A New Order Please

As time goes by, as establishments age, their charters/constitutions age and they become more estranged from their constituencies. Organizations become locked into their time while the people they serve and their circumstances change. Our establishment, in all its facets, becomes inadequate.

And so, governments and their agencies enact regulations to embed themselves into society, removing themselves from their pioneering beginnings, regulating us into their paradigms for existence.

Politicians, even well-meaning, serve their parties rather than their people. Leaders serve established bodies, national and international. They become slaves to the ivory towers of establishment rather than heroes of their peoples.They endeavour to endoctrinate us on their infallibility, they can never for example admit to mistakes; they make no mistakes. This is my experience in Ireland; it appears to be case in the US, the UK, the EU and everywhere I look.

The power brokers have, I think, through accumulating regulation upon regulation, insulated themselves from answerability; it’s time to vote them en-masse, internationally, out.

Free Energy

Almost,if they'll allow it.

They Gave Me a Chair

They Gave Me A Chair.

I either read about or saw a picture of Simone de Beauvoir sitting on a chair above the grave at Sartre's funeral.That image of a woman sitting above a grave with the backdrop of the thousands that turned out for Sartre's funeral is strange. Somehow sitting on the chair makes wallpaper of the crowds.And I imagine the act of sitting would, for some reason, alter your thinking.

They gave me a chair
so I could sit beside the grave,
like a woman painted in
after the funeral crowds had gathered.

And I, his lover, looking down
as though this earth was some sort of heaven,
thinking
I'd prefer it south-facing
or he could do with a bit more space
or some other such nonsense.

Then, alone again, I found,
fixed above all my memories,
the picture of a coffin
on the floor of an empty room
as seen from above.

(from Sunfire)

Launching Poetry Bus 3

Poetry magazines are precarious ventures at the best of times, so you have to admire and congratulate Peadar O’Donoghue, creator of Poetry Bus, a self-funding magazine which is launching its third number this Monday night, 23rd January at 8.30pm in the International Bar on Wicklow St. Admission is free.

So I’m all set for a great night of poetry, music and craic;and since many of the readers of this blog come from Russia, the States, Austrailia and elsewhere, I’m expecting to meet a very international audience.

PB3, an A4 format magazine, comes with an accompanying cd and will be mailed to anywhere in the world for a paltry 10€.

Pearse Hutchinson

On the locker-lid
a biscuit-wrapping
...............................torn,
waves in a sudden breeze
just like a flower.


Pearse Hutchinson
20/12/ 2011

This small poem was like a parting gift from Pearse. He was in good form that night: chatty, laughing, telling stories; very much himself and the way I’ll like to remember him. He was a great conversationalist, brilliant company. A superb story-teller with an amazing ability to remember actual dialogue from encounters years ago and the capacity to take numerous diversions in a story and still arrive back, no matter how much time had passed, to the precise point of departure.

In recent years, more or less house-bound and often very fragile-looking, he still somehow seemed indestructible. It was as though he was surviving on the energy he got from words. There were always new books, new poets, new words in a myriad of languages to explore, and so, in his room on Rathgar Road he kept travelling.

It was hard to realise this weekend that the travelling had stopped, and looking at his face, that he had moved out and there was no one there. He has left a gap that no one can fill.

Your Crying

Your crying:
The silver streams
Of your eyes,
The radiant red cheeks,
The choking on words,
The gullish.

Somehow
I think of a voice
Curling up
From inside a hollow oak.

Watching Her Watching Films

Three poems about small, intimate moments near the beginning of a relationship.

1.
I watched the film on her face;
settled into that landscape

of shadows flitting, as images
scudded across the screen.

I could spend a lifetime
beneath that sky;

grow old like a fisherman
whose eyes are burnished

from watching weather;
his face tattooed from living it.

2.
I am watching the film in your face:
your enjoyment crinkling
the corners of your eyes,
teeth catching your lower lip,
blood draining from the pressure,
draining back as soon.

Furrows on your forehead,
I am smiling at your absorption,
want to stub them out with my thumb
but you catch me looking
so I turn back to the screen
till your face is mine again.

The words on my lips
remain unsaid. A time may come
when, not having words,
I will wish I had spoken; a time
when love being tested, I could say
I used to watch films in your face.

3.
He thinks I didn’t notice:
he never once looked at the screen.

But wrapped up snug in his feather down gaze
I was electricity;

played the film on my face
so he could read inside me;

and if he liked what he read,
he would be mine.

She Leaves.

She leaves
a country of mountain tops,
pencil points in nothing
and crosses on current arrows
to where the sun shines on a space.

Angels
look over the rails,
cheering ferries on the sea

of her worries;
for that is where she bobs,
among all the sparklets
on the sea-top.
And fears
scratch their fingernails
down the glass

she has left;
not left,
left, not left.

Scarecrows

Artistic Expression: method of spilling the beans without having to clean up the mess.

Scarecrows.


We are two scarecrows: rags and string;
what the rain softens the wind picks clean.

We are two scarecrows: sticks and straw;
crows fly out from underneath our jackets.

We are two scarecrows: nails and wire;
each day drowning as the corn grows higher.

We are two scarecrows: sacks and hay;
nodding toward eternity, we tip toward clay.