SPRING  DON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

"Ok..!"  shouted Spring
"I know y'are in there..!"

Spring had the house
surrounded.

It had trees stationed
all about my abode

aiming their apple blossom
straight at me.

Already their perfume
had invaded the room.

I had turned into
THE INCREDIBLE SULK

sunk into
a blue funk

there was to be
no escape from.

Even my reflection wouldn't
look at me.

"OK..!' shouted Spring yet again
"...just look out your window....

surely you can see you
don't stand a chance!"

I couldn't help my self
I gave a panicked glance.

Platoons of daffodils
waiting to charge the house

yelling in yellow.

"Ok fella...this is your last chance
I'm going count to then...."

"Alright....alright...it's a fair cop
I'll come quietly!"

I kicked open the door
hands held above my head.

The trees had me
cornered.

The sunlight had me
blinded.

Happiness...sheer ******...happiness
grabbed me by the heart.

"Ok kid...easy now...easy!"
Spring soothed me

"Everything's gonna be ok...
...Ok?"

I sobbed on its shoulder
threw my despair away.

*

I had broken up with my girlfriend and was absolutely desolate. I would go to work and come home and just sit in my room and stare at the white white walls and the little window as it changed from light to dark and back again and...back again. I just cried and cried. Then one day I was walking to work not paying any attention to anything when all of a sudden I was greeted by a bunch of crocus and they were the first things to enter my mind and catch my imagination.

After a year I had finally noticed that something beautiful could possibly happen. And like the ancient mariner I blessed them even though I could not bless myself and I was blessed for loving the crocus just for the beauty of themselves.

The healing had begun and the voice of that wonderful English anchorite Julian of Norwich penetrated my loss and anguish and revealed to me that yes...yes...believe it or not.. . .

‘All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,’

The poem wrote itself inside my head and by the time the Underground had delivered me to my place of work it had emerged into hastily scribbled form and later that day beside the little window and the white white walls I typed it up and ceased crying bit by bit by bit.

"BE DE HOKEY!"

uncle's old hat
inhabited now
by a black feral cat

I remember the laugh
always fixed
beneath that hat

forever tilted back
ready with the quick quip
tongue in cheek

his green corduroy trousers
nothing but rags
to shine shoes

first colour photo
we'd ever seen
those green corduroys

were really green
as if the photo was
necessary to prove it

attacking with a pin
the dirt caught
in the green ridges

"See that tree?" he'd tell me
that used to be me but
I grew out of it!"

words loved him
and would do anything
he said

I the small boy
wearing the fabled hat
in the act of being him

wearing the much too big
green corduroys
rolled up...held up by braces

"Be de hokey!"
I'd exclaim
quoting him

"Be de Holy Dublin!"
his catch phrases on my lips
creasing him up

"Hey ya little *****!"
( pretending to be mad )
"Yer better than that Charlie Chaplin!"

me bathing his feet
in a basin after
he put the cows to bed

a black cat
inhabits the now
curled up in Mikey's old hat

*

Dry, droll, laconic and ironic...he taught me just by the example of himself how to create a world from just a bunch of works and shape them until they fitted your thought. Everything could be so surreal and real with him at the one and the same time.The man who made me the poet I am today. One of the three Corkmen who were the treasure of my childhood.

I once went for an interview to get into some college up in Dublin and failed miserably. To merely put me at my ease the interviewer said who are your heroes and I at once said: "My Da, my uncles Seanie and Mikey!" And the interviewer said:" No...I mean real heroes!" And I said:"My Da, my uncles Seanie and Michael." i knew even then that these were the men who were everything to me and shaped who I would be!" Their teachings were tender and gentle and I soaked them up by some emotional osmosis. I still claim that the best part of me today is...THEM.

MAKING THE MOMENT

Memory nails
one piece of time

against another
piece of time

until it bears
some ramshackle  resemblance

to the exact
moment.

Memory has left things out.
Memory has put many more  things in.

But for what it is worth
it could...pass for...the moment.

The sense suffices.

A hedgehog creeps slowly
across the bottom of the garden

as if it were in
a universe of its own.

A crow caws
across a sky

as if it were creating it
with its cry.

Well, well, so...
here I am again.

Sorta.
Kinda.

And here you are again.
Alive.

Not dead.

You flicker through
all the faces you

have ever been.

But bit by bit
time slips

and the moment
comes apart.

I stare into the nothing
you have become.

And my mind builds
and rebuilds

this exact moment.

Nailing one bit of time
foolishly to yet another.

Making the moment.
forever.

*
What the mind elects to remember....this tiny moment of not-much-ness gets played and replayed...yet it holds him as he smiles and turns to say something and then....he is gone yet again...and I can't remember what it was he was going to say only that he said it to me and every little second of him is precious...even this insignificant little thing that should have vanished.

Strangely enough there are three different times in this one moment....there is the hedgehog on his journey across his little world...then the crow dragging the sky across our vision...then just Brian standing against the window that looks out upon that sky...that garden...but memory elects to combine them all as happening at the one and the same time...the only common thing being his smile(as always)and his lovely laughter. A tiny moment made out of nothing at all and yet is the seed of everything I love.

"I AM persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love...."

Romans 8. 38, 39.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF A 9 YEAR OLD BOY'S SECOND WORLD WAR

the evil drone of
Heinkels ...Messerschmitts
"Ack-ack-ack..!"

the darkness
answers back
fear & fascination

the small boy
plucking them out of a sky
in his mind's eye

identifying  their shapes
clocking their markings
"I AM DEATH!" they say

his auntie's house
nowhere to be seen
the next morning

being comforted
that she's in Heaven
God uneasy in His world

Daddy a pilot man
who stayed up in the sky
because he died

auntie and daddy
lost in the night
with all the Heinkels ...Messerschmitts

making up curse words
when he let in a goal
playing on bomb sites

"Focke-Wulf
Focke-Wulf
FOCKE-WULF!"

SINGING THE RIVER

Walking with my uncle was never
the ordinary process of of perambulation.

in order to get from pt. A to
pt. Z.

We would sing our way west into
the field as if to

tame it
soothe it with sound.

"On Carrigdhoun the heath is brown..."
we'd sing to it

"...the clouds are dark o'er Ard-na-Lee."

The grass listening with its thousand ears.

And the field would swoon
and fall down

to the river at its border
( which as it happened )

was the real life river
of the song

"...to kiss the slumbering Own na Buidhe."

As if we had sung it
into existence.

And we would roll ourselves down
over and over until

we arrived at its dizzy waters
dangling our toes

in pure song.

And now( with a quick uncle wink )
"Let's walk home....backwards!"

And backwards home we'd go
just for the laugh of it.

The yes of it!

Confusing cows
and a few scattered clouds.

Trees and hedges tiptoeing
away from us.

The five-bar gate with
the sweetest wildest strawberries at its feet

proclaiming: "Is it mad...
...y'are or....wot?"

And the next day off we'd go walking eyes closed
in a darkness of our own making

to sing its song
to the river

the river chuckling
over stones to itself.

And the next next day would be
backwards with eyes closed

led along by our own laughter
and the odd mystified moo.

"Farewell..." we'd tell
the sleepy river "...farewell!"

leaving it dreaming
in a sunset.

"Shhhhhh..." shushed our footsteps
shhhhhhs walking backwards,

"When Donal swore, aye o'er and o'er,
We'd part no more a stór mo chroidhe."

"shhhhhhhhhhhh.....shhhhhhhhhhhh!"
"shhhhhhhhhhhh....­.shhhhhhhhhhhh!"

"....shhhhhhhhhhhh!"

*

Oh now that sense of play would be down to my Uncle Mikey who taught me the world in his own inimitable way. I believed everything he told me which used to annoy the hell out of my Auntie Nellie( God love her )who then had to put up with the both of us. She'd always be saying: "For Christ's sake Michael will ya stop filling the child's head with such nonsense...can't ya see he thinks everything ya say is true!" And true it was 'cos...I did and in a way...still do! He was one of the heroes of my childhood...a treasure trove to a kid...one of the jewels of my life.

THE GHOST CLUB

It's THE GHOST CLUB
you hardly know
when you're dead

it's just
a different kind of
alive

I hang around my old shed
touch & not touch
my rusting tools

some of the other ghosts
hang out at the bandstand
but only when it rains

we call ourselves
THE GHOST CLUB
chat 'bout this 'n' that

that 'n' this
you know the little things
that make a life

we keep in touch
with the living
shadowing them

pretending to be their shadow
hidden in a sudden
slant of sun

we shout and shout but
our words are invisible
it's like living

in a parallel
dimension living
inside a snow dome

when turned up side down
the fake snow falling
mimicking the real snow

falling gently now outside
I'd love to cry
but I've forgotten how

and I don't know
if it's allowed
it's a life of sorts

somehow
I get by
( I miss my boy )

bye. . .
bye. . .
bye

*

An old negative who had never known a photo...found floating face down in the ruins of my uncle's cottage. It's impossible to tell who they were...are. But I thought they bring them back as an illustration for this poem. Long may they live even in this ghost world.

STARRY STARRY NIGHT

She switched off the moon.

Plucked out the stars.

A little dog barked
as her scream scrawled:

“This time life has gone...too far.”

She took an overdose of sleeping tablets
in her big bright red car.

The day withers
that was once in bloom.

Petals fall
in an empty room.

The moon wept.
The stars cried.

Life was for living... Life lied.

She actually survived this attempt as she went into the hills where nobody could save her but...she had counted on a lone one man and his dog out for a last stroll. Paddy the dog went to *** upon the back wheel of the beautiful red car and started to whine. Paddy the man saw what was happening and pulled her out in time. Beautiful red haired woman in a beautiful red dress in beautiful red sports car...how could she even think of doing such a thing. When he visited her in hospital she was so enraged at being saved she threw a vase of flowers at him!