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
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
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
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
OBSERVATIONS
Our lives are not our own
Our cards are marked from womb to tomb
Jealousy is the art of counting
Someone else’s blessings and not your own
You will never grow big by thinking small
The life you leave behind is no big deal at all
Be strong, be brave
But most of all don’t be a slave
To fashions, to politics, or whatever is the craze
Don’t run if you’re not able
And never expect happiness to come
With a glossy buy-me-now label.
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
RYE HARBOUR SUMMER SOLILOQUY
Rye Harbour basks this sunny summer morning
The river Rother already all bled out
Following the departing tide far out to sea
Leaving assorted sea craft specked in the distance
And seagulls dancing on the just-bled riverbed
Digging for scallops and mussels
Then dropping them from high
Onto the concrete bunker and the asphalt walkway
To shatter and split
Before feasting on the fresh flesh thus exposed
On the horizon
Dungeness chimney stacks
Rise like piss-horns from the sand
And Camber Sands arcs wildly round the bay
Flat as the Gobi desert
On any given day
And lurking behind this bucolic scene
The wind farm at Romney Marsh can be seen
Turbines propellers lazily turning
Barely generating enough power
To make a pot of tea, or so it would seem
Overlooking it all is the town of Rye
Stately and high, with its ruined castle on the hill
Much loved by the king with eight wives
Though nearby Camber Castle, also in Henry’s demesne,
Still sits marooned between land and sea
Doomed for centuries a bridesmaid to remain
Nearby squats the Mary Stanford lifeboat station
A monument to that fateful date
When seventeen crewmen tracked across the saltmarsh flats
For one last time in nineteen-twenty-eight
Searching for a phantom ship
They found a cold and watery grave instead
Sandwort, Curlew, Couch Grass and Stork’s Bill
Cardoon, Sea Kale, Cormorant and Sea Purslane
Egret, Sea Pea, Lapwing and Marsh Frog
Compete for space in what some might see
As just another piece of swamp or bog
But neither bog nor swamp truly can describe this place
So full of the genomes of our diverse race
A million years will not have altered
Its make-up or genetic shades
Our DNA is mapped out here in spades.
CRICKLEWOOD COWBOYS
In Cricklewood we had the crack
We went to town and some came back
In Kilburn and Willesden too
We danced in The Banba and the Club 32
(A ramshackle house of bones
In Harlesden High Street
Where the girls danced round their crucifixes
Who knows whom they hoped to meet?)
If you owned a car and didn’t drink Guinness
You were good for a feel if nothing else
But if you wanted to get them into bed
You had to put a roof over their head
Oh, and two little words were important too
And they wanted to hear them loud and clear;
I DO!
TIGER BAY
How long have they sat there,
Unnoticed?
Granite haunches
Tensed in the sand
Brunting the snarling sea
Washed over again and again
Licking endless salt wounds away.
From these high cliffs I see them clearly
Wild creatures
Waiting patiently for prey
Yesterday it was desolate;
Now there are tigers in the bay
IS ED SHEERIN AN ANDROID?
Everywhere you look these days he’s there
Ed Sheerin
Strumming his plastic guitar
Smiling his geeky smile
Singing in his whiny voice
Best Album, Best Solo Artist
Come on, get real!
Writing his colour bling lyrics
Peddling his simpering vanilla sound
Sounding like his tongue got stuck in a mouse-trap
Then there’s his inane grin
His funky waistcoats
And his sexless chin
There’s more sex appeal in a pillow case
And he’s not even gay!
I suspect he is an android
That makes soothing noises when you pluck a string on its back
And I bet that close up he smells of WD40
My Writing Life 