Uncivil War

A Matthew Brady portrait of Union officers, ca.1862

Fredericksburg.
Chancellorsville.

Massa Robert was on a roll.
His army was invincible
and, yes, by God they knew it!
Time to cross the Potomac.

Lee's Union opponent, Hooker,
was badly confused,
at odds with the War Department
at odds with Honest Abe.

Time to cross the river.

Maryland, Pennsylvania,
untouched peaceful farms,
milk, butter, eggs and beef:
live off their land for a change

(but all paid for in Southern script).

Meanwhile
down in Richmond
capital of the CSA
sits wild and beloved Johnny Mitchel.

Who is this man?

Mitchel was England's
worst nightmare, a revolutionary
in control of a Dublin newspaper,
calling for the end of English rule.

Get your fat British behinds
out of Ireland, today and
not tomorrow: this was
the tone and import of the "United Irishman"

The English, as is their wont,
passed a brand new law
ex post facto, a frequent occurrence,
to nail this firebrand nuisance.

................................................................. John Mitchel (1815-1875

So, for his sins, poor John
and Francy Meagher, his friend,
were sentenced to death for treason
but transported to Australia instead.

Out of sight, out of mind.

From Australia they both escaped
(conspiracy theories abound)
and both, separately, made their way
to the USA, safe among Irish friends.

John sailed back to France
(Ireland was unsafe, but France was free)
while Meagher took over the Irish in New York.
Then along came the Civil War.

Francy took command of the Fighting 69th
the best and the worst of the New York Irish
committed to the Union cause.
But Mitchel came out for the South.

Returned to Richmond (running the blockade)
his sons joined Confederate regiments
while Mitchel himself wrote intemperate articles
for the local newspapers.

.................................TF Meagher (seated, centre) with officers of the Fighting 69th


Now Lee crosses the Potomac.

Among the troops under his command
are the veteran First Virginians
with their standard bearer, young Willie,
17-year-old son of John Mitchel.



Hooker gets the push and in comes Meade
(Union generals never lasted long).
The armies march under the summer sun
and make contact in rural Pennsylvania.

Gettysburg.

Two days of deadly skirmishing:
marches, countermarches,
concentrated cannonades,
savage assaults, grim defences,
until both armies, Union and Confederate,
like bareknuckle boxers
bloodied and exhausted,
stagger, punch drunk, to the mark
and face the third and final day:

July 3, 1863.

Not only the battle
but the outcome of the War
hangs in the balance.

------------------------------------------
Intense fighting erupted on Culp's Hill at 4 AM on July 3 and by 11 AM Union troops had secured the hill, firmly anchoring the point of the Union 'fishhook' line. With the loss of his advantage at Culp's Hill, Lee decided to alter his strategy. Lee decided to strike what he thought to be a weakened Union center on Cemetery Ridge where he observed few troops and only a handful of artillery batteries. If this section of Meade's line collapsed, it would threaten the Union rear. Lee issued orders for a massive bombardment followed by an assault of 18,000 men, commanded by General James Longstreet. Longstreet's Assault, better known today as "Pickett's Charge" would be Lee's last gamble at Gettysburg.
http:// www.nps.gov/gett/gettour/day3.htm *
-------------------------------------------

Waiting for orders --
then abruptly hauled into the line
along with so many others
come the First Virginians:
and among them Willie Mitchel.

Wait for it ...
Wait for it ...
Then the air splits with the sound
of high-pitched bugles:
now, boys, now,
now, now, now!
The screaming 'caoine' of the Rebel Yell:
Charge!!

The bullets come sizzling by
whizzing like demented hornets
zzzzzzzzz... then a dull flat 'pok'
when they hit with a puff of dust
and down goes the sergeant
down goes Billy Joe Parker
down goes the Preacher
then red-haired Randy Simmonds
Archie Drummond, poor little
Jimmy Preston, then that bald
old bastard what's-his-name,
then Johnny Belham, Andrew Holland,
"Daddy" Goulder, Snakepit Jones,
Paddy Miles, Dandy Kelleher,
'Arsey' Versey, Jimbo, Davy, Mack,
Pauly O'Brien ... Pascal ... all of them?
"Get your ass up here, Mitchel,
and take this goddam flag!!"
He stumbles, drop his rifle,
hears a sizzling past his ear
and grabs the blood-smeared
wooden pole, the flag little more
than a rag shot through
with holes and he runs
and he runs and he runs
and he ....

Down past Coliso Farm
in the grey morning dawn
come O'Rourke and Timothy Fallon
gaunt-visaged figures in Union blue
with Privates O'Donnell and McCarthy
and with the two corporals
Delaroche and McInteer
to recover the body
of John Mitchel's son.
They carry him away from the field
in a final act of honour
and respect for his patriot father;
the blood-sodden war, for the moment
forgotten, and the next war,
the long hard struggle for Ireland
very much in mind.
-------------------------------------------------
* -- for some obscure reason the National Park Service will not always accept a linked post and will flash a Security Violation message: if this happens to you simply copy/paste the URL into a new browser window: http:// www.nps.gov/gett/gettour/day3.htm
-------------------------------------------------
First off, this piece says more about Ireland than the American Civil War. Sorry. But people fight in wars (even your own) for different reasons ....

John Mitchel was imprisoned after the Civil War for his unapologetic support of the Confederacy but he managed to make his way back to Ireland where he was elected to the British Parliament in 1874. He refused to take his seat (as elected Sinn Fein candidates in British-controlled Northern Ireland continue to do today) because he would not take an oath of loyalty to the British Crown. The British annulled the election on the grounds that Mitchel was a convicted felon but he won re-election with an even larger majority. Do not mess with the Irish. He died before the Brits could decide what to do next. In the aftermath of the Civil War many ex-soldiers (Confederate and Union alike) took part in the Fenian Rising of 1867 which was brutally suppressed by the British. Jail sentences for the survivors were savage. Out of these hellish prisons came Tom Clarke who helped to set up the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Dublin in the decades before the First World War. On the principle that England's misfortune was Ireland's opportunity the rebels struck during Easter Week of 1916. The rebellion was suppressed and the leaders (including Clarke) summarily executed. But after the Crucifixion came the Resurrection and the modern Irish republic was born out of the anger and disgust with Britain that became a national movement for independence after the events of 1916. Thank You and God Bless You, Michael Collins. I mean that. Without you I'd still be waltzing around the world with a British passport.

--------------------------------------------

In-house Links:

history The Runup to Easter 1916

poem After the Rising

tongue-in-cheek history primer for beginners From the Normans to Michael Collins (1170-1922)

poem Across the Water

history (anger, regret) Armistice Day

Birthday Poem

I don't even want
to think
about
all the things
that
have happened;
nor think
about
all the things
that
mercifully
didn't.

I deal
most of the time
with the
surrounding world
in English
except
when I don't:
that's when
two other
languages
come into play
and spatterings
of six or seven
others.

This
creates an
uncalibrated
form
of cultural calculus
in which
the fixed
point
(from which perspective
either reveals
itself, or becomes
imposed)
doesn't stand still.

When you
feel 'at home'
in another language
you are
residing
in a different house
far away
from home.
You are
but you are not
the same person.

One language
is
functional, it is
all we
think
we need.
It is not.
It is a restriction
a self-willed
refusal
a primary gap
of understanding
between
the world we understand
and the ones
we don't.

This War ... and The Next

Broken glass,
shots in the night,
voices, shouts and screams:
impossible to believe
that this
is really happening.

Cradling
the unfortunate child
in my arms
I listen to their people
opening up
with machine guns.

They are right,
we are wrong.
We are right,
they are wrong.

Meanwhile

I look at this child
with a bullet
hole in her tiny chest
and I think
none of this makes sense.

the sharp lemon-scented surprise of language

"The road was a ribbon of moonlight
across the purple moor " --
a cherished poem of childhood
(galloping hooves on a moonlit comparison)
brings language to the fore.

Even the harsh jumpy clatter
of endless daily talk
finds grace in comparisons, analogies,
(the ancient roots of everyday speech):
we can run, yet cannot walk.

Transport systems of the mind
rely on habit, things gone before;
so in Athens the public transport
(which carries us from place to place)
is called the Metaphor.

Down by the Seaside/ Holding Hands

The sea is a fine and pleasant sight beyond the beach and esplanades;
first green then blue in the changing light
where children play until daylight fades.

A holiday by the sea was a childhood treat:
O let's bury Daddy in the sand!
He'd growl and roar, he'd wiggle his feet,
and life was innocent, life was grand.





Now Daddy is dead and Mommy's on pills
and my brother's in jail for extortion;
my son can't believe that heroin kills
and my daughter's just had an abortion.

-----------------------------

No, this is not autobiographical -- you'd be amazed how many times people assume that everything you write is personal. Well, sometimes it is. Here is another poem, also not autobiographical, representing every parent's worst nightmare ....

------------------------------

holding hands

here I sit, drawing
elephants for another man's child,
recalling, with pain, the death
of my daughter, when was it,
eleven years ago?

she would have been seventeen

seventeen, sweet and lovely,
convinced she was ugly,
worried about pimples,
horrified, yet very attracted to boys,
glued to her mobile phone;

it's not so hard to imagine

that day, crystal clear
in memory, I will never forget;
it was all so casual, my wife
simply wanted to get her hair done,
asked me to care for the child;

if only days could be lived over, taken back

the sun shining, I thought,
sweetheart, let's go for a walk,
would you like that, alanna?
and she, all smiles and trust,
put on her coat and took my hand;

why, oh why didn't we stay at home?

down on the street, as usual,
the traffic went whizzing by;
I held her hand, tightly,
and we talked about important things,
her school, her friends, her questions;

fathers can love children they do not physically bear

a friend, John O'Farrell,
hove into view: well, is it yourself,
John, I asked, loosing my grip,
a handshake, the child darted away,
and that's when it happened;

no blame to you, John, but stay out of my sight

the police, sympathetic,
say the death was instantaneous:
when she stepped off the kerb
the driver, a Pakistani immigrant,
had no chance to stop;

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

eleven long years, not one
day goes by when I don't relive
each moment: my wife, tight-lipped,
never blamed me; the divorce
came through six months later.

Two Families

I.

electricity
for about four hours,
no water, my brother
missing, Aunt Salah
dead, the same bomb
killing all three children.

Mark joined the Marines
in June, just after
high school graduation;
he got sent to Iraq
last March, got killed
in Fallujah.

my uncle,
after the funeral,
moved in with us, no longer
noisy and cheerful,
prone to bursts of sobbing,
said he'd join the new police.

Mark played tight end
on the football team;
he took Courtney Phillips,
the most popular girl in school,
to the senior Prom, gave her his ring,
she thought he was so cool.

II.

my father
wouldn't let us go to school,
my sister and I, the kidnappings:
he pretended it was all a joke,
said he couldn't afford the ransom
for a pair of princesses.

Courtney says Mark
told her about joining up,
said he was afraid to tell
his folks, his mom would
just worry, and his dad,
he said, would kill him.

a car bomb
(we could hear the blast at home)
killed the police recruits
lined up on the sidewalk,
and at first we thought
my uncle was among them.

Mark's dad, Mr Kenneally,
had served in the 7th Cav
in Vietnam, he ran
a real-estate company in town;
his wife worked at Wal-Mart, they both
broke down when he told them.

III.

for several days
we asked everywhere for news
and there was no news;
finally, three weeks later
a scribbled message arrived,
my uncle was with the resistance.

Mark did well at Basic,
got his sharpshooter's badge
and came home on furlough;
we went out to the Stagecoach,
got drunk, he said his parents
were OK, but Courtney was cold.

my poor father
puts on a necktie every morning,
kisses my mother, says good bye
to us girls, takes up his briefcase
and goes out to a job
we all know no longer exists.

Mark used to send e-mails
after he first got to Iraq;
at first the letters were full
of funny stories, after a while
they got harder to read,
a lot of strange religious stuff.

IV.

my friend Farah
is dead, killed with her father
by machine-gun fire;
they were driving behind
an American convoy, a bomb went off,
the soldiers shot them dead.

after the election
there's going to be a big attack
on a town called Fallujah;
we're gearing up, wrote Mark,
and if I don't make it, tell Courtney
I love her: she won't answer my e-mails.

we are frantic,
my father has been missing
for two days: my mother
has asked everybody, nobody
can tell us anything; also,
my uncle was killed in Fallujah.

a car came to the door,
two Marines in dress blues:
Mark's mom refused to see them,
his dad, in tears, let them in.
Mark is gone: now Courtney Phillips
says she always loved him.

Midshipman McCarthy

I sit outside your door
Barry MacCarthy
half drunk and half sober
cradling my father's pistol
waiting, waiting for the dawn
and for you to walk out
so I can shoot you dead.

In boyhood days
Barry MacCarthy
there were no better friends
than you and me against the world
"contra mundum" -- do you
remember? Then your parson daddy
sent you off to the Navy.

On deck, there, Mr Midshipman
Barry MacCarthy
look lively, hoist the topgallant sails
clap on the blocks, bear away
and leave them ratlines alone.
And it was Eileen M'Gee who loved me
and not you.

O we took a brilliant prize
says Barry MacCarthy
and my pockets are full of golden guineas
taken from Papist Spaniards.
I am rich beyond belief in my father's parish
and it is you, young Eileen M'Gee
I wish to take to wife.

My Eileen, in tears,
last night she came to me,
beaten by her drunken father, a bad farmer,
but he with a glimmer
of debts forgiven. It is the gold
that opens all their eyes,
the sudden wealth.

Dear Jemmy, 'tis you I love
not Barry MacCarthy,
'Tis you young Eileen I love in return
and I will furnish an answer.
Ah, Barry MacCarthy, dear Barry,
cradling my father's pistol
I wait for the dawn.

After the Rising

We picked our way through the rubble
on Friday evening, myself and my sister,
stepping over the broken tramlines
on O'Connell Steet, shaking our heads
at the shell-damaged buildings,
two females, silenced and appalled.

It seemed as though
nothing was left: the city
we had loved and lived in
was gone. It was destroyed.

"God's curse on these people
for the trouble they have caused",
said my sister, Dervla, petulantly,
she was trembling, walking by my side.
"God's curse on the bloody English"
said a voice which was my own.

Dervla sprang away from me
as well she might
shocked and scandalised
her mouth hanging open
(never before had she heard such language)
my genteel and proper sister.

Next day I went to work for the rebels
who had no other name,
not in those days, and a young fellow
breezed in from an English
prison, that would be 1917,
and ran me off my feet.

"Miss O'Grady", he said,
"you will take a memo, please,
and I want copies of the previous letter
with suitable amendments
typed and legible for my signature
by 5 o'clock this evening".

"Yes, Mr. Collins", I said,
"and would you mind very much
if I was just a little bit late
returning this afternoon?
It's just that the sales are on
at Brown Thomas in Grafton Street".

"Miss O'Grady, you astonish me.
Do you propose to gambol and play,
to disport yourself, to sling
about your hard earned shillings
(God knows how little I pay you)
in mercantile British corridors?"

Well, there was no answer to that.
I glared at him, furiously,
as he unleashed his wide and sunny grin.

Fair City

On the condom machine
in the pub toilet,
"For refund insert baby"
while around the bar,
the skangers
getting langers
are holding up the walls
along with the knackers and the chavs
and the local head-the-balls.

O dear sweet Bally Aha Clee
funny, edgy, chancy, iffy,
ye've always been the place for me
astride the green and filthy Liffey

"Send them f**kin Spaniards
straight back home to Italy"
(graffiti on the 77A to Tallaght)
"Use your brian, vote Sinn Fein"
while Jacinta, all alone,
screeches down her mobile phone,
and the bus explodes in laughter,
"Anto's a bleedin' luvly roide,
and didn't he pull up me knickers after!"

There's an oul' wan at the stop
who goes and asks the driver,
"How long will the next bus be?"
so he looks at her and he says
"Ah, missus, about 15 or twenty feet,
same as this, but who can tell",
and she asks, not missing a beat,
"And will there be another monkey
driving that as well?"

O dear sweet Bally Aha Clee
funny, edgy, chancy, iffy,
ye've always been the place for me
astride the green and filthy Liffey

"Excuse me, sir", says the tourist,
"do you know what side of the Liffey this is?"
"Eh?" says the Dub, with a puzzled look,
"I do, of course", and goes back to his book;
so when the mother was belting the arse off her brat
and the tourists behind expressed their views,
"In Chermany we do not beat our children!"
the mammy replied like a ball off a bat
"Well, in Ireland we don't gas our Jews".

timeslip

tracing
the tendrils
of lazily
curling steam
rising
from this cup of tea
reminds me
of Proust's
madeleine


and the
formidable
unlikelihood
of employing
mere memory
to salvage
anything
akin to truth

Aotearoa

I walk
down the path
flanked
by strange
companions
silent
serious men
mother naked
feather-bedecked
over the rough
trail I walk
and they smile
from time to time
with stained
and sharpened
teeth.

I smile
and caper
but
when I whinny
as I feel
I ought
with subservient
courteous
laughter
I fear I find
their frowns
and disapproval
decidedly
disconcerting
not at all
the thing!

The captain
god rot
him, has
stayed behind
and forced poor me
a surgeon's mate
to accompany
these
sullen savages
along
imperceptible
jungle trails
in search
of sweet water
and greens
for the scurvy.

On trees
hang fruits
I have never seen
and also
there be flowers
whose fragrance
overpowers
my senses
but my trousers
rub hard
against my thighs
and the
Norfolk broadcloth
of my
uniform coat
hangs heavy.

Suddenly
we stand on the brow
of a ridge
and my knees
become unsteady
but ahead
and below lies
a sheltering bay
with the sweep
of the sun-bedazzled
and bedazzling sea
while the sun
itself
sinks down
like a fat red
orange.

crosscultural communications

Look here, my good man,
I have no idea
What you think you
Are doing, but you can't
Just walk into the Lord's House
Half-naked; and furthermore,
Be so good as to explain
The meaning of that weapon
and that rope in your hands.
Have you no proper sense
Of what is fitting and seemly?
There are times, give me patience,
When I truly despair of you people,
Of your willful ignorance
And your dark savage ways.
What? Speak up, boy, what?
Your uncle says I must turn
Around, I must close my eyes?
Preposterous! What's that?
Your uncle has a surprise for me?
Young man, I can tell you
Most assuredly, after all I have seen
This day, there is absolutely nothing
Your wretched uncle can propose
That could possibly surprise me.

________________________________________
"The Reverend Carl S. Volkener came to New Zealand in the 1850s, but fell out of favour with the Opitiki Maoris by urging them to desist from bloodshed when war broke out with a rival clan in 1865. One of the Opitiki chiefs hanged him, shot him, decapitated him in his own church, drank his blood and swallowed both his eyes."
-- Niall Ferguson, "Empire": Penguin Books, 2003. Page 121

Broadway/103rd Street

West Side Highway
sparkling water
Jersey Palisades
34th Street
whish
42nd Street
whish
57th Street
USS Intrepid
96th Street
whish
125th Street exit

Malibu Hotel
Broadway, between
102nd and 103rd
eccentric
convenient
a bit of a dump
who cares?
just a place
to shower and sleep




Gristede's
Petland Discounts
El Taller Latino Americano
Rite Aid
West 104th Street
Ben and Jerry's
Hot & Crusty
Juanito Unisex
Super Discount
Eden Cafe Bar
a couple more
turn right
West 105th Street
Silver Moon Bakery
Metisse
The Abbey Pub

tell Sharon that old joke
downstairs in the Abbey
how can you tell
if an Irish guy is queer?
he prefers women
to drink: she barks
with laughter, stops,
stares grimly into space:
her last two lovers
were Brian O'Callaghan
and Aidan McCullough;
oops, put my foot
in it again ...




Jeff from Drogheda
takes me to
a "real" Irish pub
near Mama Mexico
full of black people
like Louis and Troy
and Ali
from Ethiopia
who spent eight
and a half years
in jail
and never wants
to see his country
again.
I tell him
helpfully
how the Irish
are the blacks of Europe
inured to
centuries
of oppression
persecution
colonialism
and repeatedly
and intentionally
and joyously
and continuously
disloyal
to foreign masters --
a pox upon them!

Ali views me
speculatively
blinking
over his spectacles
as if
I had
materialised
from under
some unexpected
trapdoor
hidden beneath
his neatly shod
trusting
feet

Say it long and say it loud
Oi'm black and Oi'm proud!

Faith and begorra,
blacker than the H of shpades




the pints unbidden
line up on the bar
laughter
bewilderment
and a series of toasts
to Martin Mac Luther O'King;
young smoky-eyed
Alison, behind the bar
is half-Scottish
and doesn't think
she's really
all that black
but slides me a free pint
for the thought
that's in it




Streeling home
under unseen stars
under a slightly
orange sky, attended
by the whoops
of police and ambulance
sirens, the constant
rush and roar
of never-ending traffic.

New York, New York
is a wunnerful town
the Bronx is up
and the Battery's down

my batteries
were low and slow
in the morning
as we hurtled
beneath
the belly of the beast
to 86th Street,
a stroll through the park
and the discovery
that the Metropolitan
is closed on Mondays:
joy in the morning,
Happy Mondays
(where are they now?
shattered & shivering
in Manchester)




take your Metrocard
and stick
it in: the buses
and the subways
love it, can't get
enough

St Patrick's Cathedral
built by the pennies
of the Famine Irish, a soaring
neo-Gothic testament
to tribal values and bad taste;
embarrassingly huge,
bombastic, imitative,
empty; just as
MoMA down the road
wanted twenty dollars
to view their paintings
so I laughed
and walked away
having stood in line
for twenty minutes:
in such small incidents
a lifetime of conviction
finds instant expression




Penn Station
(Joe Louis Plaza)
neither snow
nor rain
nor heat
nor gloom of night
stay these couriers
from the swift completion
of their appointed rounds

the perfect meal
is one click away
zagat-dot-com

Tir na nOg
(Land of the Ever Young)
Irish Bar and Grill
Donal and Pronsias
from Donegal: Tony Jackson
the Leitrim Dandy
still working the door;
my fifth, or is it
sixth or seventh
visit since
the innocent, pre 9-11
summer of 2001?




Ground Zero:
a gaping hole
in the heart of the city
an ominous absence
like a missing tooth
like an amputated leg
a constant sad reminder
of all the things
that have gone wrong
and continue
to go wrong
since that lazy
indolent summer
of the missing intern
and shark attacks




later, on 42nd Street
(we get around)
the yellow cabs
avoid collisions
with insolent
arrogant ease
accelerating around
the very empty
US Army Recruiting Center
and the signs
that say
Don't
Even
THINK
Of
Parking
Here.



On the house,
says lumbering David,
known as Buffo
(Big Ugly Fecker From Offaly)
in the Blarney Stone
near Nassau and Fulton;
we're a few steps uptown
from the SWAT teams
and assault weapons
on Wall Street
where the business
of America
is business




crash, rattle
and bang
on the C train
to 34th Street
then transfer
to the Uptown No. 1
"Boy, oh, boy"
say the headlines
Michael Jackson
beats the rap

Don't
Even
THINK
Of
Living
Here

(Just click on the photos to expand them. Click on the Back Button to return to the text.)

Four Haiku

Spring

at the festival
starlight shines upon your hair
only I can see

Summer

my eyes are in love
you pretend you cannot see
sound of cicadas

Autumn

leaving the office
a whole day of black and white
bursts into colour

Winter

snow on the platform
thinking of her dancing eyes
here comes the train

An Clar

I like the craggy, weather-beaten
old men with nicotine stains
on their chapped knuckly fingers
and few remaining teeth. I like
the way they stare at you
with their faraway cynical blue eyes
and take you in, visibly unimpressed
with the ridiculous person you are.
I stand among them, occasionally
forgetting not to smile, nodding
my head sagely, losing the beat,
in my off-the-peg suit, my despicable tie.
They allow me the honour of infrequent speech,
spitting (very politely) to the side,
reserve all spoken judgement for the sake of my family,
then mutter, grimly, about the price of sheep.

Three Poems

Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
-- W.S

Greenwich Mean Time

that day south of the river
he walked, or was it I who walked,
over the damp grass, past naked trees,
over the line and measure
of fleetfoot time;

another day it was drink
and awaking in the white room
with footprints, inexplicable,
distinct, stepping around
bloodstains on the ceiling;

this day, as on all days,
other footprints skirt the edge
of an unforgiving canyon, an abyss;
and if you stare long enough
it will stare back.

Afghanistan

In the end, perhaps, we all end up
with the politics we deserve:
but there was something very strange
about these people, as if
for all their stalwart pride
and flashing eyes, hawklike eyes,
(often enhanced with charcoal)
there was something missing,
some essential human element
absent, just not there: they were
clever, charming and witty,
quick to anger and quick to sing,
emotional, happy and friendly,
but cold, cruel and treacherous.
Dangerous and attractive, no wonder
they have their history; how I miss
that fearful country, those people.

deliquescence

one of my childhood friends
walked into the sea, another
walked out of his mind, his
family prays for a safe return.

another went away to war
and when it was time to leave
the war came home with him,
it lives with him now in the night.

all the "ills this flesh is heir to",
diseases, conflicts, accidents:
I watch them make steady
inroads, erasing names I knew.

yet this life can be no different,
(reason and religion teach us)
alike in all but detail, we share
in its grim but glorious mystery.

(but from the loss of a child
there is no recovery.)

yesterday, today, tomorrow,
beady-eyed, coldly glistening,
a dark uncoiling presence
lives, unwelcome, in my heart.

Berlin

They sealed the train past Helmstedt,
nobody on, nobody off,
and when the Vopos came on board
just outside Berlin
(Volkspolizei; people's police)
these arrogant surly bastards
came storming into the compartment
like the drug squad, like the old SS:
ahh, these unlovely Germans,
preserved, in aspic, only in the East,
long after the ruin of Hitler.

"Papiere, Ausweis, Passport" bellowed
these louts, weighed down with pistols,
passport stamps, and barely contained hostility;
we were supposed to rise from our seats,
cringing and submissive, thinking
this way we could prevent them
from tearing apart our luggage, but they
do that anyway. Gobshites. Pardon the Irish.
A very tense, anger-filled fifteen
minutes later, you roll into West Berlin,
to the enclave of "freedom": Zoo Station.

In Cold War days this city was seriously weird,
slashed in half by the excrescence of the Wall.
The Wall: Die Mauer: flowers and graffiti,
flowers for the the ones who didn't make it
and graffiti for the cunts who shot them.
I was 17 on my first visit, made the mistake
of leaving the subway on an empty platform;
well, not quite empty, there were two of us,
me and the guy with the machine gun,
hammer and sickle on his helmet, the wait
for the next train took two hundred years.

On the Ku'Damm and at Ka-De-We
the consumer West was at its best,
lights and music, jittery signals of possible pleasure;
at times the whores in leather minis, of all sexes
and then some, hard to tell apart,
would rasp at you in the hard city argot
"Na, Liebchen ... sag' mal, was moecht's Du?"
"Garnichts, gute Nacht!", a cheese-eating grin,
then pounding the bright stony pavements,
past the Imbiss stalls, the smells of Curry-Wurst:
Zoo Station? This whole place is a zoo.

One should never lightly contemplate
a visit to the East, and I will tell you why:
it involves a visit to the bank, or casual contact
with one of the shady unshaven characters
flashing rolls of bills on street corners.
You get a five, maybe six-to-one exchange
on Ostmark for your (real) Westmark money,
which you stuff into your socks, or up
your ... whatever makes you feel secure,
then you step off the train at Friedrichstrasse
and march up to Checkpoint Charlie.




The GIs wave you through (no skin off their ass)
and, not feeling so great, you approach the real border
between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Here we go. Once you enter that door
("You are now leaving the American Sector")
they have you by the balls, you pass
into Their World. What's going to happen here?
First, you wait. Then you show your passport,
and the blond young jerk inspects it for five whole minutes,
I kid you not, flicking his gooseberry eyes
from the photo to your face, from your face to the photo.

Then they move you along to another room
where they tear your luggage apart, empty
your bags completely, inspect the seams,
leave you then to gather up the mess;
today, thank God, they are not interested in socks,
a good thing, because, although we all know
money is shit, we don't really want
to admit the real-life stink of corruption.
Finished? No way, Jose. Another careful
passport check: photo, face; photo face,
then the barrier clicks, you're through!

Through, perhaps, but through to what?
God, it's all so grey and empty.
They force you to change 25 DM (one-to-one)
so with the money in my socks, I am now
a cruising unit, a man with money to burn.
My steps lead me to the nearest restaurant
(brain and belly in perfect synchronisation)
and, after a quick visit to the bathroom
to liberate all those crumpled rolls of banknotes,
have the best meal in two months of hardass travelling.
Say what you like, I don't care.

Replete, burping politely, ever so slightly,
I walk down to Unter den Linden
and view the Brandenburg Gate
for the second time, but now from the other side.
You can see the West through the arches,
the golden Siegessauele, the Tierpark, my God!
It seems a million miles away.
And it is. Sharp right to the Museuminsel;
so how did these people end up with the heart of the city?
Well, they did, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon,
Nefertiti's bust, reside under their control.

Alexanderplatz. Das altes Rathaus.
Time for a beer ( I have to, have to
spend this money! There is nothing, nothing to buy!)
So I walk down the steps and get directed to a table
with four other guys; they do this all the time,
there is no such thing as choosing your own space,
there is no such thing as choice, period.
These guys are all strangers to each other
but they go silent, anyway, at my approach;
a few cautious greetings, veiled assessment,
then I toss the pack of Marlboro on the table.

Holy shit!! Their eyes bug out on stalks:
Western cigarettes!! This guy has Western cigarettes!
Therefore (you can hear, almost see the gears clunking in) ...
this guy is from the West!!!! A pregnant pause.
Eyes start flicking from one to another,
is it OK to talk to this guy? can I trust you,
are you an informer, will you turn me in?
I keep politely silent, waiting to see
what, if anything, will come of this.
The silence lasts a full two minutes.
One guy clears his throat, decides to jump in.

That was one of the best nights of my life
(didn't hurt I had all that funny money to burn)
and we all got deliriously happily smashed
with only one bad moment, when a new arrival
looked set to be joining our disorderly table:
immediate shutdown; immediate tension.
The guy moved on and the relief was palpable.
I want to go to Paris, they whispered,
I want to go to London or to Rome --
I am sick and bloody tired of holidays
in Poland or Rumania. Bugger the Russians.

The last thing to report, dear patient reader,
is the insidious Cinderella Rule, whereby
day visitors from the West, capitalist running
dogs, the Unenlightened, whatever they
may choose (have chosen) to call us,
must cross the border before midnight
or face execution, fines or imprisonment.
Picture this, because it happened, a platoon
of beaming beery East Germans, bellowing out
Irish songs (without any need for words),
making sure yours truly got safely across.
------------------------------------
Yes, this really happened, back in 1989 -- not when I was 17 which was my first visit a long time before that. I've been to Berlin about 5-6 times and it is a seriously weird place, even now that the Wall is gone. David Bowie can tell you more about it than I can. Zoo Station and environs is still not for Mom and Pop from Minnesota. As for the lads, I don't know what happened, but I have every reason to believe that those visits to Paris, London and Rome did, in the end, work out. They were all promising to have a pint in Dublin, as well. Sure, why not!

Ballyalla

I can hardly imagine
that the tour groups will come through,
but if they do
these few things remember:

My grave is a flat little stone
under the shadow of my grandfather
who did nothing
in life, and in death was equally blameless.

The French female guides
wear sunglasses, even in our dim
threatening weather;
the Germans, very serious, carry books.

Adam was a man
and all men are mortal:
I too was a man
but the dope was cheap and the women
were easy: so much for logic.

Here I am dead,
been dead for the last six years
(get used to anything),
still missing the girls and the craic.

I wrote one super good song;
now all these strangers come like pilgrims
to gawp at the soil
five yards from where I'm planted.

Disappointment is general,
here's me with a teeny-weeny stone
stuck in the gravel,
below Gran'far with his concrete Angel.

"But HE'S not famous at all!"
say the elderly indignant Americans,
red-faced, irritated,
not having reckoned on the cattle stile.

Come here to me, says
Timmy O'Flynn, 'tis a question of blood,
(he's a local man with a criminal record)
and if you understand that,
(he stops, has a think) yerra Jayzus, man,
I never even knew the bastard.

patriot act

one
of the
reasons
we
decided
to lock
you
up
is because
you
like
going out
too
much
and
we just
don't
have
the time
to
follow you

Aengus of the Birds

The medieval world is alive and well
in large pockets, vast geographical
containments of human souls;
I once fell in love with a Muslim girl,
a meeting of minds and sensibilities,
(the other must wait for marriage)
and within moments of her family's knowledge
had my visa revoked, found myself
frog-marched to the waiting plane.

This war of civilisations is ineptly named,
it is a war of time zones, in which different
centuries find themselves in puzzled conflict,
none understanding the other. As an Arab
I would most definitely be angry and humiliated
by the arrogance and depradations of the West;
as a freewheeling travelling Celt, one of
the last of the amiable cheerful chancers,
I find my friends and homes everywhere.

Tradition is part of our belief, and so is pride,
but we look to recent not ancient accomplishment;
we cherish spontaneity, initiative, and above all,
the calculated weight of personal freedom.
It comes as a shock to realize, here and there,
that freedom is the exception rather than the rule,
the whole world over: it is disappearing
in rapid gulps in the experimental New World of the USA,
and in other places has never existed.

The Ballad of Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly walks
Bill O'Reilly talks
Bill O'Reilly walks and talks.

Bill O'Reilly walks to work
Bill O'Reilly talks at work
Billy is a total jerk.

(Something you'd pick off your shoe
If you'd nothing else to do)


(How much indeed?) 

Billy's claim
To an Irish name ...

Has nothing to do
(I swear it's true)
With the plain dacent people of Ireland!

O, Billy, tall and wiry,
Tongue both forked and fiery --
Blue-eyed panderer,
Serial slanderer,


("Why don't you just shut up?") 


You think the money
Takes away that funny
Smell?

Lying as a way of life,
Sucking up to power,
Paid by the hour,

What the hell:

'We report, You decide'
Not true.
'Fair and balanced'
Not true.
'Some people say'
Not true.

Rupert runs you like the Mob
Kiss his ass, and keep your job.


(What you see ...) 

Maybe once there was a choice:
But who remembers William Joyce?
Media deceiver,
True believer ...

Arrested, tried, and hanged.

My God,
two peas in a pod ...

You're a very nasty piece of work:
As I said, a total jerk.

"It's a Long Way to Tipperary"

the camera was still
a novelty in 1914
so that's why everyone
mugs and grins
in jerky motion pictures
but sits upright, stiff,
and a little glassy-eyed
in formal studio portraits
against peculiar, no doubt
conventional settings;

we look at their faces
today, and we think,
my god, these people
look so innocent:
upright solemn young men
in rough, uncomfortable
factory-made uniforms,
unaware of their historical
fate, sacrificial lambs
before the slaughter.

-------------------------------------------

Armistice Day marks the end of the First World War at 11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. The Brits, Canadians, Australians - even the Irish - have a deeper emotional connection with this war than our American cousins. I would like to make a quiet appeal for memory on behalf of all those young guys who were marched off to a dreadful and unimaginably horrible situation in the late summer of 1914, all in the name of patriotism, and who died in their hundreds of thousands. This was never an important war in US history but it has left an indelible scar on Europe. The First World War was the cause of the Second World War -- in fact, it was the same damn war with a 20-year half-time break while the Germans got geared up to go again.

One is not encouraged to write commentaries like this, particularly when they are longer than the poem.

So I will shut up. But for those who are interested, I have re-tooled an article I wrote about a visit to the battlefields of the Somme in the summer of 2000.

Are we still upset about this war and what it did to Europe? Believe it. Without this idiotic mass slaughter the whole history of the world could have been very different: no Soviet Union, no Hitler, no Second World War, no Cold War ... and probably no Dubya Bush

sex and the single officer

Aunt Jane
sipping tea in the garden
lifted her voluminous skirts
hoops and all, to avoid
a licentious beetle.

That moment
for the very first time
the sheer joy of sex
hoops and all, entered
my innocent mind.

Herodotus
demanded my attention.
Under dry and careful masters
clocks ticked, I prepared
to enter Balliol.


My scholar's gown
was a source of delight,
my rooms in a village of stone.
War came, I enlisted,
went to France.

The trenches,
a sharp and ghastly smell
of blood and shit and corruption,
unnerved me. I decided
to become a hero.

Leftenant --
Sah! I sprang to attention.
You will take a little walk this evening:
Yellow-fanged, my drunken
commanding officer.

The Huns
will never expect you dear boy
if you follow this line on the map:
sheer suicide, the idiot
was drunk and rambling.

Right lads
I said to the sullen soldiery
fix bayonets and follow the tapes
piece of cake, simply
do what you're told.

Steel helmet
useless revolver at my side
an unexpected stiffness in my groin
Aunt Jane, the hoops,
God will I die a virgin

Two Haiku

The Black Ships (Admiral Perry arrives in Japan, 1853)

winds blow from the west
strange ships lie in our harbour
the gods say nothing.

----------------------------------

Mandarin

one bold step forward,
five private steps to the rear:
secret of long life.

-----------------------------------

On the Road to Kandahar

Four hours by the side
of the road, falling snow,
grieving people, no sign
of the idiot driver. A jeep
came by with soldiers; they
piled in the foreigners
and the badly injured
and me with a teenage
boy in my arms.
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
(his gaze had locked
on my strange foreign eyes)
and I held him tight,
and begged
him to hold on, begged
him from my infidel heart.

In Afghanistan
the landscape is unforgiving
very sparse and rough, very browny-grey
and you discover that time doesn't move
quickly, unlike in the movies
where events happen one after another.
It took a long three hours
to get back to Herat.
Three hours
with a dead boy cradled in my arms.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough

One bomb in London
is worth ten in Belfast:
during our little local war,
the "Troubles", as we called it,
our guys, the IRA,
were taking a crash-course
in media manipulation.

The ancient enemy, the so-called
'peacekeepers', shipped in
from Across the Water, the very
reason and cause for resentment,
assured the international press
that the Irish were incorrigible
liars, a crowd of sectarian hooligans.

Especially (don'cha know) the Catholics,
a suppressed, priest-ridden people,
moaning, always moaning.
And the press believed it, didn't even blink.
One has a pained admiration
for smooth, practiced liars,
but this one takes the cake.

Well, I thought it was stupid,
when our crowd decided
to rattle these people in Britain,
to set off bombs in their capital city,
give them a taste of their own war,
let their own people suffer and feel it
just as we did at home.

The Irish often complain
that the English don't understand them,
(our genial hardness, our velvety aggression)
but it is clearly, unequivocally true
that we don't understand them, either:
geography may play its little games
but our mental worlds will never meet.

With a bit of effort on both sides,
in recent times, in spite of
the open running sore of the North,
(the 1998 Agreement doesn't work)
we overcome all the ancient differences,
learn, tentatively, to live together,
through football, music, the pub culture.

It can be chancy, uneasy, tense,
(local accents can be a social minefield),
but in thousands and thousands
of random personal connections
you can feel that it works, the English
are just as impatient as we are
to dump the past, lay history to rest.

Eight centuries of occupation, the near
destruction of a cherished ancient culture
takes a bit of getting over; now, at least,
we are a free and risen people,
with a freedom we had to fight and pay for,
(the only freedom worth having)
but our young neither know nor care.

Maybe, that is not such a bad thing ....

How many Americans think of 1776
on a daily basis? Just about none.
How many Americans think of their country
as a beacon of freedom? Just about all.
It's a very good thing to love your country
(after all, it's where you live); but it's a very
serious thing to surrender an ounce of freedom.

Now we turn to our American cousins,
with so many of our own people among them,
hoping to see them raise (again) the standards of truth,
what we have come to expect of this shining nation,
let it act as a champion for the poor and downtrodden,
let it mean what it says about freedom,
let it stop this military Empire in its tracks.

The bombs in London:
ahh, the bombs in London --
I say the same as I said
twenty-five years ago:
No, No, and No again!!!
It doesn't work with the English.
They don't get scared. They fight back.
And that makes me think
Cui Bono?
Who wants them to fight back?

----------------------------------
PS - The title is from Betjeman, who disliked intensely the functional and industrial architecture of Slough (southwest of London, near Heathrow Airport) and was more or less begging the Germans to bomb this area if they had to drop bombs on England. The city (quite ugly) survives and Betjeman is not popular.

a suspicious death in amsterdam

My love, my life
is dead:
we shall no longer walk
in crimson glory.

My wife, chosen
perhaps
by elderly parents,
but beloved

by me, bore my
children
tried to warn me
and departed.

My rivals, sly,
industrious,
smile when they speak,
say little.

Casualties

I feel like trailer trash
in spite of my Ph.D.
and 28 years
of honorable service
because
when asked to resign
or be fired
by a jumped up jerk
like you, with your little
smirk upon your face
reminiscent
of the Supreme Leader

I am reminded
of poor Rommel
the professional soldier
who provided
his Supreme Leader
with astounding
victories
and, consequently
had to choose
between suicide
and the utter destruction
of his family.

Your power,
your abuse of power
fails to impress me, does not
intimidate.
I may be thrown away
like a used Kleenex: so be it.
But I have my
memories
of older and better beliefs:
I have more in common
with the abandoned poor
of New Orleans
than ever I had with you.

You think
a career is all that matters?
In your enclosed world
of power and money
and sycophancy
and servility
you recreate the worst
features
of the cruel heartless
world of privilege
that has aroused
every single
human revolution.

We are not
inconsequential people;
and we are not so easily
set aside.
You may possess
the temporal reins of power
for now
but your lies and your mistakes
and, above all
your ignorance
will bring you down in the end.
Fireworks. Jubilation.
Dancing in the streets.

The world will take no lasting pleasure
in the downfall of the USA.

Well, you don’t believe in listening

You are behaving
like fools, like arrogant fools.
No free nation
born out of sacrifice
established in law
indivisible
clutching at certain
self-evident truths
(a sturdy but unsteady
beacon to the world)
can long survive
with ‘hubris’, the power-driven
will to Empire.

teenage blue

cobain shot himself,
thought it was all over,
his music getting darker, his wife
something out of a magazine

have you noticed
how many of your friends,
maybe you yourself, come
from broken families?

the baby boomers
were in love with love;
sex, drugs and rock'n'roll,
no place for little kids

now the little kids
are not little any more,
nor are they happy little campers
but angry, totally pissed off

so where is daddy
since the last telephone
call, and the twenty-dollar bill
stuck in a belated birthday card?

daddy has moved out of town
daddy has a new daughter
called stephanie, he's thinking
of marrying what's-her-name

mom says she is serious
about bill or jim
or whatever the f--- he
calls himself, the smiling nerd

when i get married
i will stay married, i will
take care of my kids, i will
love them forever

_______________________________________

This poem is the result (not nearly strong enough) of an eye-opening article I came across today by a lady named Mary Eberstadt called "Eminem is Right".

USMC (ret'd)

The ducks come over
from Russia, my dear,
without fail
at this time of year.

I walk down
to the lake
to watch them;
and I sometimes take

my thoughts and memories
with me
although I know
I should not do so.

God, I have such
a bitter recollection
of the past, and the things we did --
I thought the military
was an honourable profession.
I know better now.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait ....

Ahhhhh!

See how the ducks land.
Isn't that the finest thing?

Lady Charlemont (1914)

Look here!
I am sick and tired
of you people
prancing about
in the streets
waving flags
cheering
hollooing
and being
generally
bloody noisy.

It simply won't do.

Yes, yes
yes, of course
I know there
is a war on
but I didn't start
this war
so I will thank you
all of you
to please
kindly
recollect your positions
reconsider
and go home.

What? What did you say?

Win?
Of course we shall
win, we never
lose: how
peculiar
ha ha ha ha ha
how astonishing
you silly little man
to entertain
such a novel
proposition.

white nights

In the glass-walled
conservatory
within
the garden
where we
used to meet
when our young
and oh so innocent hearts
were pounding
in anticipation
and our fingers
trembled
as they touched
the white curtains
and the linen
within
are slowly
yellowing with age
just as our hearts
and our memories
yellow and fade
within
with the passing
of the many, too many
parted years.

a visit to my aunt

Yallabay yallabay yallabay
puff puff
tiktik
hoo ... hoo ... hoo

ping-pong

- Boody boody boo!
- Em, boody bally boo!

- Chicatack?
- ah, bungum, bungum

- Plor vallton tras "tea"?
- ah, bungum
- torp lamper sha?
- bungum
- op lamper fram?
- ah, 2 fram
- plick!

Terror

The Raja Restaurant (Bali)

My eyes see a girl
The rucksack clings to my spine
Three seconds to live

---------------------------------------------

TV Correspondent

When bullets crack above your head
get down, or you'll be dead
the thing
(ppshangg .... ppshingg)
to remember, the thought
to bear in mind
(bbshangg)
is that people are unkind
from a sense of virtue.
(ppshooong)
They will kill you
(takatakatakatakatakataka)
but have no wish to hurt you.

Up North

The air, ahh,
the air was clear and sweet
in Hakodate
and in the morning market
among crawling
red live crabs and enormous
half-dead fish
business arrangements
were consummated
in a flash of fingers
and I went, quietly,
well hidden from obstruction
for a welcome pint.

The teenage girls
were everywhere, uniformed,
scandalously short-skirted,
blissfully stupid;
they live in a strange world
of suspended hopes
and dreams, soft and fluffy,
soon to be shattered, soon held
to ridicule, not by their parents,
not by their friends, not by
useless teachers : no, no, but
by heartless stiff-
pricked boyfriends.

My God
just look at the bouncing beauty of nature;
you'd want to take it home with you
or at least take some photos,
you know what I mean?
This stuff is real, man,
this is fifteen shades of green
and I have tears,
no, come on, I have
real tears in my eyes
as I focus the sights
on my M-16
camera.

Oh, golly.

In other news
another drunken teacher
was fished out of the harbour
last night; he was half dead
but will never remember
that we met by the harbour wall
after the morning market
closed down, slowly,
not until 3 in the afternoon,
and that we went for several beers
and talked and talked
and he thought he knew it all
but didn't.

So when he passed out
all drunk and collapsed and trusting
I heaved him over the harbour wall
as my final answer to
his droning platitudes. Through no
fault of mine, I regret to report,
he survived; doubtless he will
continue to write his influential papers
and send me a card at Christmas.
I will send him a cordial response
mingled with the sharp feral
stink of regret.

The sea.
I love the sea.
The sea is a sight from my window.
I would never never never
(are you crazy?) get in a boat, though,
because waves get high.
I have seen this stuff before
when the waves swamp your boat
and you sink, and then you fall
into the water and then you DROWN.
This is not for me.
This is not my scene.

On the other hand
there are many other ways
to make a living, more interesting ways.
Here and there and over beyond
every fool can think of something,
every fool can wear gloves.
But when you slyly speak
from the side of your mouth
unaware of that concave mirror
at the back of the room
cold realization sinks in.

Sybilla Americana

Our love is like a kiss in a dream
but it doesn't seem
real, somehow.

You are like a girl in a magazine,
something all the other boys have seen
with steam coming out of their ears;

skimpy top, proud chest out to there,
blonde and wild tumbling hair,
plus those outrageous cutoffs.

Is this you
or something you are trying to do?

You fell in love with my car (before me)
because the paintwork glows like Venus
and cars don't have a penis.

Idiot boys are fine
but shopping is divine
things, things, things
and make-up

why break up?
I look good beside you,
tall and tanned, expensive clothes,
nobody knows
how little you care

except me.
I have a little surprise for you
tomorrow
a little drop of sorrow.

Seduced by stranger's eyes
you don't realize
I come from West Belfast.

(you never asked)

a fleeting recognition
when you turn that car ignition
will be your last.

Bye-bye, American pie,
I'm heading down to Mexico,
contrite, polite,
looking for a fiercely blushing virgin
and a pistolero father
who would kill me as soon
as look at me, and I might possibly
have ten children.

memory lane (and the truth don't come easy)

Blissed out on "esra"
under the rooftop canopy
of the Gulhane Hotel ;
around the corner from Yeners,
a few minutes from the Pudding Shop,
a couple more to the Blue Mosque,
in Constantinople/Istanbul --
well, it seemed like a good idea.

Six weeks later, after
the usual hitchhiking grief,
and a dash across the bridge on the Turkish border
(a small matter of a smuggled car)
I was picking up my payoff in Germany
from stony-eyed parents
whose son I had rescued from a 4-year sentence
with a false passport: 500 dollars cash.

Business is business: we aim to please.

So then of a sudden there I was
back in harsh and chilly London Town
(in all senses of those lean unlovely words)
broke, unhappy, unloved,
for all my shining altruistic
puppydog personality. So what
can you do? Sail for Iceland.

I didnae want to get drunk on the train
to Scotland, but with the four wild kilties
on leave, it was sup from the bottle or face certain death;
so staggering, dry-retching, I departed the port of Leith
on the SS Something, thrown together
with seriously peculiar passengers
including perhaps the most beautiful
girl I have ever seen.

No, she wouldn't. Glorious & golden. Damn.

We passed the new volcanic island
(popped up, steaming, out of the sea)
and docked at darkened Reykjavik;
aurora borealis, but cold as a bastard,
so I headed for the local Sally Ann
among Christians and visiting Eskimos
who were being run over, decimated,
by the sparse but speedy passing traffic.

Sitting on the dock of the bay
but not for long --
80 mph winds could blow you away
in an instant: your survival time
in that green frozen water (so they say)
was one minute twenty-five seconds.

We used to watch the local fishermen,
blind drunk, rejoining their trawlers,
with the policemen lined up
with boat hooks and nets, waiting,
and not for long, anticipating,
drunken nose dives into the harbour:

families with kids (they'd even bring
sandwiches, it was a spectator thing)
would raise a cheer and clap and shout
when the cops would fish some poor fecker out.

Strange country, but you had to love it,
love it or shove it ....

jeez, there were times: forty below
day after day, but there were no days,
only pale glimmers of twilight
between the long hours of darkness.

"Yeg vil vinna!"
the only Icelandic I ever learned,
("I want work!"), daily, daily
talking to the trawler skippers
one weary ship after another.
You're out of luck,
get away to fuck,

because the fish were just not running,
worst catch in a decade,
the daily round was tiring,
the locals were not hiring,
and there was nothing else to hope for,
there was nothing else to do,
as the cold and the darkness
and depression settled in.

You could actually die here --
in a way it was kind of funny:
of all the options in the great wide world,
to die ... in Iceland?

Close enough, I had long left the Sally Ann
and moved into a canning factory
(deserted, the fish were not running)
which was heated, thank God, by free volcanoes,
along with two Brits, another Irish guy,
and we were eking out a living

by creative shoplifting in local stores
(the money was long gone)
when we became a target for young girls,
drunk and horny, not exactly whores,
who rolled in after the discos closed
and snuggled beside us looking for love:

a strange world, but what does it matter?
starving to death, sweet heaven above,
an absence of food but sex on a platter.

The local boys got wind of these ops,
were afraid to fight and called in the cops,
so one night - O God, not again! - we're all getting laid
when the cops burst in on a 4 am raid
("give me ten more seconds ... aaaahhhh!!")
and lined us up for a passport inspection.

Starvation does wonders for the male erection
(they don't show THAT on your passport
and being nineteen sure don't hurt, my friend)
but all good things, the pleasures
we all enjoy (this laughing charming starving boy)
soon ... come .. to ... an ... end.

A whacking great big East German trawler
sailed in and saved us
(and this is the truth I'm telling you);
I met Wolfgang down by the harbour,
half-pickled,
and he so tickled

to "sprechen sie deutsch"
after days with the locals
(grinning yokels)
that he dragged me "home" for a slap-up feed,
everything I could wish or need,
and after a silent rather dreary view

of the obligatory propaganda film
(I could hardly resist it,
when the captain insisted)
we put that nonsense behind us
and became good friends.

Food, food, food, like old times past!!
(sex is grand but it just doesn't last)
and me so laden down with supplies
that the homeboys couldn't believe their eyes:
Heil ... who is he? ... Honecker!!
We were brought back to the land of the living,

in the nick of time, but still in bad with the fuzz,
(the girls had wanted to meet us outside,
yeah, thanks but no thanks, too cold for a ride)
and not just because
there are other things in this life,
a lot of other things in life

apart from girls: got nothing against them,
au contraire, love 'em to bits,
their faces and feminine graces
always make me smile, feel happy.

If it could only
always be so.

But I had seen the face of death
and I didn't like it.

So we went to a disco
with the lead-ass freaking Commies
and had a great time: the best craic
of all (I swear this is true)
was to leave a drink on the table
pale yellow pernod type stuff
after a quiet trip to the loo

(yeah, well, figure that out)

then lurk behind a nearby pillar
and wait for the local lady killer
to swoop down and lap it up:
gulp, gulp, gulp and sup.

Yum-yum.

I got out of the bloody place
(I'm writing today, I'm still alive)
by stowing away on a British boat
that came in for repairs,
could barely float,
but that was the least of my worries.

I was going mad,
going crazy and bad
(darkness and cold, cold and darkness,
I was ready to kill to get out).

You can imagine it,
but it was actually worse,
a widow's curse. Jesus!!

I rolled on board, slipped down
the passage to the galley
among piratical bearded ruffians
and asked, "Who's the feckin skipper?"
(polite discourse had long ago departed)
and amid gap-toothed grins somebody farted
and said, "E's ahr fookin fooker",

then a drooling yellow-fanged creature
pointed his two-fingered hand
(with fishermen this is a common feature)
and said, "Oi'll work ye watch by watch,
fifteen hours a fookin day!" - "OK --
that's grand by me" , sez I,

I was burning to get away.

Ah, England! thou sceptred isle,
thou gem of the ocean, jewel of the sea,
I never never thought I'd be so happy to see you!

On re-reading the younger Yeats

regrets are many and the pain runs deep
in my long inglorious history;
no more shall I turn aside and weep
upon love's bitter mystery.

Witness of his Century

The light is slowly fading,
infinitessimally shading
daylight colours into tones of grey;
twice have the servants come
offering to light the candles,
and twice have I waved them away.

I am but a guest
and know the servants need their rest,
but I sit with this blanket on my knees,
obdurate, unmoving;
alone in this familiar room
communing with ancient memories.

Look here, old boy, don't be a c*nt
(we had returned in a lather after the hunt),
now Ivo expounded the need for war
just over there by the cloisonné table;
(and we did use THAT kind of language then),
The Kaiser needs a bit of what-for!

Poor Ivo copped it in the first few days,
and Death became known in disgusting ways
to nearly all of our class and generation;
yes, I was out there, so beastly drunk
from start to finish, can't recall a bloody thing,
before drifting home to the thanks of the nation.

The twenties passed in a cocktail haze
of very long nights and very short days;
I believe I got married there once or twice;
it's hard to recall, I was never quite sober
from 1915, after Loos, to God knows when,
the short-skirted girls were frightfully nice!

I seem to remember some trouble and fuss,
that was '26, I think, I was driving a bus;
there was a strike of some kind, and the 'civil power'
never expected me to run over their own policemen,
which I did, and then the crowd closed in,
cheering ME, the hero of the hour.

In '29 my chums lost all their money,
silly asses, yet none of them thought it funny;
I did, I lived on land, on hardworking peasants,
so I flitted about town, same as ever,
charming to a slight but wicked degree,
handing out carefully thought-out presents.

The Thirties were long and infinitely weary,
the people very poor, bad-tempered, dreary;
I considered a sojourn in warm foreign climes
but was consumed with such hatred
for Mosley, AND for that bastard Churchill,
that I chose to wait for more interesting times.

We should have gone to war in thirty-eight
and wrapped it up, '39 was too late;
but with the pallid politicians of the day,
pusillanimous Halifax; Chamberlain, (that Birmingham
umbrella: "J'aime Berlin"!); in the end
only half-cracked Winston could lead the way.

I had a jolly war, I must confess,
half-sober, exciting, but you must not press
for details. Mum's the word, (dear lost and darling mother)!
It was a world of codes and radios,
parachute jumps and secret agents:
when it ended, at once I prayed for another.

Many years on, I have been given my other war,
and it is not what I had bargained for;
the room grows dark, the staircase creaks,
I sit here alone, this blanket on my knees,
listening to the voices and ghosts of the past,
and my soul wants to scream. It merely squeaks.

Jai Ram (the new boat)

Varanasi

Ganesha is the god of new beginnings,
a portly jolly little elephant, with the hint
of a twinkle in his eye: so, naturally, when
the new boat was ready, we draped the bow
with bright orange marigolds, used our thumbs
to rub on the lucky red powder, lit the cones
of incense and then said our poojah.

Bholanath, red-eyed with drink, dark as a Dravidian,
clapped his hands and we all sprang to our feet
with a shout, pushed the new boat down the sand,
and launched it into Mother Ganga: shabash!
Arey bap ... it floats! Well done, Ganesha!!
All five of us tumbled on board, fitted the oars,
grinned and waited for starter's orders ....

Jai Ram! Ram Ram ki Jai! Ahchaa ... shabash!!
Dukhi and Nagesh took a lunge on the oars
and we shot like a bullet into the stream, roaring
with happy laughter, narrowly avoiding
the decapitation of several pious bathers:
dear sweet snotgreen Mother Ganga,
most blessed and wonderful of all rivers!

Ignore the iron ugliness of the railway bridge,
a legacy of the myopic practical British,
and gaze on the jumble of temples and terraces
elbowing each other along the shore, see the
colourful crowded bathing ghats, a scene unchanged
for two or three or four hundred years,
and know you are in the heart and core of India.

politics 101

Power is an aphrodisiac
beyond sex, inflaming the minds
of arrogant, driven, limited
people, fellow humans, ablaze
with visions of personal grandeur;

and it is their ambition
more than their ability, certainly
more than their humanity,
which drives such people on;
in their pride and their ignorance

they turn their backs on love
and thus become our leaders.

They may need us in their rise
to power, our willing subjection
to seductive language, our atavistic
response to the call for war:
each querulous generation
forgets the blessings of peace.

And the restless young, bored,
hemmed in, respond to adventure,
to the lure of the world; but modern war
is no adventure, no cavalry charges
in beautiful uniforms, but rather

industrial murder with high
explosives, so that bits of your son .... 25

(or daughter, as the case may be)
come home in clandestine sealed boxes,
flag-draped, secretly shipped to funerals,
to grieving communities of parents and friends,
which the Leader never attends.

Idealism and anger crop up
with every second or third generation;
and we have seen, so often have
we seen, that courage is not
a sustainable commodity, among
the young or anyone else.

We compromise. We make allowances.
We don't want to get thrown in prison.

We don't want to lose our precious jobs.
When times are scary, people
get scared: a sure sign is when they
murmur about family responsibilities
in the same way that a divorced woman

will settle for the least bad choice
to help her raise her kids, to give
some semblance of love and respect:
it's not what she would have wished for
as a girl, but it's better than nothing.

The squalid "arrangements" of the past
have been tinkered with, not changed, .... 50

the old inequalities remain: they squat,
like giant dull-eyed toads, as heavy
as the weight of the pyramids,
darkening our hopes and aspirations.
And so it is with a gasp of sheer
astonishment (!!) that we respond

to the brave and articulate few
who stand up against this ugliness,
this arrogance, this injustice.
We admire them, but are secretly
appalled: Good God, they are just
Asking For It! No good deed

will ever go unpunished; and we,
the children of a cynical age,

somewhere at the back of our minds,
deep in our quaking, mendacious hearts,
don't trust them either: we have been fooled
so many times before, too many times!
We live with lies: you can't fool me again!

Yes, they can. Lies roll over us.
We may laugh and we may call it bullshit,
but the horrible, the terrible, the insidious
thing, is that we simply no longer know,
with confidence, how to filter lies from truth.

Words no longer have the meanings .... 75
ascribed to them by the dictionary.

We are constantly
seeking a new vocabulary of truth,
a stripped-down version
of eternal, not necessarily religious
verities, in which
words that have been abused
like cringing helpless children,
like ten-dollar whores,
can be regained, words like

freedom

liberty

democracy

justice

all these words we mouth and repeat
must come back to their original meanings,
cease acting as smokescreens, cease
disguising boardroom agendas.

Because this is what is happening.
This is the world we live in.

Clinically employed, clouds of rhetoric
befog the minds of a dumbed-down, malleable,
flag-waving public, unhealthily overfed.
But the rich have always played games with us,
we, the people once described
as free independent citizens. ........... 101

in a handful of dust

Tiger, tiger
burning bright
in the forests
of the night
I am not
afraid
of you,
you magnificent
dangerous
beast ;
instead, I am
afraid
of civilised people
in suits
with blue and red
neckties:
after all,
how many of us
can
tigers kill?
and for all
your fearsome
rows of teeth,
brother shark,
the same
thing
goes
for you.

Aisling

Who can you be my dear sweet maid
with your dancing darting violet eyes,
your clear white skin, the burning
blush on your lovely cheeks?

I think I have never seen such eyes,
not at Tír Eoghain nor at Dhún na nGall

Nor at any of the feasts in my father's court
have I seen such loveliness;
I wish to know you, auburn-hair,
dimple-cheek, sweet sly smile:

I desire with my heart to know your name.

Look to me, please, with your lovely eyes.
I will be kind. I will cherish you.

Five Haiku

yabai...

a sudden earthquake --
all around the ground trembles
we have lost the war
-------------------------------------
your half-moon glasses
made you look ridiculous
until I wed you
-------------------------------------
drunk under blossoms
the boss thought you were funny
but not so today
-------------------------------------
these days older frogs
refuse to jump into ponds
the master is gone
-------------------------------------
scissors paper stone --
all circular arguments
bedazzle our minds

the goat walks

You wonder
why all these
low-ranking individuals,
caught on camera,
end up in jail
while the people
who set them up,
encouraged them,
move on
to higher command.

Oops! There goes
Lynddie England.

Bad apples
in an
otherwise
pure
military
dispensation?

Yep.

That's the way
we deal
with
embarrassment.

As if
Gitmo and Abu Ghraib
weren't enough,
now we have
Amnesty bloody
International
speaking
out of turn.

These
bleeding hearts, these
non-team players
make you
want to
pass
some new laws
that will
shut them up
forever.

The country
needs
half-formed idiots
from inner cities,
from trailer parks
in godforsaken
wastelands,
and other places
of bitter
deprivation

in order
to have someone
to throw
in jail
when things
go wrong.

An anthropo
semi-logical
tight-wired social
environment
makes sense
only
when you follow
the money.

daddy's war

In a little cafe
just off the Boul 'Mich
I talked to Herr Springer;
that was Paris '37.
Springer was a classic,
shaven head and pebble spectacles,
passing me money in a grubby
envelope, not much, just enough;
my job was to supply
the Germans with information.
Well, there was no problem there,
I was working for the British and the French,
so whatever they told me
I simply passed on.
But the one thing I didn't like
is that they asked me
to surrender Springer's payments.
What for? Come on, chaps,
I'm a free-lance operator
and this cash comes in very handy:
it's not as though our own crowd
were forthcoming, believe me,
dollops of petty cash, dredged
up from the depths and signed for.
They made you feel like a pimp.

They treated me like shit.

So I lied about the payments
and decided, in anger,
to give Springer some real information
and get a bump in income.

We were nearly at war, of course,
and I was solid, patriotic.
But life was expensive, and those
people in Military Intelligence
were prancing about, looking down
their noses: God rot your grandmother.
And it's just not right,
I wasn't ALLOWED to keep
that extra bit of cash, understand?
So that started to work on me
and I began telling Springer
what was true and what was not.

My payments went up.
The Germans (being German)
demanded receipts, but we
worked out a system of double entries,
one real, one for my controllers.
With a regular income
I decided to get married to Beryl
the landlady's daughter
whose large thrusting tits
drove me insane
even though her father never liked me,
one-eyed, one -legged,
a walking reminder
of the War to end all Wars:
sorry about you, chum,
before my time.

September '39, war, a serious
drop in income. MI cast me loose
but the Germans didn't: as a
married man I had to listen.
Stands to reason.
The daytime job in sales
wasn't going so well,
and we had the house to pay for,
not to mention the furniture,
plus the new car, all on the HP,
and there was a child on the way.

Your family comes first, am I right?

I didn't care much for the bombs
but Springer promised
they'd avoid my house (haha!)
so we were still in touch
through a newsagent's window
in Notting Hill. I had to decide
if what I was doing was wrong
or just necessary.

The child was a girl, Mandy,
and this was my small little family,
the first touch of warmth and love
in my sad solitary life: nothing,
nothing could be more important.

It was November '43
when they came; the neighbours,
previously friendly, threw stones.
I was taken to Parkhurst,
remanded, the solicitor
viewed me like a piece of dirt.

We were a nation at war.

Now it appears they will hang me.
Dear sweet Mandy!

fishing in belfast

a sun-speckled dazzle
dancing coins of light
the wet water

Liam, before he died
so horribly ...

the windshield wipers
chick, thunk ... chick, thunk,
outside the Northern Bank and Trust,
the rain gleaming streets
almost beautiful,
slashed with reflected neon ...

Duran-Duran
Bon Jovi

the wink and shine
on each individual bullet

Help me find Thy grace, O Lord,
now in my hour of need

such sweaty hands, a Belgian
gun: is the safety off? which
way does it go?

You can crucify me
upside down, I haven't
tried that before.

A gun in my hand
feels good, redirects
the course of Empire.

I am a soldier
I will answer none of your questions.

seven past mental

in a lonely ditch with a nagging bitch
domestication overcame me

my sad eyed lady of the lowlands

half-cut, leaning leftwards in the breeze,
bouncing off trees, losing
the run of herself
oh! oh! entirely

so I went to the pissart convention
straight down the old red lane
with stout Cortez, an eagle of a man,
or was that Pissaro
gazing goggle-eyed,
rehearsing
on the Hill of Howth?

We were
half-cut, leaning in the breeze,
leaning and linking serenely,
floating over the flushed and happy faces
of the lusty multitude, singing,
loudly, lovingly,
their anthem at the races:

there were four and twenty virgins
at the Ball of Inverness
and when the ball was over
there were four and twenty less

and in another corner of a foreign field
young Jimmy the Bollix and Gaston Grey
languished
among the lazy langourous lilacs,
gesticulating, interpolating,
Wolfsbane
Sinn Fein
and fifty feckin reasons
to kill your mam
and love your dad

the only peace I ever had
was seven past mental
alone in the flat in Islandbridge
but with two suns in a blazing sky
closing in, approaching,
there was this ... apprehension
(a temporary illusion)
of permanent impermanence

and I thought (that was then)
Mr Death was not worth dying for:
because like any sensible man
I was all for a bit of silence
but, Jayz, Mr D went a step too far

in the other direction. Beyond the gallows,
you may discern
the psychological centre
of the healthy happy human mind:
pre-Revolutionary
pre- Communist
pre-Fascist
pre- American
prelapsarian

as when in days of innocent youth
we laughed with girls and told the truth

but let me
put some interpretation
upon your scalp
and rub it in with kneading fingers
as the needing lingers
and
the clocks
tick
on

Shantih ... Shantih ... with a dull sound at the stroke of eleven.