EXISTENTIALIST HUMANITARIANISM

‘ there is but one truly serious philosophical problem

and that is suicide ?’

                       Albert Camus

The alarm went off

vibrating another day.

I see a wheelchair

a piss-pot a bed-rail and hope.

I see beyond this room-

this hell of un-adopted kingdom.

I see a car and a life

without this torment.

I reach down into my source

Again and plant my seeds of hope,

This is my forth year of digging my plot

And I’ve seen nothing grow.

I used up all my money planning a future

But god had no plans for me

I had to make my own tea, cook and clean

unable to walk.  God and the system

Let me down and I was left to dig my own hole.

I see the shoots grow

I throw back the covers and greet the day.

DEBRIS

I love the sound of breaking glass

underneath my wheelchair. Over

Fenced in debris,  living in a ploughed

Up health care.  Reading the paper

Sitting alone eating sausages and mash

On easter Sunday . the only thing that

Rose from the earth is dirt debris and

These spuds.

BEATIFICATION

I woke to to the sound of the 16^th century word

Ringing like an angelus.   Doesn’t it sound like

a word created in the 60s and the beat generation.

I watched images of a pure white stage filled

With men like Kkk men in dresses and funny pointed hats.

I thought it was going to see a rock festival

and a redneck rock star would get on stage

Instead I saw a man in a chair with a dress.

I don’t understand this cardinal law.

I have to live in the law of the land alone

And some elderly man in a dress gets cheered.

Like an image by Francis bacon

This image has been scarred on my mind

By a priest who tried to abuse me

When I was fifteen but he got

A dig in the head and I ran.

I should have said something but

I was ashamed I thought there was

Something wrong with me. I bet

He’s still abusing boys, what about

the families of these people.  What-

ever happened to empathy. 

These families have been ruined by

These people and yet they can still

Practice  and under my law

People go to jail and rock stars get ruined.

No wonder there’s an aggressive atheism

They created it.   I’m down here at the hide

By Lough Neagh hiding.

BAY A

The tree

In the mirror

By the pebble-

Dashed wall

Looks cold

Dark naked

and alone.

A SHIT SONNET

My world is coming down

With poetics and poetic literature

The meanings jump of the shelves

Pound and Eliot and all those

Cold grey words that go right over

Your head and drop like a blitz.

The war years are full of them

But it’s the books in the bogs

That really matters.

All those inward outward words

That find your centre and explode

Like the real ablutions of literature.

CRAIGAVON

The sound of nature and the cars go by

We are in between a city and a town ,

plans for spanish villas in northern Irish weather

and people from all the broken towns

give them hope for a good year dream

a drawn out utopia sketched by pen on paper.

The balancing lakes to balance everything

Heaven to a child from the north, south,

east, or west of troubled dreams.

Bringing with it all those broken dreams

Society’s wasteland beyond society

but the dream comes back to bite you.

Like travellers in an unfenced reservation

just like a trailer parked trash

ok there’s alcoholics at the lakes and junkies

in the flats there’s asbo’s coming out

of the new city pre-fabbed walls

this is like an American dream gone wrong

or a beatnik novel gone right

were all dharma bums on natures road’.

THE BLACK HOLE POEM

For Stephen Hawkins

1.

This is the theory of everything.

life begins like a poem.

‘The source, eternity is darkness within darkness’, the Tao Te Ching

a letter of light comes from negativity

and the universal poem is formed

radiating light from dark

and love from hate.

2.

I woke from the darkness of a bad dream.

Why was I witnessing such darkness?

It was like a cancer or a plague.

I was afraid to go back to sleep

I lay there listening to the rain thinking

maybe this went further back?

to Dostoyevsky or Van goghs time

Maybe time is timeless?

crash like world war one or Adolf Hitler’s name.

Maybe this is as Nietzche said

‘i’ll turn this muck to gold’.

This is the shadow of my event horizon.

                                               

Its as if it was present at the grapes of wrath

Or in a Francis Bacon look

It feels as if I’m in the short story called ‘Grief’

by Anton Chekov or on the island

of Liam O Flahertys black  soul.

ive just crossed the wilderness

and I’m still half asleep

this must be the product of all I’ve read

either that or I’m going mad

im listening to the war of thunder

A KILL HOUSE

Death: blood guts and brain

All pulped into a grey/white

And cured into a pudding.

A skip of swimming maggots

Above skinned coats of hide.

Pig’s shot and the squeal

Cut and torn from their throats.

Dipped in a bath of scolding

Water and the layer above

Blubber shaved the parts

Hung in the window like

Decorations on hooks.

Memory hangs like a crucifix

A blood dried landscape

Apron-ed on a sawdust floor.

CRIPPLED

Just when I was feeling positive

Writing a blog called barcode of light

Craigavon borough council give me yet

another kick in the teeth.   Im not

Taking this no more, these are my real

poems on my real blog.   Poems by

A crippled poet with no voice and very

Little memory.

Im no longer trying to be positive

To fit into an ablebodied time-

Table,this is my timetable.   Where

I took a stroke that crippled me.

MY BLACK ANGEL

The shadow of my wheelchair is like

A raven an Edgar Allen Poe image

guarding my hell, my black angel.

I woke and the raven was gone

It turned back into a wheelchair,

Nature is only a footstep away

If only I could walk.

The light floods into my room

and creates a shadow of rain rippling.

They say an English-mans home is his

Castle and this hellhole is mine.

Its 2009 and I live in a middle age, limbo

All I can do is cry,  I cant even commit suicide.

I’ve got to fit into an able-bodied timetable,

I piss in a bottle each day and wheel-

Chair a wheelchair:  I’m as low as a spider

or a mouse.  Wood louse and beetles highway

my floor, shell-shocked noble beasts.

The blue is crying from my eyes into

the reservoir of loss.

I’ve been waiting a lifetime for happiness

and four years for contentment.

I know these images come up again and again

But there’s nothing else in my life only

torment and pain.  This is only half a poem

From half a man