. Shits, every one. Still, one humoured them. ‘Now is the summer of fucking content.’ Something like that would have suited the Bard better. ‘Not to be at all’ sounds better than the other one. It was a dark and dangerous hour…why do I keep changing the words before I write them? Good practice for later, I guess. Scott Fitzgerald liked to try this form of writing; get all this shit down on paper and see what resulted. Nothing much ever did. However, it’s a discipline that has got to be tried – see what comes out apart from shit.
Shall I begin a new paragraph? Go on, treat yourself. Buy a few pages of crap; spout it all out here at this end-of-page feeling. This life is but a dot on a far horizon…a blank dilettante….almost faltered there… doesn’t blank dilettante almost rhyme? – and if it doesn’t does it matter? Now this plate on my table stinks; old dog-ends mashed up in rasher grease, and outside cats-nip that some should nick. The old shed at garden’s end was nicked too. Oh, not in totality; but layer upon layer, chopped down with a buzzz-saw, and then nailed to the cross that bore it. What crap you say, and of course you’re write (right), but then you always are my dear. Never known to be wrong, for long are you crucified, eh? Maybe that is right too, but you hammered in the nails yourself. No martyrs for me, but you – you – you stood there screaming – it was him – him who brought the house down – stood there ankle-deep in shit telling everyone our secret. Secret? That was no secret; it was written in italics on every cinema wall in the state. She loves you but she daren’t admit it, not even to her fairy godmother, who happens – and this is true – to be the biggest fairy in dog-land. I don’t know where dog-land is, but by God it is rough. Ha  Continue reading →

GRYPHON-ITIS

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Here goes, a poem in 5 mins.

GRYPHONITIS

I saw the gryphon again today

Walking in a rather peculiar way

It was goose-stepping instead of high-stepping

Hugh Granting when it should be Johnny Depping

It looked me directly in the eye

As it it shuffled-shunted to get by

Whispering hoarsely what it had to say;

I bet you don’t see one like me every day!

HISTORY LESSONS AGAIN

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HISTORY LESSONS AGAIN

Ring of Kerry, Lackendaragh                                                                                                                                            Fachta Finn and Gougane Barra                                                                                                                                       Ollam, Piper, Beann a Ti                                                                                                                                                         Farmer, Fiddler and Land-Lease                                                                                                                                          Viking, Norsemen and Wild Geese                                                                                                                                     Erimon and Fionn Macool                                                                                                                                                        De Danann and No Home Rule

Clonmacnois and The Dail                                                                                                                                                        Men of Erin, Fianna Fail                                                                                                                                                       Democrats and Labour too                                                                                                                                                   Gombeen men, the Dublin Zoo                                                                                                                                        Loonies, Moonies, Lords and Serfs                                                                                                                                         Poets, Painters, Suffragettes                                                                                                                                                Cowboy Pictures, Travelling Shows                                                                                                                                     Ceoltas Dancing, Frightening Crows

Tyrone, Tyrconnell, Red Hugh and Owen Roe                                                                                                                    Cromwell, Robert Emmett, Dev and Strongbow                                                                                                                   Pearse, Kevin Barry, Colm Cille, Maud Gonne                                                                                                                            St Patrick, St Brigid, Mac Murrough, Wolf Tone

Aonach, Feis, Connemara                                                                                                                                                 Irelands Own and Hill of Tara                                                                                                                                              Rock n Roll and fireside stories                                                                                                                                               Sorse Eireann and Mickey Magories                                                                                                                                        The Coleen Bawn, O’Donnell Abu                                                                                                                                  Leprechauns and Faeries too                                                                                                                                         Bloody Sunday, Black and Tans                                                                                                                                             Easter Rising, Bobby Sands                                                                                                                                                   Oisin, Cormac, Tigernach                                                                                                                                                   Cashel, Cratloe and Armagh                                                                                                                                                 The Hills of Tullow, Conor Pass                                                                                                                                             Sarsfields Ride and Dorans Ass                                                                                                                                            The Croppy Boy and Ninety Eight                                                                                                                                       Sassanach and Fenian blade                                                                                                                                                  The Clipper Carlton, Dicky Rock                                                                                                                                               St Stephens Green and Glendalough

Kilmainham, Kilmichael, Kilwarden, Kinsale                                                                                                                       Dungannon, Dunmore, Enistymon, Rathkeale,                                                                                                                   Fedelm, Eithne, Aofi, Kathleen                                                                                                                                               The Shamrock, the Harp, the Flute and Crubeen

Master McGrath and Brian Boru                                                                                                                                         Famine, Firbolgs, the H Blocks too                                                                                                                                        Ard Ri, Mountjoy, Parnell and Rynanna                                                                                                                                Step-dancing, Brian Boru, Big Tom and Setanta

Tir Na Nog, the Galway Blazers                                                                                                                                             Bord Na Mona, Macs Smile razors                                                                                                                                       Mummers, Druids, Unionists                                                                                                                                        Catholics, Jews, Adventists                                                                                                                                                     Malin Head and Poitin stills                                                                                                                                                    Ikes and Mikes, the Book of Kells                                                                                                                                         Shannon, Suir, Boyne and Nore                                                                                                                                            The Gallowglass and Take The Floor

Blackleg, Wrenboy, Blackshirt, Whitethorn                                                                                                                         Whiteboy, Boycott, Blueshirt, Blackthorn                                                                                                                             Plantation, Emancipation, Emigration, Liberation                                                                                                                O’Connell, O’Brien, O’Hanlon, One Nation                                                                                                                     Cuchullian, Rebellion, the Taylor and Ansty                                                                                                                                B Behan, O’Casey, Riverdance and Planxty                                                                                                                         Sean T, Mick Del, Sean Kelly, Glenroe                                                                                                                                James Joyce, Christy Ring, Arkle and Mick’O

IRA, BBC                                                                                                                                                                               UVF, RTE                                                                                                                                                                                 IRA and UCC                                                                                                                                                                            LDF and IRB                                                                                                                                                                             ICA and ESB                                                                                                                                                                          GAA and C of E                                                                                                                                                                Saints and sinners                                                                                                                                                                  C’est la vie                                                                                                                                                                             Everyone is you and me.

 

 

BORN TO MISSS

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BORN TO MISS

You see I came to everything too late

I missed the first train

I missed the last bus

I missed the sixties swinging

The Stones and The Beatles singing

I missed On The Road and Happy Days

Woodstock, Bob Dylan and the hippy craze

I missed the signals

That women give

Carnaby Street and I Want To Live

I missed double sixteen

More times than I can remember

And I missed the Lewis effigy-burning

Every bloody November.