...and gael force winds

The Headless Body From the Irish Gaelic of Aonghas O Dalaigh (16th century) A lament for the rebel leader Fiach McHugh O'Byrne               I see your body headless stuck on Dublin’s steel spikes. The sight stuns me senseless. We poets never lost your likes.   Your body impaled before me a spectacle to our great crowd. Today your horror all may see, yesterday your courage our byword.   Once a fine figure with grand grace, now as I behold you horribly quartered my heart drains my face, my mind dismembers my memory.   The sight blinds even my blindside, weakens the strength of my stride. Seeing you spiked tightens my hide. Your tragedy shouts worldwide.   Now who’ll help the poor, patronize our teachers and poets too? O body, now that you hang headless ‘twere better not to live after you.   Who now will recompense the scholars, give hospitality, entertain? With you butchered so, in quarters, who will provide our wine?   Your four limbs hacked by butchery stuck on four sharp steel stakes before me here in Dublin city beggars my heart with blindness.   Your headless torso has now truly left green Leinster’s good men without the harp of hospitality to cultured conversation.   Your tortured torso’s a woeful sight. Giver of weapons and horses, hacked apart by an alien’s hatchet, limbs chopped off with curses.   Legion the laments of your history. Our hero’s headless horror stuck up on spikes indifferently, changed in colour and contour.   Telling tales of their travels like lords I heard foreign friends in your fort; gossip for girls, versed by your bards. Shut silent now that court.   Great grief! Beheaded in your glory who spoiled enemy territory, you’re now denied the honour our history should give your buried body.   Before I witnessed your sacrifice brave son of Aodh’s brave kind, my grief’s that my heart did not rise, that my eye was not blind.   We’ll never again see to emulate your strong stride, warm hand; no more admire your noble head’s shape, a noble image of Ireland.                                        Desmond  O'Grady     +2014                     ....

with a nod to Poe

               Stupid Raven









I know that my Redeemer lives

Be that as it may,

There's still this

Irritating

Black bird

Rapping on my chamber door

Incessantly reminding me

Of my loss

Grief is like an earthquake

At least mine has been

I knew it was likely to come

I thought  i'd prepared

Yet when it arrived I was still 

Shocked & overwhelmed

What's worse

Are the aftershocks

Never knowing when they'll come

Or how frequently

Or how hard each will be

Or how long they'll each last

I know you're better off

And in our Savior's arms

But you're not in my arms anymore

And I'm not in yours

I'm supposed to be  on your shoulders 

In the sun

Or slung over your shoulder

Asleep, too tired  & too young

Depending on your stamina and strength and patience

But this fucking raven keeps visiting me

In my chamber

"No more, never more!"

Shut up

Stupid bird

Stupid melancholy

Stupid pain

Let me go

Rain, rain, go away

Come back again some other day

Maybe someday when it's easier to ignore  you,

Work through  you

See past  you

Today, ...you're all I know








      Ted Mallory

the oldest love poem

off the lips of a fair maiden



Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,
Lion, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.

.....................
Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.
Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me,
Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies,
My father, he will give you gifts.

.....................
You, because you love me,
Give me pray of your caresses,
My lord god, my lord protector,
My SHU-SIN, who gladdens ENLIL's heart,
Give me pray of your caresses









This inscription, dating from the 8th century BC and belonging to the Ancient Babylonian Era, is described as the world's oldest known love poem. According to the Sumerian belief, it was a sacred duty for the king to marry every year a priestess instead of Inanna, the goddess of fertility and sexual love, in order to make the soil and women fertile. This poem was most probably written by a bride chosen for Shu-Sin in order to be sung at the New Year festival and it was sung at banquets and festivals accompanied by music and dance.





those were the days







......

at the interface between epistemology and metaphysics

                                    





                               











                                   PREFACE



reality bubbles of thoughts projected on the worlds'
 mirage a phantasmagoria of shifting realities
bubbles of thought the real but phantasms of thought
 taken for the real
reality but an hallucination mistaken for the real
reality mind produced bubbles of thoughts
 projected on the out there forming the worlds mirage
languages' net thrown o’er the out there
 forming the worlds mirage
meaning from the net but nothing but minds invent
reality mind produced bubbles of thoughts
 projected on the out there forming the worlds' mirage







                            ..... to a larger poem entitled Psychosis
                                 by the australian erotic poet

                                     Colin Leslie Dean











....

a testimony of sorts

 

 

 

 

               Dostoevsky

 

 

 

 

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn't have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.



                   Charles Bukowski









......

optimism is a choice of sorts

All the Meaningful Noise



      by Scott Owens






How can you be on this earth
            and not close your eyes on occasion
                         and listen to leaves give voice to wind,
                                                  hear the laugh of crow,
                          annunciation of blue jay,
               moan of mourning dove,
         all the meaningful noise
of another spring day?

Behind the finishing plant
                off the run-down road
                  between failing furniture towns,
                         a field is bursting with purple flowers.
                                            If you close your eyes
                                              you can hear the cosmos opening.




.....

life's little ironies

No One Cares Much What Happens to You






when Serbs get mad, they talk
about a small town like Grace

 Stop laughing; I’m serious
 Grace is all I can afford on my nursing home wages

  I pity her for the thankless job of building
  A nation of Americans conceived in petri dishes

   Whores are disposable.
   They get strangled, beaten, tortured, raped...

    on old motels, diners, train stations, or whatever,
    and I think about Capri Sun bags when it happens.

     As he unzips his pants I realize that I’m
     what happens to us when the curtain goes down

      no one cares much for the body parts
      murderer creeping up behind her

        Look, poetry, painting, writing. . .
        People don’t get it like they should.

        But it exists because it’s a link to what we can
        accomplish through our Academic Plan

         no matter how public it all seems
         there’s a forced casualness to this conversation

          I’ve been out here shooting long enough
          I know even a public toilet will net you jail time

           because when it comes to that word, “nigger,”
           — I know that this is illegal —

     it’s like the emergence of yet another guilty, white Southern male
        as the fat lady continues to sing,

                  “when they were first created the thing
               was to make them as white as possible”

             as long as we are laughing
           at Rush Limbaugh’s addiction

         remember that Mt. Rushmore was itself
the creation of an ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan




                                   Katie Degentesh