Hello, is there anybody there?!

Bloody hell, I came back hoping to find some old photos that got lost when my hard drive failed and be da hokey I saw that the very same thing happened in 2008! Also it was quite sad to read my posts about starting out into the poetry world. God, I was SO enthusiastic, and funny, I used to be funny! I'm just a miserable old bastard now.

And nobody I know is blogging anymore, including me, which is kind of another sadness.
But not as sad as the news that Pat (Weaver of Grass) has finally given up her longstanding and wonderful blog. Of course she has no choice. (I can't say the words) But she will be very much missed and I will revisit her old posts, so in many ways she will live on. I'll never forget her that's for sure.

 Booze News and Book Reviews, come on in!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wphy4Dw4Bw

Hello troops,

Hope you are keeping well, staying safe. I wish you all well, lovers, likers, lurkers, even the haters.

I digress. But only in the privacy of my own room..

Now, listen, come here to me. In the family home, the original one in Offaly, before some of the family had to flee at gunpoint to the North (Dad's dad, a peasant, got the local farmer's daughter, a schoolteacher no less,pregnant out of wedlock) and then, child born, return to as near to home as possible, Tipperary, the next chapter.

But going back to the Offaly contingent, my Uncle John, had a clock (with a beautiful bluebird on the sweeping hand) that in later years (my time) would only work if kept face down on the red formica top of the oblong kitchen table. How this was discovered, I don't know. I guess when you cannot afford to replace things, you keep trying 'til you find a way.

Anyways, as I remember, every time you picked up the clock to check the time, it would stop. So after a week or so (in between winds) it would lose a few minutes, but nothing major.

But jesus, I loved that clock. I loved it because of its faults, not despite them. That clock was more special than anything built by the finest clock makers worth thousands, millions.

Fuck knows what happened that ostensibly less than worthless clock. That house, with the usual family fall out, was sold, then levelled, after Uncle John's death.

I managed to retrieve an ornamental donkey, a small cobbler's hammer, a pair of (fire) tongs, and a chair that had been shortened to fit us kids, despite being one of the few sticks of furniture in the house.

But the clock is the thing. That's what I miss. What I think of. Probably because it's lost. I don't know.

BUT a lifetime later, I got a clock/radio/CD player from Mam's house when she died. Years earlier I had chosen it with her, it was (despite my best intentions) useless in sound quality, and overly complex to use. So she never used it, and I felt bad about it. About many things.

I always turned it on when I visited, so it means something to me, despite everything.

And now it is old and worn, like Uncle John's clock.
It fell, got dented. The CD player would not work, the digital display declared the lid open, even though it was closed. I leaned on it and it worked, but as soon as I moved, it stopped, displayed 'open'.

I piled things on top, some were too light, others too heavy.
I experimented with different items for over 40 mins 'til I found the perfect combo.

I love that Marx is the top of the pile. It could have been Trump, or Boris, or Blair, it could have been Leo.

But I don't have them fuckers in the shed.

What am I trying to say? I don't know, you tell me.

Keep safe, stay well.

Love Peadar.

How long since the last post?!

Time to get back in the saddle, yahoooo! To All The Proselytising Pouters. We hear ya. We also see ya. And this, as we are simple folk, leads to some confusion. Self, selfish, selfie. Cause, caws, effect. Aren't you gorgeous as you pout, and all the worthy things you spout, hat on, gloss on, right on, lovely woman, lovely man, doing all the things you can, for racism,sexism,starvation, homelessness, if not gormlessness, in your poutiessness. Ah, we love you, (not as much as you love yourself) and we love your friends, (not quite as much as they love you) symbiotic amniotic fluid gives birth to all your dreams, your circles as tight, as a sick duck's arse. Oh, your stellar skies, as in the IT you explain the whys and wherefores of literary bores, you lovely man, you courageous woman, where would we be without your words, sublime guidance, like missiles over borders, you are the main courses and the whore d'oeuvres. Mwah! WE LOVE YOU!

There we are walking along the post-storm streets of Dublin,the streets my mother walked years before, I light a candle with thought, without belief, in St Theresa's, Clarendon Street. A candle for her and all those gone before us marked (some would say scarred) with the sign of faith.Our loved ones. Out again, there's a coolness in the air, a calmness, a warmth in the sky and I think out of that/the blue, 'Lapus Lazuli.' I say it out loud, Lapis Lazuli, It feels like two nice marbles rolling an alliterating joy in my mouth up to my brain. I'm not 100% sure what exactly it is, a precious/semi precious gemstone? A title for a new poetry magazine? I know nothing of the double L. We wander in to The National Library, I like the carved wooden breasts on the fireplace, perhaps you are not supposed to touch, but I do, then we wander down to the Yeats exhibition and there out of another blue, a lump, a block, a real piece of 'Lapus Lazuli' in all it's glory. New to me, spookily co-incidental in a darkened room touching on Yeats' fascination with the occult. Then I learn something. A tour guide explains that the Yeats family wanted a quiet funeral for Willy, but his fame would not allow it, so they packed his body off to a rented tomb in France but forgot/omitted to pay the rent and his coffin was turfed out amongst the hoi polloi francaise.

Then war broke out and WB's coffin could not be returned to be buried in Drumcliffe 'til hostilities had ended. By then who knew which coffin was which? There are major doubts that Yeats is buried under bare Ben Bulben's head at all! If not him then qui? And if qui is not il then ou est William? Mon Dieu, quelle question!

Being good enough, is rarely the criterion.

Oh, Jesus, what can I say. It's been so long. I'm used to FB, or worse, twitter, the Haiku of social media. Here (Blogland) you can breathe, luxuriate in space and freedom. So much water under the bridge. You can never step into the same river twice. I think you can but you won't be the same person. What has there been since I last stepped into this river? Death, my mum and my mother in law, my nephew, and ridiculously amongst such gravity, but yet perhaps not quite so ridiculous, my dog. Ostricisation by virtually every poet and poetry outlet in the whole of Ireland. Hell hath no fury like the fury held for a whistleblower. Ill health, depression, drink, writing, surviving, living, yearning,hoping, enduring, fading if not quite yet failing. I should post a pic of my dinner,or a cat wearing a hat, this is no place for hurt. The mag I co-edit is possibly/probably the best in Ireland, the most neglected, reviled.How dare a non-university (un)educated prole try to enter our hallowed hall? Where will it end, if we let them in? Poetry may be (should be) truth, but truth stands no chance against lies and deception. I think we'll call PB 'The Mag they Couldn't Hang'. If we survive. PB7 is due soon. It's wonderful. Not that anyone will admit it. My second collection, 'The Death of Poetry' is , somewhat ironically, a lifeline. It won't be liked, no doubt it will be shot down like REd Kite in the wrong place, or worse, totally ignored, because it won't be their story, it may contradict their lies, but it will be my truth. Somebody recently mentioned (and like all (occasional) ego maniacs I thought it pertained to me and even if it didn't I could see how it (mistakenly could), 'blank white flags' Well TDOP will be (please God, it will 'be') many things, but white flags, it won't. I'm envisaging poems more along the lines of Red rags to bulls(hit).Watch out for it! We are all dying, we are dying from the day we are born, it is not the result that matters, but how we played the game. Except it isn't a game, that's where the elite go wrong. This is it, this is serious, this is real.

There's a moth on a thistle! In broad daylight, between the showers and the rain and the sun. It's a bit muddy like, after all the rain, in the field at the gable end of Seanie McHaughey's house, over the five bar gate, tricky now in wellos after 10 pints, the slip and the slide of it all, among the crowds, the throngs, the hordes, descending there like it's Glastonbury. The moth, still there, but not on the thistle, on a Dandelion, a dent de Lion, a Piss the bed, a clock head, blow to tell the time. We need a shrine, a shroud, a commemoration, an adoration, a plenerary divulgence among all the effluence and the cows. I Know, we know, the hanging gardens of Babylon, The Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, We know men on the moon and heading to mars, and the Holocaust, and children blown to bits on Palestinian beaches, we know the clock counting down in times square, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the Sistine Chapel, the sunflowers by the one eared madman, we know,we've heard Gershwin, Beethoven,The Sex Pistols, but this is a moth upon a Dandelion, upon a thistle, like, well like in a Heaney poem, we need to bolt the doors lock the gates, erect a grandstand, build an airport, we have it, we have it, we have it, the moth, the dandelion, the thistle.

So there it is. So there we are. Trump, Cameron, Kenny. The thing is, I know, politics, fairness,cruelty, left wing, right wing. I know.And it matters, and I will vote, and I will protest. But now. Here and now. there is something. Not a poem, not a, what? Grand statement? Policy? Confession? No. This is an expression, a conveying of feeling, something that could be a poem, but clearly isn't. I feel smiley face, I feel hope, I feel feathers. They are the things right? I don't know what I'm saying, but I'm saying what I'm knowing. This is more than the main thing, but less than the major theme, the final thing. Or is it? There is the self, the self is the centre, there are so many selves.So many us to make we. We the people. The people as individuals of collective solipsism. Empirical beings of personal history. Personal landscape, personal genetic nature, personal nurture. All, well most, needing escape (hope , forgiveness, chance, enlightenment, answers). The less we travel the more we need flights of fancy, especially if what we seek to escape is ourselves. To not be me, ah that must be glorious, but not death, not yet. This is it, this is me right now in the moment, a record of now, because none of us can take then back. Words. Too many words. But then the song. Talk. Too much talk. Sometimes. Then we float, float on the dreams of ourselves, against the odds: still, though, despite, because, well, because we can, and because we won't give in, give up. What else can we do but re-bound? Our heads in our hands lets us see nothing, but inside. Something, something is the beat, something is so much better, better than nothing. Something, something, something.

Teardrops un-fallen. Something, a bit like nothing, remains within. Best not speak out, or feel-out-loud. Keep the mask dry, your un-wet face, have another kiss, another chocolate, another beer. There,there, my dear, cup of tea? That's better.

This poem was published in The SHOp (RIP) issue 13 Autumn/Winter 2003. I loved The SHOp more than any other magazine, I'm bereft now that it has closed its doors. Nothing gave me more of a deep gutted buzz than getting poems in that wonderful magazine. Your first time is always special, this was my first time in The SHOp and it is the only time I've ever written a poem with a mag in mind.
They put it on the last page, I always think (wrongly perhaps) that the best poem goes first and then a good one last in a mag to finish off, so I was extra pleased. I really wanted the first page in The SHOp but never reached that dizzying height, but I did have the front cover of issue 30 which was a dream come true.

The poem is inspired by my mother's father Francis Timoney who was born in Sligo and was wilder than a bush. He joined the British Army at 15 years of age for adventure, for something to do, he fought through the first world war and survived the battle of the Somme, he cooked and ate dog in the trenches and was deafened in one ear by a shell burst. Back home in Ireland he fought for Ireland against his old British comrades in the war of independence, again without a scratch. Finally,fighting on De Velera's side in the subsequent civil war he got shot in both legs on a raid on a barracks in Manorhamilton. One leg was amputated and the other kept a bullet lodged til the day he died . While convalescing from his operation he fell in love with a young nurse, Philomena Hayes and they got married soon after.

They had 'the two days of it' good times and bad times. Francis (Frank), once a fine athlete (winning many running and triple jump medals in the army) now flew around on crutches, lord alone knows what flew around in his head. A lot of horrific things. He drank. They moved from country to town and back again looking for the thing that would find him (an ufindable) peace.

Frank and Philomena had two children, my mother Carmel Imelda and her brother ,Alphonsus Cyril, who quickly changed his name to Timmy, well you would wouldn't you? Carmel and Timmy attended 12 different schools and lived at approximately 20 different addresses around Dublin and half the country. When there was no money,which was most of the time, they were happy, when there was money there was drink, serious drink. Always loving, always kind, but drunk, very, very drunk and all the mad episodes and adventures that go along with it.

He died at 87 years of age alone and unmanageable (but not mad) in a fairly Dickensian mental hospital in Mullingar. We used to visit him, when I was a small child he was old,in a wheelchair and in constant pain from his wounds which never really healed. I've never encountered such incredible toughness and sadness in a human, he had the most beautiful kind blue eyes.I'll never forget.

The Timoneys lived in Capel street for a while, the nearest bar was Slattery's, Frank drank there a lot, so whenever I was in Dublin I always headed to Slattery's in Granddad's honour. It was an interesting, old school pub, no frills, I liked it, then they did it up. It felt like a link was broken. So I wrote this poem for me, for Frank, for The SHOp. It became the title poem of my first collection from Salmon Poetry. It means a lot to me.

Jewel.

Along Capel Street I stagger into Slattery’s
and stagger out again to be sure I have my wits.
What the hell have they done?
Is nothing sacred?
Is anything safe from their blandiose renaissance?
A curse on them whoever they are.
I barrel on to the Quays singing or talking to myself,
corpulent with drink and struggling
to re-inflate between bursts of song.
Filled with stupid elation
and fuelled on pints of stout,
I gaze wide-eyed and blowing,
at the new found beauty of herself,
Anna Liffey.
Spanned by an arch the whiter shade of pale,
her waters are expressive fecund and inviting.
With undulating, warm, open arms of green
she calls to me in clamshells of desire.
Wanting to be smothered within
and bursting for a leak,
I express myself,
let fly the floodgates,
a stream of pee to the pea green below,
relief and satisfaction in equal measure.
They’ll never take the piss out of Dublin