I'M NOT WRITING THIS OUT OF 

DEPRESSION BUT HOPE. 

HOPE THAT I CAN LIVE IN THIS 

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, TO 

LIVE WITH WAR HEART ATTACK 

STROKE, LOSS, TRUTH MY TRUTH.

Dirty Blues Background in G

PLAY BLUES MUSIC above WHEN READING

STROKE DOWN BLUES

I woke up this morning with the stroke-down blues

A formless form without a clue. I woke up this morning

Without memory, dreams or imagination. Hallucinating 

a chainsaw man behind my head Hallucinating death 

behind a hospital bed. The nurses were out to kill me

And I was next, I was next.

Black snow pelted and stippled my walls ceiling 

and floors, my wheelchair Crashed and unhinged 

doors. Lost in a moment made of tears. Lost in a mo-

ment that lasted years.

This is shell shock from a previous life

This is the darkness the blackness my wife

Black snow hologram state behind my eyes

The process of death keeps me alive

This is my stroke down blues

This is my stroke down, blue's, I hope 

I didn’t burst your sentimental bubble

Death is coming and I'm not in a muddle.

Fantasy and reality which is which.

The reality of living a heartless bitch.

THE OTHER-OTHER HALF OF EVERYTHING

                                                                            ‘Imperfection is the language of art’

                                                                                                                   Robert Lowell

I live within a moment frozen in time, it’s so hard to explain my world to an able-bodied person.

It seems I live in a world that’s outside the norm of space and time my world is a locked-in-syndrome definition:                             locked-in syndrome

1. (Pathology) a condition in which a person is conscious but unable to move any part of the body except the eyes: results from damage to the brainstem

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty

that is all ye know on earth

and all ye need to know'

                                                    John Keats

In 2005 I took a massive stroke that almost killed me, they switched off my life support and

declared me dead but just seconds later I awoke so the process of death had begun within

me and for the last ten years I have woke every day and seen the stippled darkness behind

my eyes, the way you would see blotches before yours.  My brain was a formless form, like

a bowl of porridge gruel, I learned again to read and write and use an alphabet board blinking

my eyes, one for yes and two for no.   As I was right handed before I learned to paint with my

left not with the same accuracy as my left hand was slightly damaged by the stroke.  One of the

first images I created was a collage of the word positive, my first days of recovery were spent

watching nature out the window, that was daytime T.V.  I was off in the moment thinking poetry.

I have tried to adjust to this way of life but it’s been so frustrating as Northern Ireland has not the

infrastructure for wheelchairs or disability, were a sectarian lot.

I’m now confined to a wheelchair as I can’t walk or talk and I am paralyzed down the right side

of my body, when I took the stroke I had no speech what so ever for almost a year

They say I’ll never walk again as the stroke damaged all my balance inside.

The royal Victoria hospital operated on my vocal chords and my voice started to come back

But not with the same volume as before but without background noise and reading my lips I can

hold a conversation.  Because of that ground breaking operation I now have partial locked-in

syndrome so I can communicate with a mumbling speech to friends and family who can read

my lips but I still find it difficult on the telephone.

I live within this moment locked within, lying in bed early this morning I was watching the

Shadow of leaves shimmer in the streetlight on my bathroom window.  Thinking it looked like a

Japanese print, then I thought what’s the difference between east and west?  Now and then.

I reached across to get a book of pomes I had published to read a pome now and a pome then

And I let the book fall on the bed realizing that this is the first time in ten years that I could see

Outside my moment.  It struck me that I had never compared this moment that I was locked into

Before, it was like standing on a broken bridge but I could see the other side.  I had been writing

A blog online, repeating myself over again but this was the first time I had seen the other half of

everything.  Wow I thought reading and writing must be strengthening my mind and words are bridging the gap. 

Before I go any further I should tell you of my link with the written word, words and art have

been building a bridge across my void.  I can’t stress just how much

this means to me, as Lou Reed said in the song ‘I’m beginning to see the light’ not in a

religious sense but an art sense.  Before I took the stroke I was a arts officer working at the

Millennium court arts Centre in portadown until I was fired in 2006 for writing the word fuck in a

email which my boss seen.  My aim there was to create a writers Centre outside Belfast or

London/Derry but then I had my stroke and was fired.  My mouth has been getting me in trouble

for years, I meant no harm by it, for me as a writer fuck is as great an expression as the

four letter word love, I’m a broken fucking poet and I don’t know it and I don’t want to know it.

Until the day I die I’ll say just how it is and if you can’t handle it that’s your problem. I was a

published poet in love with life, with a master’s degree and four collections of poetry published.

Setting up poetry groups for young and old all over the country in schools and community

Centre’s, getting vibrant young writers into the area.  Now I can’t work and teach poetry so I

write pomes of the moment on an online blog in the hope that I inspire at least one person and

myself, it has allowed me to see beyond myself, the power of words their magic.

I have been trying to recreate this feeling of moment-us magic through poems I call pomes

because their created from the moment and find a form of their own, a form of hope for me living this negative capability.

               HELL CELL

I remember not to forget, being taken by the hand of my mother to visit my father

Detained at H.M.S  prison in Crumlin road jail.  It seems I am doing my father’s bastard

Time in this modern day dungeon.  In the waiting room in the visitors center, Quakers

Made us tea and biscuit to take the sting from visiting the hell cell.  I could feel the bitterness

Behind my mother’s eyes, her defiance of this British regime was stronger than my fathers.

She came from a long line of Irish republican Dublin born rebels that stretched right back

to Kevin Barry and the 1916 rising.

They say I lost 45 years of memory during my stroke but I remember this like it was yesterday

Plucked from selective memory.  These past ten years have become my life these pomes and blogs are memory.

I’m not going to write the boring here now when, where, why, essay so these are snippets of truth

Rewrit.

whinger.com

HELL CELL (blues pomes set to prose)

When I woke from the stroke/coma seconds after they switched off

my life support machine, my brain was soft without form like

porridge in my head, 45 years of memory lost in the dark.

Speechless, paralyzed unable to walk I began to construct a poem from what I seen, pomes

became my imagination.  Because I lost all memory and dreamscape, a flower and a butterfly

became form.  I tried to write in a left handed childish scrawl, before the stroke

I was right handed but now was paralyzed it rested on my lap like a meat parcel.

I began to form words into a poem in a left handed baby scrawl but the moment

found a form and the moment wrote the form, it might have looked like it was done with an infants

hand but at least it was a form.   Every day for a year I went to the window and captured inspiration

while the other patients watched mundane TV, by the time I was released on a trial basis every

Saturday to my mother’s home my mind was strong enough to be released into an independent living

center, my mind was strong enough to deal with my illness and realize that no one was to blame for this

accident only me, I lived to large and this was the price I paid, I had a wonderful life and three magic kids

even because the stroke was in my blood I couldn't blame my mum and dad they gave me my wonderful

life so I dealt with my recovery through writing.

The more I read and wrote and painted the stronger my mind became and I began to see that and the

more I wrote I remembered flickers, memory began to flicker I thought was dead.  I was able to face my

disability head on and even relive the darkness to strengthen my will to face each day and even conquer

that hurdle of man, suicide.  Ok I knew I’d never walk but at least I had a brain that helped through

this darkness with the help of friends, Lagan and Lapwing press both took my manuscripts and formed

those into books, thank you Pat Dennis and René, that was a great step for me like stepping back into

reality, that has given me the confidence to write this blog and give you a taste of my world, the

moments that write my form.

I know it has been dark at times but like life itself we have to give to get and sometimes that can be a

hard road and a hard pill to swallow.  My next plan is to write about the magic moments I faced in life.

Life is full of light and dark and dark is as light as light even lighter, I thought my brain was dead without

memory but the more I read the more I remember.  The brain is a wonderful organ with its own internal

hard drive and even lifting a cup or reading one sentence can make the brain remember doing that, all

you brain injury patients lift that paper or that book even if you only read one sentence it’s a start.  My

mother had 5 strokes and she writes articles from the newspaper, I get this from her will and she's still

alive and writing and reading to keep her mind active so write to remember not

                              to forget.

For ten years now I have lived without dreams, within my own harsh reality.

No abstract realism, entity or metaphysical being exists here. 

This is a rough road, the hardest journey of my life. 

I have posted the horrors of my reality every other day on Facebook,

allowing the world to see my harsh causeway.

Please don’t judge my pomes on any poetic form they are moment

Us moments from my harsh causeway not based on any dream

Imagination.  They are moments that matter to me and help me survive

This harsh world in a hell cell buts it’s the only hell cell I have, reality

Rules ok.  For ten years I have been writing the self, living with the moment

That has become a decade of de-ja vu, these blogs have been my life.

From day one I have been living a harsh reality and now since my stroke it has been tenfold.

I am the son of a bastard son and these are my dark dreams of reality, 

my bastard life, the only one i got.

GUTTERSNIPE

SOME OF THESE POMES AND STORIES ARE FROM 

BELOW, BEYOND THE REIGN OF  SNOBBERY.

poetry is like sunshine it's free

TEARS OF JOY (an essay pome)

Laughter and comedy is humanities way of dealing

with the worlds destruction.  Comedy is re-born out

of hard times like the First World War and the deep

depression.  The reason we have so much comedy

today is because we live with the fact that as Spike

Milligan said we are Fucked!  We live in the shadow

Of nine eleven and a crumbling economy, were going

Down but were going down laughing.

Laughing at the horrors of life, the funniest place

I found was the stroke ward at foster green hospital.

Laughter at the antics of warped minds and nurses

were my survival tool, after my stroke my mind was

as sensitive as a child’s mind.  Laughter got me through

those hard days, I actually miss those days at times.

Some days I laughed so much that the nurses had to

throw me out of the day-room, I think deep down they

wanted to laugh at the patients who’s minds were so

messed up that they thought they were the president

one day and the next they were mickey mouse. 

It was like one flew over the cuckoo’s nest in there

I know it was very sad that we were there

but it was so funny too.

My mind was in a state of formless form, when they released

Me after a year of Physio-therapy and O.T. of learning how to

wipe my ass, brush my own teeth and stand on my own two

feet to transfer into a wheelchair and live as a disabled person. 

I went to a poetry reading and my friend was on stage reading

a poem on Hiroshima and I went into hysterics

of laughter and couldn’t stop. 

My mind was so sensitive to the world that I used to burst into 

tears crying and laughing at cartoons and human disasters.  

My mind has become stronger  but some days I find it so difficult 

to live in the sorrow of humanity, I had to stop watching T.V. 

as the news items saddened me so much.

 I try to live in a positive existence  I even laugh at people in wheel-

chairs, when there’s no way out of life there is laughter of tears.  

I remember when I was very young running down an alleyway 

chased by British paratroopers firing live rounds and plastic

bullets at us and I couldn’t stop laughing.

When the mind has nowhere to go there’s laughter, these past 

few years I have found myself in places where there is no escape 

I know its sick, I even laughed committing suicide.  

I looked out the window and laughed knowing that this was 

the only way.  People don’t understand me when I write such

Bleak pomes or I say I have the right to die just like you have 

the right to live.  For ten years now I’ve wanted to kill myself 

but I can’t, I’ve got three children and grandchildren 

I can’t leave a mess for them to clean but 

I have the right to say I want to die

Because that’s my truth, I live in 

a world where there’s no escape.

I’m not very P.C. and I hate censor-

ship of any kind.  You can laugh at 

this cripple anytime you want cause I do

thats the only way.

KILLING TIME

Everyone has got the right

To live or die?  I hate this world

Of no choice, having to follow

The way of the king-dom.

Life and death takes us to

The next step of evil-ution.

Preserving life to die.  This

Is the pome I cannot write?

I’m writing this from another

Dim-mention, inside out from

A waking dream.  Dig in dirt

Strike wonder in muck so why!

Don’t I have the right to die?

Like you have the right to live?

SOUTH CHINA SEA

I wish I was in the South China Sea

With my wife chona, a caring

Pilipino girl burying me in sand.

Trying to walk everyday between

The hopeful confines of bamboo.

Having rice and fish for dinner

Succulent fruit and a smile but

I have to live under British law.

My x wife is on the other side

Of the world and I’m alone.  The gov-

ernment pay my disability so I can’t

Work and bring help into the country.

But they can pay £350 a week to

Keep me in a care system.  British

Law denies me love, the purpose

And meaning of life. I am here

Doing life and my wife is over there

The law said we had to divorce.

DUG DOWN DIGNITY

Am I buried alive in this dug down dignity? 

in just one month there has been 10 care

Workers drifting in and out of my home

And they don’t know what to do, I’m waiting

for the bin-man to come through that door. 

Life is just a numb-er named on a care plan page. 

Why do I feel like a dog in a kennel, dog’s at least

get stroked and shown a bit of tenderness.

Care workers are like apple pickers, even if you’re a burger-

flipper or a shop fitter you can get by without training.

Their only humans you have to care for

even the careers don’t care.

Have we stopped to this level, my dignity went

out the window ten years ago and I have never got it

Back even for a day.  I thought the whole point of care

was trust and security but these girls don’t know what

their doing and I forget the time of day.

The care team of two different girls wake and dress me for

The day, one said, have a nice day, as the front slammed

and hemmed in my loneliness, I thought, I haven’t had

a nice day in years.  I know I could change companies but

I’ve had three and their all the same.  Life seems so inhumane

even the care workers don’t care.  I have to suffer this every-day

in this in this hell cell under an awful disabled uncaring care system.

DARK MATTER

‘Who wants to be a millionaire?

I don’t’

Poetry will ring from the black hole heavens

Echoing dark matter from cathedral spires.

Ebola, Ebola will be a chant from the people

greed can’t defy humanity, sing it loud, greed can’t

Defy humanity.  The stolen riches would eradicate

our drought of economy and poverty. 

Chant, the riches are for humanity we

All live on this third world.  We are heading

for the sea of insanity.  You began this elitist all

Mighty public schoolboy bullying

Percentage.

Ok the world celebrity party is over

You have had your fun let’s all go home.

We have raped this global economy.

Poetry will sing like a choir of angels.

The first second third fourth fifth cuming

The truth is on its way to kill us, were bartering

the price of an antidote.   Humanity has already

been washed down the drain.

The riches of this world belong to the people

The church walks around as if it were king while

The people are dying.  Snobbery is killing the world

I wonder who created snobbery.

Darkness within darkness is here, step in to the dark

To find light and everyone will be alright in the morning.

Sing it like a blues refrain, everything going to be alright

This morning. 

The only thing that was ever free is free speech. 

The virus will spread from a third world

To wipe out a free third world.

Have I got the right to say this, I ask?

I’m a human being, aren’t I?

They ask does poetry matter, can this?

The £ symbol waits at the center of our mobile

Icons, greed gets the better of me and you.

                                 

 THE OTHER-OTHER HALF OF 

             EVERYTHING

                                                                            ‘Imperfection is the language of art’

                                                                                                                   Robert Lowell

I live within a moment frozen in time, it’s so hard to explain my world to an able-bodied person.

It seems I live in a world that’s outside the norm of space and time my world is a locked-

in-syndrome definition:                             locked-in syndrome

1. (Pathology) a condition in which a person is conscious but unable to move any part of the body except the eyes: results from damage to the brainstem

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

In 2005 I took a massive stroke that almost killed me, they switched off my life support and

declared me dead but just seconds later I awoke so the process of death had begun within

me and for the last ten years I have woke every day and seen the stippled darkness behind

my eyes, the way you would see blotches before yours.  My brain was a formless form, like

a bowl of porridge gruel, I learned again to read and write and use an alphabet board blinking

my eyes, one for yes and two for no.   As I was right handed before I learned to paint with my

left not with the same accuracy as my left hand was slightly damaged by the stroke.  One of the

first images I created was a collage of the word positive, my first days of recovery were spent

watching nature out the window, that was daytime T.V.  I was off in the moment thinking poetry.

I have tried to adjust to this way of life but it’s been so frustrating as Northern Ireland has not the

infrastructure for wheelchairs or disability, were a sectarian lot.

I’m now confined to a wheelchair as I can’t walk or talk and I am paralyzed down the right side

of my body, when I took the stroke I had no speech what so ever for almost a year

They say I’ll never walk again as the stroke damaged all my balance inside.

The royal Victoria hospital operated on my vocal chords and my voice started to come back

But not with the same volume as before but without background noise and reading my lips I can

hold a conversation.  Because of that ground breaking operation I now have partial locked-in

syndrome so I can communicate with a mumbling speech to friends and family who can read

my lips but I still find it difficult on the telephone.

I live within this moment locked within, lying in bed early this morning I was watching the

Shadow of leaves shimmer in the streetlight on my bathroom window.  Thinking it looked like a

Japanese print, then I thought what’s the difference between east and west?  Now and then.

I reached across to get a book of pomes I had published to read a pome now and a pome then

And I let the book fall on the bed realizing that this is the first time in ten years that I could see

Outside my moment.  It struck me that I had never compared this moment that I was locked into

Before, it was like standing on a broken bridge but I could see the other side.  I had been writing

A blog online, repeating myself over again but this was the first time I had seen the other half of

everything.  Wow I thought reading and writing must be strengthening my mind and words are

bridging the gap.  I know this isn’t a eureka moment for you who see

and hear this everyday but in my world it is.

This was the first time in my moment us life that I saw into myself this was the first time in

ten years that I could see beyond myself.  I felt like john Keats or a famous writer, I had

probably seen this many times in my writing but this was the very first time I had seen the void,

so this is the first day of the rest of my life.  Things have felt strange within my body for the last

few days and there was something else there in the words that I couldn’t explain this was it.

Before I go any further I should tell you of my link with the written word, words and art have

been building a bridge across my void.  I can’t stress just how much

this means to me, as Lou Reed said in the song ‘I’m beginning to see the light’ not in a

religious sense but an art sense.  Before I took the stroke I was a arts officer working at the

Millennium court arts Centre in portadown until I was fired in 2006 for writing the word fuck in a

email which my boss seen.  My aim there was to create a writers Centre outside Belfast or

London/Derry but then I had my stroke and was fired.  My mouth has been getting me in trouble

for years, I meant no harm by it, for me as a writer fuck is as great an expression as the

four letter word love, I’m a broken fucking poet and I don’t know it and I don’t want to know it.

Until the day I die I’ll say just how it is and if you can’t handle it that’s your problem. I was a

published poet in love with life, with a master’s degree and four collections of poetry published.

Setting up poetry groups for young and old all over the country in schools and community

Centre’s, getting vibrant young writers into the area.  Now I can’t work and teach poetry so I

write pomes of the moment on an online blog in the hope that I inspire at least one person and

myself, it has allowed me to see beyond myself, the power of words their magic.

I have been trying to recreate this feeling of moment-us magic through poems I call pomes

because their created from the moment and find a form of their own.

THE RAP RANT OF MY BRAIN

When I woke it was a formless pulp plain

45 years of memory gone in a hard hard rain

I could remember being with people in places

But couldn’t remember details around those faces

They wanted to throw me in a wheelchair day-room

I looked out the window saw nature and moon

Poetry woke me inside a butterfly flutter by

Awoke from the dead, giving life to the city

Seconds after my life support was switched off

Poetry’s positivity has kept me un-aloof

The N.H.S. released me after recovering joy

Just like a broken discarded old toy.

I thought a family then would come together

But alcoholism told of more rain and bad weather

I couldn’t let my children live negativity, so I got my

Own place for the wheel chair and me, no family

My mother is my home she has taken some strokes

She still reads and writes her way out of this smoke.

I don’t know why I’m still alive, poetry, art and love

Made me survive.  The affirmation of love is a wonder-

Full thing, it gives my poetry that Dom de dom ding

This is the roll of the die, I can glide by and fly

I’m blaming no one this is my proof, life and love still

Lives under this roof so there’s only one thing left to

do life twists and turns but you can’t beat the truth.

In my world love of mother or brother comes before

Alcoholism.  This is my affirmation of loves humanism

They say I will never ever walk and always mumble

words natural flow but this rap rant is my natural

Know, how.

LOOKING FOR HOPE IN A HOPELESS WORLD

‘I’d like to lean into the wind and tell myself I’m free’

                                                                       Townes van Zandt

My world is pretty hopeless

It gets harder and harder

To find hope in a hopeless world

Where I can’t function as a fully

Fledged human being.  Maybe

In these words I am talking to

Myself to remember not to forget.

We are not searching for a higher

Being, we are looking for our inner

Selves, humanity holds the tender-

Touch.  I grew up as a boy in this

Wilderness of negativity, seeing things

A boy shouldn’t see, killing in god’s name.

Shell shock began to influence my life

I became a rebel fighting oppression.

I still find it hard today because that was

My tunnel vision that was my only way

Out.  I still find it hard to know who’s right

And wrong, I have been molded in the art

Of good and evil.

People like Fredrick Nietzsche, John Keats

Rilke and Raymond carver keep me on the right

Track to humanity.  I found it a hard fight and today

In a wheelchair unable to walk and talk, paralyzed

It’s a harder fight.  There is a spiritual essence with-

In us all but we look outside ourselves and place all

Hope on the hope that someone exists and cross

Our fingers behind our backs.

The art of hope is within you, don’t get lost in the slave-

Morality, find your own way through life, your inner-

Self will surprise you, in your art of expression what-

Ever form that may be, you will find a way to stand

On your own two feet and be you.

This world began to mould me, in august ‘69

We were put out of our home, I was beat by a gang

Of taigs one day and a gang of prods the next

I did not know what a hail Mary was or the sash.

They took my mother, father and sister away

To prison, I should be one of the bitterest people

Around but I was saved by freedom winds

By seeing the world was not all at war.

I didn’t know if I was coming or going, I couldn’t

Even sit on the fence, I still sit firm on this fence.

Peace and freedom are within you don’t let hatred

And bitterness eat your humanity.  I’m still influenced

Today by killing time but at least I have found

The first step into art.

Art is the first step into hope, humanity, I just hope

That I keep reminding myself that im free, we live in

Two worlds.  Like the locked-in-syndrome that’s locked

Within, art is my way of taking it out through words

Humanity rules ok!

LONELINESS

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
made with coffee honey and paint.

for William Carlos Williams

And the poets of essential

Loneliness.

Poetry and art have taken me

Through the darkest days

Of my life.  I’ve toyed with sanity

And cried rivers of tears.  Painted

Pain and wrote words of grief.

My friends and family have drifted

Into the ether.  I’m left here directing

A one man play called loneliness.

HAVE THE HUMANS LOST ALL HUMANITY?

‘we are all in this bloody century together

And that alone should be argument enough

To stop the killing’

                      Albert camus

This pome is formed from a question?

Not metered by an old language an old

Way, poetry is the verseification that sees

Humanity.  The minds evolution, it cant be

Blasphemous, it clears wars debris and reaches

Beyond gods crusade will, beyond martyrdom

And the paradise of death.

We have to look to humanity, where man

is free from dark aged ways far beyond

the earths black spot.  We have had wars

on every land are we going to do it again?

Have we learnt nothing from the past?

We are building a global peacewall where

Man stands on both sides, new/old, we need

A newer testament that brings Christ into

The present day.  We are going down the road

Of the rising of the dead, a myth on war torn

Dust of life, over and over again.

We are trapped in a biblical cycle, please be

A holy Houdini, there is life beyond the grave-

Yard.  The world is becoming a Palestine/Israeli

State, an occupied terriotory, a thorn in the side

Of humanity.  Please don’t come down my road

Its not very nice in here, in the land of the living dead.

Please be a holy Houdini and break free from

The chains and this cycle of violence.

I’m trying to live in a positive state but this is be-

Coming inhumane.  These aren’t the words of

A heathen tearing your Christ from your cross

These are the words of a human.  This dis-

Ability is the cross I must bare but iv’e got

To obey this broken body.

We are going back into that vertigo mind-

Set of green and red confusion, playing

A blame game again.  Remember the dark

Lonliness, its getting blurred I cant see you.

Let this not be the will of god but

The will of the people standing up-

Right and proud making me feel

Like a human in humanity.

HURT HOPE

for mother Ireland

Truth is a way to beauty

and beauty finds its way

to truth.

I wake every morning

In a room of stippled darkness.

Is this:

The hurdle of existence

Or just my tense-

did I dream black?

It’s as if my mind was dipped

Into an ink-well and it seeped

Into my brain.

Is this what I get for living high?

Evil-ution stamped upon my mind.

I’m not blaming but my father was a bastard.

There are whispers of abuse

Whether that’s true or not

There are alcoholic scars

Left on family members.

I suppose were all doing time?

He never touched me, he knew

What he would get, I would have killed the bastard.

Poor Stephanie is doing

Time underground.

To think that he put her there?

And me in this living hell.

I can handle most things but

Not that.  Imagine my mother

Lived with that monster for me

And your mothers for you.  Now

That’s true humanity.

Paedophile religion has raped

This country in war and hurt.

We have to find a way to let truth out.

Them bastards in robes are still

Ringing bells, they have us by the balls of his-

Story ringing the pedophiles ring.

My sisters loved their father.

I couldn’t see the hurt in their eyes.

Humanity was in there somewhere

Mixed up in the paedophile slops.

My first instinct was to stand on his grave

And grind bones into the earth but this is for

My sons.  Forget the past way of a bastard

Locked in a motherless hard man hell.  He was a back

Combing spearhead bastard but I loved him all the same.

I remember one day, I think finding him hit my mother

And I popped up from behind the sofa telling him
id kill him if he touched her again, I was only fourteen.

At least the past hurt hope can make

The future right, I hope-

Hurt makes me not forget.

NONE

In a world without god

There is no fear, anxiety

Manic depression just

Life’s depression.

Just you and nature and I love

Her wild side, she doesn’t hold

Any taboo’s up her sleeve.

These pomes are my adrenaline

Rush, even suicide has a back door

Ive been there so you don’t have to

It’s just a bolted back door that leads

To a dead end.  I miss the little pinch

Of madness, I haven’t had one in ten

Years but I’m telling you

Your not missing much.

This pome holds all my fear.         

      MELANCHOLY HAPPINESS

I woke this morning feeling a little blue, my career jokes with me, saying hi grumpy or sourpuss.  I know she means well trying to win a smile.  As she showered me, I was thinking, why do I feel

A little low, is it caused by our dreams affecting our waking hours? But they are only figments of life.  Then I thought she’s probably right you know, I live in a somber state a melancholy happiness.

It’s awful and sad that I live in this state but how can I turn this around.  We live with grief and suicide death, wars’ holocaust we are all refugees shell shocked by this planets past but we have to live with that and find tomorrow.

The only way is to become better human beings and use the word empathy more to break down the divides that exist in humanity, I know there will always be conflict that’s the human condition but life is becoming inhumane.  I know that I live in a world that’s lonely and the only way out of this hell is through writing and expressing hope.  Here I go again trying to convince myself that there is hope in the world, words have been my only source of hope.

Dark roads, along black paths

                     Finding words in a negative world

Hope on the ropes, the Tao says existence

         Is ‘darkness within darkness?’

I am on John Berryman’s blind brow.

                 I can't fall like Karl Walenda did in

A Ray Carver poem, i must stay on

the ropes, balancing.

I and you have to accept this blue.

                       I always make love to my light

                                                

                                     in the dark.

19/9/2014 PART 2.

NUMPTYVILLE

We have been hen pecked by capitalism.

Britain had a great tradition of eccentric

Individualism but the film: ‘A long good

Friday’, has become a reality and we live

Now in a world of greed taken over by

The American dream lost

in a mega rich fog.

Our souls are moneybags labelled with

A brand name.  It’s no longer ok just to

Win ten thousand pound on a game show.

We want to win a hundred million, get sucked

Into a million pound drop.  We are dropping

To the level of a big fat gypsy wedding, you

Don’t need knowledge and art anymore, all

That matters is the money in your pocket.

We are lost in a gambling haven sanctioned

By a government who takes gains from drugs

Drink and gambling.  When I went to school

They taught and promoted individualism, now

They teach business and greed.

I don’t have answers as there is no alternative

To capitalism, my only way is to reject greed.

We have already been swamped by the dream

it is taking us down the road to nowhere.

19/9/2014

This is the very reason why I’m a non-voter, I was very saddened to hear the news from my career’s that Scotland got the “NO” vote.  I was very sad for Scotland, they stood up and took it on the chin but I was saddened for humanity, maybe this should have been a world wide web referendum.  This was the first time in my life that there was a shift towards a true democracy but now I don’t even know the meaning of that word.  It feels like I’m right back at the start in a highchair not a wheelchair but I’m standing or sitting firm in the fact that I know everything I’ve got in life, I got myself because I have true democracy and truth in my heart and as the “YES” vote said trust for each other humanity.  Good on Scotland they took the world’s first step, just a shame they didn’t have the balls to follow through.

We live in a molly-coddled nanny state, watched over by a sweet old lady that’s full of sentimentalism. I’ll stand up to sit down in this wheelchair for my rights in any country, when I took the stroke, I woke unable to walk or talk, paralyzed down the right side.  It seemed to me that I was damaged goods that they should have let die.  Their ethics of medicine and their moral judgment kept me alive, what about humanity.  No wonder our economy is going down the drain.

I have lived now for ten years since the stroke in this wheelchair, really when you take me down to my basic form of humanity, I am just a brain and a left hand.  Living in a welfare state, it has cost the powers that be almost two hundred thousand pound to keep me alive.  Not one second of my life has been any better than before the stroke, do you call this living?  If I had been given the choice of life and death I would have chosen death, we have the power to save life but it would cost billions or even trillions to build a disabled infrastructure.  I would choose death not on the grounds of the ethics of medicine or moral judgment but humanity.

That old wives tale is still alive and kicking and that old crusade that we pump billions into defense.  It doesn’t matter what land you’re from, this was a world debate and the world hasn’t got the balls to move on and be themselves.

SURREAL REALITY (a prose pome)

This is an in-between state.

Just seconds after his life support

was switched off he woke in a strange

world he knew and didn’t know.

Without a sense of time and space.

He woke from a comatose stroke in

The sudden grief of his children’s loss.

The bond of love was so strong it

Dragged him from death like a magnet. 

The molecules of death and decay remain

within him in the marrow of his bone.

All memory was gone from his mind

he was a formless being an infant re-

born in an adult shell.

The medical staff busied around him

Pumping him with drugs and oxygen

To keep him alive, he was hallucinating

Life and death.  Going and coming be-

Tween the plain of time and no time.

One second he was in real time the next

He was flickering back into darkness.

He seen the people around him in white

Coats but he had no grip on reality.

He thought they were out to kill him

Administering drugs of death, the drugs

Were kicking in making him hallucinate

That there was a man behind his bed

Cutting up bodies and tossing body

Parts in a skip but these were figments

Of his imagination.  He had no sense of

Time, he didn’t know what was real

And what was fantasy.  He gripped

The blankets in his left hand realizing

His right hand didn’t move, it was para-

Lized, he held on in a white knuckled

Grip hoping those people who were

Out to kill him would save him.

Days passed and he began to come to

Drifting between fantasy and reality

Not knowing which was which.  He lay

There in the ward with drips and tubes

Going in and out of him and monitors

Bleeping, drifting in and out of time.

One day he woke in a dayroom and caught

Sight of an exit sign, telling his mind

If he seen that sign in daytime then I’m

Not dreaming or drifting on their drugs.

He was tripping on life and death, he

Took drugs in the past and knew he was

Tripping but this was a trip and a half.

This could not even exist on film, this was

Beyond a state of reality.  His head was up

His ass and this shit would not transfer to

Celluloid, this was out there an unreal road

Trip, off the road, in here in the darkness.

This was the place where you didn’t want to go.

From the dayroom he seen grass and earth

Through an open door and began to create

A map in his formless mind.  He began to drift

Back into time.  To a world where he was para-

Lized, unable to walk and talk.  Creating a world

From the darkness within like shadows

on the ceiling, recovering flat on his back.

People and faces began to appear in his mind

With the familiarity of nurses, doctors, family

Friends.  He had what’s known as locked-in-

Syndrome:  all your mind is locked within

So this is an extract from within.  A world of

Coming and going between poles, in and out

Of darkness in no time.  He would learn to live

With that darkness in a limbo state within

A melancholy happiness, his family and friends

Would accept and understand that death in life.

A FLUTTERING POME

Honey rises to fall like

Lava in a lava lamp.

           The darkness before

 My eye when I woke

      Drifted like a spider

 On a web. 

Balancing the light and dark of truth

   A clock-flower on

Humidity, inner light

Projected from

The dark.

Sitting at breakfast trying to weigh up the day

Life is like a butterfly

In John Keats eye.

           Fluttering love on death to make

Me see the light.

Humanity is fragile

                         Please handle with care.

NO CHOICE

An impending darkness looms

Like the remnant of a womb

Dream, stippled dark on

The walls of my room.

Did I fall into death, has

Hope of despair been left in-

Side, must I go through this hell?

We live in a world of no choice

To live or die, we must suffer

The consequence of shell shock.

Born to hate, living a them

And us state.

Seems I’m living Keats waking

Dream, his negative capability

Keeps me sane in this hell cell

Of melancholy happiness.

ERIKA

In your eyes I saw the Danube

Move like your smile drifting

From the black sea inland to

The map you drew me in the bar.

I asked you for your language

And it swept through me cutting

Crevices and peaks in the scent

Of your hair.  I reached you on

Page 104, b7 of the illustrated

Atlas of the world. 

The scent of your flesh through

the window here in Ireland like

the mist of a Transylvanian dew.

INCIDENTS

It’s like the world runs on two currents, the positive and negative flow.  The able one I don’t remember and no longer in touch with and this disabled one that I live in now. 

In 2005 I took a stroke that erased 45 years of memory, I can recall incidents happening I can’t put my finger on it, I can’t remember details.  For the past ten years I have been writing a blog trying to restore memory as it has devastated me and turned my life upside down.  The blog is a list of incidents trying to put a little fiction to the facts of my life, sometimes I feel like an alien in this world without a past or future.  I have a condition called locked-in-syndrome but because I can mumble a little that must be a partial syndrome, the syndrome means everything is locked within without communication. 

I suppose this is trying to rescue that bit of me that’s locked away.  It gets sore and very tiring living in a hurtful present, it’s as if I live in melancholy and the real world that’s out there doesn’t encroach my world.  These incidents hopefully take me out of this melancholy,  I find it so difficult to find hope in here, it’s really difficult to explain this world to an able-bodied person even I don’t understand it some days, it’s like living with a melancholic life force within you.  I don’t know if this will help, I used to believe that I was writing memory back into my system but then I realized that after reading it I would forget so if this blog keeps me a citizen of this planet for a moment that’s all I can wish for.

23c MELANCHOLY WAY

How can the world know?

This swoon of life/death.

Even the people who care

Don’t understand.  How

Can you step outside your-

Self and let the world see.

Imprisoned in beauty but

Not finding beauty in me.

Searching for the right word

In words and art, the lonely

Streetlight shines on me.

The air I breathe is tainted.

The sentiment of love is deep

Deep within my heart, lost in

Here out at sea.  All I can do

Is write and write this out of me.

If poetry is felt by the senses

Then what’s the sense in me.

My truth is inside my beauty

I must go round and round

Within my living and hope

That I hold that thing

Called love in me.

ANOTHER LANGUAGE

Reading Boris Pasternak in a restaurant

Mount zion house, Edward street

Lurgan, Northern Ireland.

The chatter and clatter

Of people and cutlery

On plates like

A gaggle of geese

Images seep.

A shiver of sap

A quatrain of lime-trees in bloom.

(Long you must suffer)

Long you must suffer, not knowing 
what, until suddenly, from a piece of fruit 
hatefully bitten,

The taste of suffering enters you.

And then you almost love what you’ve savored.  
No one

Will talk it out of you again.

                                                             Rilke

U-TURN

I am but a tiny speck on the face of humanity.

Whether you take this essay to heart, or not

Makes no difference to me, this is my truth.

Ever since taking a stroke that almost killed me

And left me unable ever to walk again, paralyzed.

That’s the truth that I have to deal with every day

But in the blues I have found hope.

I can only see this point of view because I look

At life from this perspective.  These words are

My truth, not the gospel.  Since the beginning of

Time man has created the story of creation and be-

Cause that story has been the battle of good and evil.

We have been wound up in anxiety and depression of

Who’s right and who’s wrong.  Were still on the crusade

Today with Gaza and Israel, they’re both right and wrong.

Before we decide we have got to look at life from the harsh

Reality of humanism, it takes conflict and atrocity for us to

Decide.  Stories have been wound so tight that the spring

Of humanity has sprung back and we don’t know where we

Are any more and what’s true or false. 

I live outside the real world within this cell without parole 

or a good Monday Wednesday or Friday agreement but I can see the world is in turmoil and I ask how can we recover from this killing, all killing is wrong. The only way to recover is for the world to live in truth not sentimentality the world spins on a fragile axis of sentimentality and it’s going to get lost in another holy war that will catapult us through a galaxy of bitterness and hate. 

As the philosopher Roberto Unger said in the book, ‘the self, awakened’,‘we have to be more godlike not more god’.

The story has become so corrupted and fantastic beyond our wildest dreams and imaginings.  It’s like a Caldron of culture, a pot of rape, murder, suicide, blowing people out of the land and sky and even childhood is not safe from evil human hands.  We are turning into monsters and every human being is to blame for this nightmare, we have let this happen.  

We have to look at life in a more realistic manner and face this nightmare, not bury our heads in sentimentality, we live in a celebrity unreality make over.  I know life is true and hard to swallow but at least we can find truth in the blues, truth is the only thing that can turn this world around.

I’ve spent the last ten years trying to come to terms with my disability, living in a wheelchair knowing that I’ll never walk seeing past the disability that’s all around me.  These have been the worst years of my life, I have even tried to commit suicide to escape this rotten world.  As you know from my blogs of pomes of the moment have been filled with my moments of truth and to write those words have been harrowing but I think I have accepted the blues.

The blogs have been hard hitting and true and their truth has torn me apart but through it all I could see the truth.  I have never written a word that wasn’t plucked from reality or had an aura of truth, I will stand behind any word I wrote.  I love a little escapism but let’s base it on reality, reality is the best fiction you can get.   

It’s as if the caldron of culture is getting mixed

With the unreality of sentimentality, caused by the story 

of creation to cover up the truth of evil-ution.  It has spun the spin around and it has shot back in our face like the dark ages of cheap lives and beheading blowing people out of the sky has become the norm.  

I’m not asking you to live under the blues but just to live in truth, they are murdering and killing humanity.  I’m not saying the story of creation is untrue but let’s stick to reality and fictionalize the truth, as long as we have an inkling of truth not some metaphysical bullshit that removes humanity from reality.  

Until humanity sings from the same hymn sheet we will always be spinning in an orbit looking down on us like a flock of unworthy beings being judged by the hypocrisy that we created.

Let’s live in this blue true world of acceptance, a new true world where we can accept our flaws in a broken universal truth.  I have looked at life and death in me, it’s beenthe hardest road I have ever went down.   Let’s live in a world, a world where Keats  

said, ‘beauty is truth and truth beauty’. 

BECAUSE I'M HAVING DIFFICULTY WITH MEMORY AND INVIGORATING YOUR MINDS , HERES SOME OLD POEMS:

THE DREAM

I begin to sway awake

With the morning drifting

In and out of the wind

And rain like snippets

Of silken shadow.

The dream i've been having

All my life flickers in the light.

A catalyst without ink to stain

Undulating through finger-

Print silk screen frames.

The images appear white-on-

White but there in sleep

It was a bomb blast of colour

By Vermeer or Van Gogh.

All that remains is shadow

The wind and rain settles

On light and the words I had

Stored lie fragmented

On the page.

SINCE TAKING A STROKE IN 2005, 45 YEARS OF MEMORY WAS ERASED AND ALL MY BALANCE WAS SMASHED SO THE DOCTORS HAVE TOLD ME I WILL NEVER WALK AGAIN. THE ONLY WAY I CAN BE HONEST TO YOU AND ME IS TO FIND HOPE WITHIN THIS HOPELESS STATE,THIS IS MY LOCKED IN TRUTH.  

       A POETIC REPETITIVE PROSE

“the self knows its light only by   

    knowing its darkness”.  

                            ALINA FELD

PLACEBO EFFECT

I find it very hard these days to focus on positivity, Alina Feld said in her study of melancholy, “the self knows its light only by knowing its darkness”.  My darkness it seems is projected from within, I live within the state of melancholy but I hope this essay shines a little light in the dark.  I am not coming to this essay trying to shove something down your throat.  I have searched and searched for the answer, but even in my hours near-death, I found the same answers as you.

I believe I have been given a second chance for a reason but I'm not asking you to believe in something that fundamentally contradicts itself. I believe what I believe, it’s just that I call mine poartry, you have another name for this mystery, let’s leave it at that, a mystery. Mysteries are named so because they want to be left alone; if we find out what the mystery is then that's the end. Like poetry, you get something from it, then leave the rest alone for another day.

You will receive something else from the same thing don't bury it and kill the mystery.  It’s about you and how you feel today, everything you receive depends on your mood, how positive and negative you are.  You have the power to change your life for the better but it’s up to you. The power of positive thought is an amazing determination; tell yourself you can do it.

At the minute I'm reading the book “Purpose Driven, What on Earth am I here for? “I’m looking for the answers like everyone else but no self-help book will give me the answers.  At the end of the day they are Rick Warren's (author) words, it’s the name he places on it, it’s his answer but who are you, what's your name and most importantly what's your answer? It’s in you, look at yourself!

When I was in the embrace of death there were always questions I needed answering. I remember waking up one night in a cold sweat from a dream. There was a crowd of doctors around me administering drugs. I thought I had died and this was my hell, but I came to realize that heaven and hell are the same place its how we think of them, they both exist in your mind but it’s up to you how you paint them, positive or negative.

I remember, many years ago, being kicked to the ground in Lurgan one night with seven around me and a beer bottle in my hand. I thought of smashing it over the ring-leaders head but instead I threw it away, I rolled up into a ball and took the beating. If I had smashed that bottle over his head I would be dead, not here now writing this essay. It’s up to you, your life says what lane it takes. As Robert Frost said, “Always take the road less travelled by.” Life can be affirming. It’s up to you and what you bring to it, so paint your picture with a beautiful sunrise or sunset and you can’t go wrong.

A good friend asked me to write this essay. A searcher like me, she and her son have, along with others has been instrumental in my life since the stroke.  They are the ‘road less travelled by,' they are the sunrise and sunset of my life, they are my positive thoughts.  I wouldn't be here without those people, they were there for me. It's at times like this you realize who your friends are. Without them I would have become really negative; instead with their power and my own determination I pulled through.

Alright I'll never be 100% the person I was, but I'm alive. I have someone to thank for that, even if it's me, my friends and family. I believe in them and they believe in me; that's what I call the power of healing the positive force within me. The beauty is not to ask people to believe in what you believe in. Whatever happened to diversity? Believe in whatever you want to, it’s your right. If it paints your day so be it, that's your positive force.

This past years has been the worst I have ever encountered. As well as recovering from a stroke which almost killed me.

The stroke came without warning .I was on the edge of the bed, then I was on the floor shaking. I didn't know what was happening. I crawled into my mother's room and asked her what was happening; she told me I was taking a stroke. She phoned the doctor. All I can remember is being rushed to Intensive Care.  I had ‘locked in Syndrome.' I knew what to say but hadn't the power to communicate.

I was flat on my back and could only move my eyes I was so afraid it was uncanny. I thought everyone was out to get me, without the power to resist. I really did believe I would go out in a wooden box.

I remembered an experience from childhood. I was running along a pier when I slipped on seaweed and fell into the water. I was trying to get out of there. I feared I would die but when I looked around it was beautiful in there, the seaweed was dancing and for a second it was beautiful.  An American tourist dived in, pulled me out and pumped the water from my lungs. Since that day I have never met him but thank you.

It felt like that during my strokeI was lost walking around in a field 

of nothing, then I woke up with friends around me .I don't let on to know

the answers to life, I am just like you, a searcher of the truth and lying

there in that hospital bed I realized that there is no great light that I'm

drawn towards, just the people who loved me for their own reasons

not mine.  Someone once said ‘Never judge your enemy, it

clouds your judgment.' The power of positive thought is everywhere,

it’s what they see in you. These are the positive thoughts I have

produced.   I'm not looking for sympathy or pity you can keep it. All I

ask is that you read this and determine your own answers, not one

that's shoved down your throat, I hope this is your placebo effect.

POLLENATING DARK

The cars go by my window

from there to there, I’m In

the hive of in-between. The sun

shines poetry onto the page

and the shadow of cloud drift by.

Time goes by and seasons pass

but life still shines in me, it finds 

a way of producing honey

from the syllable bee.

A COLD SON OF A BITCH

                                                        ‘yet why not say what happened’

                                                                                          Robert Lowell

John looked from the kitchen window, the sink he stood by was like the interior of a

Well worn tea pot or the inside of his lungs sucking on yet another cigarette.

The street light threw a subtle pastel glow on the still housing estate, the red rusted

Volkswagen beetle stood like a monument to his life, ‘ill have to get

stuck in and fix that car tomorrow’.  He dropped a sleeping pill and rinsed it down

with a cold swig of tea and ‘ill have to clean this place’ he told himself

climbing the stairs.  He dreamed the usual sixty year old dream of young ladies

running naked through summer meadows.  When he woke it was those abstract

images of memory that disturbed him and lingered like a blunt saw through his aching

heart.  It’s a suffering fucking hell he said, throwing cold water over his face

as if extinguishing the image in the mirror and the reality of his bald head and pointed

features.   The stench of his loss lingered with every step he took down those steps

where once walked the wife and mother of his dreams.  He could almost see her

walking down those stairs to meet the day with that Irish strength that pushed the sore

reality to the ground.  I’m a loser he told himself remembering but not remembering

an infant left in a basket by a blood red door, doing time in Crumlin road jail, the longest 

detainee in Ireland, those nine months were hell, a single droplet of salted tear fell from his 

hardened Belfast exterior he brushed it aside like the murdering bullet from an armalite rifle, no 

point crying over spilt milk.  He ejected the stale teabags from the teapot he thought I have to go

doctors today and get that disability living allowance form filled in and get a mobility allowance

and have a new car instead of that almost unrepairable rusted old banger.  He remembered 

how the car looked in the nights subtle pastel glow,  and said god you’re a bastard you and

your cold light of morning.

He sat in the doctors waiting room trying to remember good times like his first born

or his wedding day but this annoying ugly kid kept shoving leaflets in his face about

cancer of the bollox and depression.  Just as he was about to smack the kid up the

head he heard the broken english voice of the Pakistani doctor call his name on the

tanoi like a conductor on a bus.  As the doctor filled in a section of the Disability living

allowance form and wrote some prescriptions for depression angina headaches

and the general feeling that life is a sick load of balls. John was calling him a black

bastard in his mind because he asked him exaggerate his findings on and received instead

a lecture on the ethics of medicine.  John was a bigot he didn’t know how to be

anything else, he hated blacks, Pakis, Chinese  as well as all those beautiful

women he could not have and especially that bitch that left him after thirty one years 

and six children.  He walked home through the maze of housing estates with his bag

of pills for every ill but the aching black hole in his heart.  Going past the derelict

houses full of grafitti he remembered the night the police man called.

The shadow of black cap was cast off and fell through the hall like the black cloud of

Depression,  ‘your daughters have been searching for you’ screeched, crashing with a

families laughter.  Those words rang through his mind like the word bastard the winds

of a harsh winter reminding him that life can be a cold son of a bitch.  He passed the

old decrepid bettle without an engine with out much hope of ever pumping fluid

through its rotten pipes.  He opened the front door and half expected his wife to pass

him and his children playing music and busying around the house,  instead he was met

by the grey stench of loneliness.  He stood by the sink steadying himself as those

words pounded through his head he washed down paracetamol and an anti depressant.

His head pounded filled with anxiety he staggered into the living room and threw

himself on the sofa putting his feet up on the coffee table between the carbareatur .

And the innards of a TV he was trying to fix.  He then stood up over the hearth and

placed a little blue tablet below his tongue and his heart rate began to fall and he was

able to catch his breath and relax.  He climbed the stairs and threw himself on the

single bed this is my bed I must lie in it he told himself and looked through the ceiling

through the grey sky through the galaxy of stars burning in the darkness of his sight

crumpled up into a little boy and cried himself to sleep.  He woke with the

hope of a thirty year old man he debt,  he bounded out of bed to tackle the unbeatable

day,  ‘you cant beat a good cry’, he told himself throwing water about his worn

features.   He brushed the hair from the nape of his neck to cover his bald patch and

brought it to a point on his forehead.  He sang walking down the stairs a song he sang

to his children when they cried, ‘you don’t have to be  a baaa  aaby to cry’.

Opening a cupboard in the hall he dragged a filthy pair of overalls from a pile of

clothes on the floor and stepped into them tucked his hair into a tweed cap and lifted

the toolbox.  The morning was a little cool but the sun was coming up strong above

the grey housing estate, ‘ this is gonna be a good day’, he thought sucking in the

almost fresh air.  Opening the passanger door of the car creaking like a great sigh

reaching in he delved between unsecured seating  busted wings and an exhaust

hauling a jack from the debris.  He took the cross shaped wheel brace and placed it on

one of the four nuts,  before taking hold he stooped and spat on his hands taking hold

he gripped the brace and turned with all his might and tried to budge the nut as if it

was his last task on earth.  He cursed the car and gave it everything he had, all a sixty

year old worn heart could muster.  A heart like a prune without syrup dried and left in

the searing desert of hurt to long,’ ya red bastard, ya german fucker, ya useless heap

of shit,  he mumbled as the sweat broke on his brow.  He rested a while leaning

against his dream and took a cigarette from his top pocket lit and sucked, he licked the 

beads of sweat that fell across his lips he ran his tongue across his lips once more they

were cold and grey he licked once more unsure and tasted death.

On the morning of his funeral a letter drifted through the letter box, one of his pal-

bearing four sons opened it and it read, we are pleased to inform you that you have

been awarded  motability.

ABSOLUTE RHYTHM

The first poem I had published was called ‘Bastard life’, it held my syllabled truth

it held the weight and emotion of what happened.  I saw that weight in the words

of Ray Carver, Patrick Kavanagh, Robert Lowell and James Simmons. 

When I was a schoolboy I heard them words falling into a trance when the teacher spoke

words from Julius Caesar, I seen those words on the street, words of Shakespeare sonnets

and Gulliver’s travels, I felt them in my heart.

Ezra pound said:  I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm’, a rhythm that is in poetry

Which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed.

I had no interest in school, English and art were the only subjects that held my attention

I couldn’t get my dyslexic head around math’s and figures.  I remember walking into a math’s exam

Writing my name at the top of the page and walking out home through the fields of

Freedom, getting four per cent for neat writing that for me was a pass.  I regret now not taking

English but that was the weight of my emotional truth so no regrets that was my emotional choice.

I just wanted to get out in the world, stand on my own two feet.  I had spent the first years of my life

Under a bastard life rule, I wanted to taste freedom and boy did I taste it, that’s why I’m in a wheelchair

now.  The weight of my life is sometimes very difficult to carry as you know from my writing, I write the

truth and it hurts sometimes, words of truth find their own rhythm and form.  These are my real fathers

The ones who helped me take the negativity and turn it around, they help me today to find my source

 in this neglected world of hate.  We need conflict and the struggling weight of words to turn this

world around.  ‘Yet why not say what happened’, wrote the great Robert Lowell.

I was born in Kent, England, the son of a bastard son, my father from Belfast and my mother from

Dublin.  I had a bittersweet duality, my mother was goodness personified and my father was a bastard.

He was on my back from day one, my aim in life was to get away from these authoritarian regimental

Bastard’s, to get there I had to go through schoolteachers, head masters, police, army,

queers, priests, perverts and a right wing system.  Aged sixteen after hitting my father a dig in the head

and putting him down never again to lay his hands on me,  I walked out and hopped a train to London.

A POETIC REPETETIVE PROSE

I woke in a strange place, one I knew but

all my memory of it had been erased. 

It was like I was reborn, I thought the nurses

were out to kill me.  I gripped the sheets

in a white knuckled grip and broke into a

sweat knowing I would have to hand over

my trust to make me settle into this strange planet. 

It was as if I knew this and didn’t know, that must be

how a newborn infant feels?  I knew I had

to give them my trust but I didn’t know why, everything

was so alien to me.  I had no sense of reality and I wasn’t

sure of this new world, I didn’t know if this was real or

I was dreaming, reality and fantasy felt like the same. 

I was drifting back and forth between both. 

It wasn’t until they put me on a ward, me and my bed

drifted along corridors past the morgue to a day Centre

by the back door, I could see the grass and the fields be-

yond and I knew I was at the back of the hospital.  

I lay there unable to walk, talk paralyzed, flat on my back

watching the strange comings and goings of nurses

and neurology patients.  I noticed an exit sign above the door

so I fixed it in my mind and I told myself if I see that sign

is not there then I’m in a dream. 

The strong drugs they were giving me to keep me alive

We’re making me trip into dreams, it’s strange now sitting

here when everything is normalized but those first two days

I was tripping on prescription drugs 10 times stronger than

acid, heroin or ecstacy, I had hallucinations in the past but

my mind told me I was tripping not to worry.  This was sending

me to dark strange places and my mind couldn’t say where it was.

It was as if I was an actor on the set of a surreal Steven

King screenplay or on a virtual trolley being wheeled into a macabre operating theatre in silent hill. 

I dreamt there was a man behind me cutting up bodies with a chain-

saw and throwing the body parts into a skip and I was next

another was I woke with all these people in white coats standing around the bed each with a nineteen forties syringes full of the death serum when they went to inject me I woke.

One night in the middle of the night in reality and all the lights were out on the ward and I got so paranoid I thought the nurses were scheming to kill me so I tipped over the stainless steel trolley beside my bed to wake up the other patients. 

After a few days my mind began to settle but those first few days were the best and the worst trips I’ve ever had, I was buzzing and sucking oxygen, like a alien junkie in a naked lunch.  The doctors told me I had locked-in-syndrome a thing where everything is locked in you, I can recall that things happened but

I can’t put my finger on it and state it in detail or tell you if it’s true or false.

  THE RIGHTS OF A BROKEN MAN

The powers that be have denied me love:  Ten years ago they would not allow my Philippino wife enter this country because I could not work and was disabled receiving benefit.  The law states that you can’t bring someone into the country on government funds, now they are denying me my independence.  I wanted a partner to do what the government pays hundreds of pounds for, a carer and partner that understands my needs.

me with some of my Philippino family

The whole point of this new D.L.A. is to give you a better quality of life but they are taking away my independence.  I can’t walk and talk and I am paralyzed down the right side and have been awarded middle rate D.L.A. and yet a person who can walk and talk is awarded full D.L.A, I don’t understand this.

The reason they don’t pay me full D.L.A. is because I want to live alone and be an independent person but my rate of D.L.A. won’t pay for a car that helps me be a disabled independent citizen.  They awarded me middle rate D.L.A. when I was living in an independent centre and being cared for 24hours a day, since then I have lived in two homes independently and yet my D.L.A. rate has not changed and a doctor has never entered my home to see how i live.  They are creating the benefit fraudsters by not trusting their own people, I only want my rights as a disabled broken human being, I have paid tax half of my life for this right, up to last year I had a drive in car.  I could drive from my wheelchair and was able to go for a coffee out to Lough Neagh and sit outdoors and read a book or go to the shopping centre and do my own shopping and even drive to poetry readings and a four day music festival. 

This year with no car its £70 just to get to a poetry reading in Belfast and arranging a gig in Dublin, we paid for tickets to concert then train fare on top and 170 pound to stay in a disabled room for one night.  You can get the train to Belfast but what’s the point if you have to leave the venue at ten to catch the last train home.  I think you need to get around this sectarian ridden country in a wheelchair before that word independence enters your vocabulary.  I was forced to surrender my car because I hadn’t the money to put diesel into it, my bank balance dropped to £200 and I had to decide on life or a car so it made the decision for me.

my wife now x wife Chona

This blog has been created out of pure frustration, living 

under a racist right wing so called care system. Disabled 

people should wheelchair and rollator the capital cities of 

this land with placards that say were not dogs were broken 

human beings. If I had believed in god I would have killed 

myself ten years ago, we have to live under pure oppression 

and I know all about oppression, I lived through the 

Northern Ireland troubles.

Seconds after my life support machine was switched off I woke from my stroke, reborn into an adult body with a clean slate, un-fossilised. Forty five years of memory was erased, unable to walk or talk paralysed, I had what’s called locked-in-syndrome, for seconds I was dead travelling through limbo and I woke up in hell. Nobody asked me if I wanted to live or die, their Christian ethics of medicine and morality pumped me full of drugs, nobody told me Northern Ireland had no disabled infrastructure.  I had to live under their way or the highway so I had to shut my mouth which was shut by a stroke and look out the window at nature and into myself, locked-in-syndrome is looking into yourself.

I was hallucinating that there was a man behind my bed with a chain saw cutting up bodies and tossing them in the skip and I was next. My mind was like a bowl of gruell porridge it had no substance, I was like a baby in an adult body. I had no sense of time and space, I don’t think they knew where to put me so I was put on ward three a make shift ward for neurology patients. The past almost ten years has felt like I am doing my father’s bastard time in Crumlin road prison in the middle ages it has been pure hell and even that is an understatement.

The whole point of life is to find some form of love and gain some inspiration from life. We are the first generation of disabled people with the rights of a human, before we were locked away from society like animals in a zoo or exploited like a freak show. I’m taking it no more, this blog will show just how racist and right wing this care system is, this is my only way of finding hope in a hopeless society, world that only thinks of war and crusades, weapons of mass destruction and blowing up women and children but what of their disabled citizens, we need a well - being centre of humanity.

LIMBO

This piece of prose holds my moment together, my reality, art holds the key to my kingdom. Heaven, hell and purgatory are written from the confines of Christianity but the nearest I’ve found to a landscape of limbo is ‘negative capability’. I’m not a man of god or Jesus, I don’t hold sway to that middle earth metaphysical presence. I envy the Christian crew sometimes that they can muster up a saviour to guide them through the dark days. I live within the dark days and it gets so hard trying to muster up hope from within. I live alone in the real world with funeral blues, I try to make a positivity out of my negative world. Before I say anymore I should tell you about my stroke.

On a Saturday in April 2005 I fell and crawled into my mother’s room shaking from head to toe, ‘what’s happening mum’?, I said, ‘I think you’re taking a stroke’, she answered. She made me comfortable in her bed and next I knew I was in intensive care. My youngest son came to my bedside to kiss my cheek and as he leaned in to tell me he loved me, I saw the hurt reflected in his eye along with my image that looked like something from a horror movie.

Three seconds after they switched off my life support machine I woke from the stroke/coma. In there I had no sense of time, it was as if someone hit the power off and I was travelling on a train through tunnels when someone flicked the switch back on. I woke paralysed unable to walk talk or even eat, they tried to fit a tracheotomy but my body rejected it.
It felt like I was in a car wreck, my body was so mangled, the stroke had also erased 45 years of memory. With my only left hand I felt myself to see if I had lost any limbs, then the doctors told me I had taken a massive stroke that almost killed me, they were amazed I woke from such a trauma. I spent the next year in re-hab flat on my back looking up at the shadows on the ceiling, I had what’s known in the medical profession as locked-in-syndrome. Every day for that year I went to speech therapy, occupational and physio sessions after which the doctors told me I would never walk and they released me into the care of an independent living centre.

At the front door of flat number 12 there’s a summer seat, inside lives the guy who had a stroke and now he’s in a wheelchair in the centre of independent living in limbo in-between a ward and the real world. in his early forties when he took the stroke all he could move was his eyes, one blink for yes and two for no and a message board to spell out words, he had what’s called locked-in-syndrome he knew what was being said but he couldn’t communicate. You can see him flitting to and fro the bedroom and his computer. Some days that’s his only form of communication. Otherwise he spends the day alone. The family used to come and go but now you only see the odd friend going in and out. One day he was sitting beside the bed reading a book the next he was on the floor then intensive care. He wears a splint on his right leg and used to write with his right hand but now he doesn’t have the same power. If you sit on that summer seat you can watch the world he lives in now. Put your foot in his splint and watch his world slow in motion. Go from a free spirit to a world of mis-communication.

To see him now in that wheelchair you wouldn’t think that once he was a published poet with two books, the verbal arts officer for this county and beyond inspiring others, running creative writing classes. It’s as if there exists two worlds running side by side like two rivers. One is the able-bodied river twisting and turning on its way to the sea. The other is in constant slow motion a never ending flow of disabled misunderstanding like the missing link of communication. It’s as if these two worlds exist in different time frames, as if from an able-bodied view the other doesn’t exist. Like the olden days the disabled are locked away in the nooks and crannies where they’re not seen.

I think we have to live side by side to change the stigma that exists. Be like a webcam on his wheelchair for the day and see what the world is like from his side of the fence, go up and down the high and low ramps because the doe don’t get any advice from disabled people. You try going into a disabled toilet with a half inch to spare all round where the mirror is set for someone that stands with more thought for a milking parlour than a disabled toilet. Go into the footage of his world struggling to pick up things that fall little things we take for granted. Like making a cup of tea but only able to lift the kettle with your left hand or sometimes not at all. Here’s a little exercise whatever hand you use, use the opposite for a day then you’ll see what I mean. Anyway let’s get back to the story and stop winging about the world I call limbo that exists between the able bodied ad disabilities. Sit on that summer seat and watch his world turned upside down.

Watch him stumble on the bridge of recovery but you have to look hard and deep. Pretend this is your world; you have just come from a world of dreams. The walls are the floor and light is dark and you come too on a hospital bed and you feel yourself to make sure nothing is missing. The only image you remember coming through the tunnel of drips and blurred faces and oxygen masks are a group of doctors in white coats deciding your future. It’s like the film with David niven going up the escalator to judgement day.

These doctors are your judge and jury. It was as if the record skipped and missed a beat and I woke up in this world and I began to realise the world I came from was not a dream. Anyway I came too on a hospital bed unable to move with these docs around me and me saying what’s up, then I realise there are no words coming out and feel all over again it feels like I’ve been in an accident but I don’t feel sore. I remember the blurred image of my x wife and my mother in law. I looked around and someone said it had a stroke I looked around and everything seemed normal except for the furniture from an intensive care. Then people were coming in and hugging me. I remembered reading the book sitting on the bed then I was on the floor trembling I crawled into my mother’s room and asked her what was happening. She said I was taking a stroke and put me in her bed. I remember the face of a doctor, then that was it? I was lost in that groove that skipped a beat. I remembered the words of a friend, he was explaining the wonder of music. The rhythm before it becomes a beat, anyway I was lost there. Id woke in an alien world even the doctors didn’t know where I belonged I was in limbo. It was as if I was between life and death, as if I’d been re-born into this world of dependence. My past went through my mind like a Pathe newsreel from a world outside me.

In the real world, while I was in hospital and the living centre my younger brother had moved back home into my room and his alcoholism had become a grave concern, the house was to be renovated for a wheelchair but I said I couldn’t live in my brothers negative world or let my sons see that negative attitude so I moved into a private bungalow that went idle next door. I could only access four of the many rooms in the wheelchair and it was a dump but at least I was living in a positive state of mind for me and my children. I lived in that despair and desperation for three years years knowing my name was top of the list for new disabled bungalows being built in the area.