THE UNIVERSE AS A HOLOGRAM
I was happy as I am
Living in a hologram
Please don’t add to my confusion
Is my 3D space just an illusion?
Am I in mired in someone else’s dreams?
Well, fuck you buddy
Life just ain’t what it seems.
see my books @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
I find the further back I go, the better I remember things, whether they happened or not.
Mark Twain
THE WALL
I stopped by our wall again today
Staring
Just staring
I saw an image of you
Fleeting
As you hurried by
It was like somebody
Had stood on my grave
You in all your finery
Mirrored on a blank wall
Blank
Just like your face.
DUNGENESS
Boats that belong to better days
Mingle with iron flotsam
Washed ashore on a sea of shingle
Fishermen’s shacks sit like pygmies
In the shadow of the power station
Their colourful facades
Browbeaten by nature’s extremes
A stone garden sprouts incongruously
Beside one such dwelling;
It does not bloom in spring
But neither will it die when winter comes
BEING HERE
I may never be a poet
I may never rhyme;
(having no time for all that crap)
But one thing I do know;
People don’t stay, they go;
And they never come back
Oh, they are there – empty;
Looking like they once were
But deep down you know it’s not really them;
Just effigies
Waiting for you to go too
She loved you once you know;
She would admit it
Now fire has seared her mind
Cleansing the important bits;
It’s not love that sparkles now,
Just tolerance
And not a lot of that
So where do you go
When the fire has burnt itself
But into it;
Ashes to ashes
Dust to December
And no better for it;
Complacency –
And no end to the pain of it
my latest 2 collection of poems- 67 & 67 PLUS @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
THE MANAGER’S WORDS OF WISDOM
The best player on the planet.
When he plays on snow
He doesn’t leave any marks
He can’t walk on water – yet
Though when he farts there’s always sparks
I am like God
I never get ill
I am always right.
Football is a game of two halves
And is mostly a right load of shite
I wouldn’t say I’m the best there is
But I am in the top one
And that’s the only group to be in
If I walked on water
Some would say it’s because I can’t swim
Some believe football is a matter of life and death
But it is much more important than that
In football as in life
You won’t get far
If you don’t know where the goalposts are
The best way to relax
Is to drink pink champagne
Before the match and after
Then losing five nil
Won’t seem a total disaster.
These 4 works are by street artists, BAMBI,PLASTIC JESUS, KING ROBBO, PURE EVIL. The works themselves speak more eloquently than any words of mine could.
A lot of people never use their initiative because nobody ever told them to – BANKSY
ABOUT SINGING
An unsung land is a dead land
Forget the song
And the land will surely die.
Our forebears, though mostly illiterate,
Made music that can still make us cry
Musical phrases, like a map reference,
And the land read as a musical score
Where singing the land
Has the crowd calling out for more.
The song couplets stretch across tectonic plates
Just like mountains stretch across continents
And someone waving as we pass through endless gates.
*
Pale sand, red rock, burning fire
Everything your heart may desire
Mapping the music
to which everything transcends
This is where the story begins not ends.
Religion, pagan or Christian
Permeating everything, blending,
People sympathetic and synthetic,
Careless and unknowing of secular beginning
Or religious ending.
All the colours of the rainbow
Dressed in human clothing
Aisling, dreang, radharc
And the gift of seeing what isn’t there
When the songs are left unsung
Who is then left to care?
CURE FOR WRITER’S BLOCK
Saying Zanzibar seven times
Very slowly
Is good for writer’s block
Z-a-n-z-i-b-a-r, Z-a-n-z-i-b-a-r
Zzz-aa-nn-zzz-iiii—-
Fuck, fuck, fuck
my books are available on http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent
THE WILD WEST
The Wild West has migrated east
The Middle East near and far
Where the horse has been superseded
By the pick-up, the land cruiser and the car
They race across vast deserts firing bullets in the air
If there’s a name on any bullet
Well, no one seems to care
Shooting up the town was once the pastime of the bad guys
Now it is blowing up the houses
And killing little girls and boys.
The bombs rain down on everyone and everything
Where once it was just arrows
Fired by some pesky redskin
Looking down the barrel of a gun
Can be intimidating
When it’s eighteen foot long
There are no six-guns or shotguns any more
But rocket launchers, machine guns
And others of such enormous bore
Playing cowboys and Indians was once a pleasant game
But when your opponent must be beheaded
Then it isn’t quite the same.
THE SINGULARITY
The singularity or
To be more precise
The technological singularity,
This thing for techno-utopians
Looking for immortality,
Is it real?
The singularitarians are banking
On it being so,
Seemingly willing to stay alive
For long enough,
By fair means or foul,
To benefit from this man-made God
That grants transcendence.
Artificial intelligence rules
They hope, despite
The doomsayers and techno-dystopians
Who claim it will malevolently bring about
The end of the world.
The end of civilisation as we know it
History and Hollywood are on their side;
Frankenstein, Skynet, the Matrix
Are their testimonials
When AI exceeds human intelligence
Everything changes
A smart AI breeds a smarter AI…and so on
Ad-infinitum, perhaps,
Leaving human intelligence without comprehension.
Driverless cars
Automated financial transactions
Language translation systems
Already better and faster than humans,
The list grows bigger daily.
Who needs humans, really?
My Writing Life 