What have I learned but
Nothing
Nothings
Somethings about nothings
like
Heart is wild animal
Wild animal is pilot.
Life is absence much as presence,
names, stones, the splitting of sticks
missyous strewn across the holy scape like erratics.
Cavern …
The Celtic Tiger, stone dead.
Isn’t it awful, awful?
She wandered onto the M6
Somewhere near Kinnegad,
Into the brute smack
Of a Lidl truck going west.
The heft of headlines, snap rage.
Isn’t it a real disgrace?
Someone left …
Us & Then (Exabyte)
Billows of dust
Thickened and dry
Colour of rust
Blotting the sky
Comments flicker in the fallen night
(A trillion stars in a trillion galaxies)
Flickering, bickering, faraway old light of
1000000000000000000000000 stars
Go on, get …
To watch from a distance
the world settle in for its night
from a bank high up under the Skye Road
where I can make out
comforting lights in windows
cars in their driveways
and the beam of a lighthouse …
This poem is called Breaking News
This is it guys
It’s happening
Clear the decks
This is breaking
I want pictures
Get the victim names
Find them on Facebook
Cross reference with LinkedIn:
We need names, faces, stories, now
Quick …
The body it waits, all tensed up
For the next sudden ping,
[New message]
And from the top of the stomach,
When it hits,
Nerves spark and jitter.
The body is wired from the mind to the world,
[Permission required …
I am
The car jolts and rocks along the track, as though dragged by chains to a chased beast.
I am the beast.
The indistinct greyed-over bogs and swollen rivers coming down the hills whish by the windows
I am …
Spring Fishing
Am I in a trap?
Did I build it myself?
The punt bobs on the waves between Broochen and the point of Fournaugh
This is no weather for fishing; no weather for anything bar the
Seat next to …
Máméan, Pass of the Birds
According to legend, St. Patrick blessed Connemara from a well at the top of the pass, and slept there (“Leaba Padraic”=”Patrick’s bed”), though to my limited knowledge there was stuff going on there before that …
Daffodils rising, raising yellow heads to bob in March winds.
Driving from Aberdeen across a Scottish Motorway,
Over the Irish sea in the belly of a ferry
South from Belfast and west from Dublin
West to Galway City and beyond,…
The smallest thing; flap of a finch’s wing
Dart of a blackbird’s eye
Rising of spring from buried roots with a cry
Strange to be here again
Late, behind schedule, delayed, out of time,
Yet back at the beginning, where …
An artist regrets having never committed
Streets outside the curtains
Draw me back
A bad sketch of a hollow tune
Hums above the others in the room
For her, my vacant ruin.
Waking in a strange old bed can be …
Do not forget me when the door clicks shut
Let me linger and fidget as a breeze
I would prefer to persist
Like the smell of toast or coffee or Febreeze
And my foregone exit resist
The lake at its …
Rainy Day in Renvyle
Rain sweeps across the wide open,
Clouds rolling in from the west,
Tears from the sky set in motion
Blown by a wind that won’t rest.
Ceaseless the changes chase over,
The shelterless landscape at speed.…
When she pressed on her glasses and drew the words near
Their shape and their meaning began to ring clear
The humdrum around her then faded away
And her mind drifted back to an earlier day
Where raucous and ready …
Cast it back,
Cast it out,
Freckled innocence,
Blooming doubt…
*********************************
The present is the presence of past.
Wrap and preserve it since nothing will last?
********************************
If daily we have the same lessons,
And become as the message itself…
Thus ends the age of exploration
Now Rules of Grammar and stuffy constants constrain
Fixed and steady, RIGID and arbitrary
While whipped on a whippet of wind,
Deserted, rejected, injected and binned,
Age turns the skin inside out
And indoors …
Turlough
Here comes the flood
The beat of rain in the dark,
Here comes the water,
Streams of pain make their mark.
A shoreline appears,
From the stone come angry waves,
A sinking in tears,
Of moments that nobody saves…