Looking for God

In the churches, in the chapels - only Man I see.
In the Falls and in the Creggan - only Man I see.
Man have I found beside me in every situation;
In favour and in fortune - only Man I see.
In the Abbey and the Vatican, in death and tribulation,
In every incantation - only Man I see.
In the shattered towns of Lebanon, In Cairo and Jerusalem - only Man I see.
In the missions, in the pulpits, in the faces of the priests,
In the blank-eyed congregations - only Man I see.
Open-eyed I peer about me and listen to the claims
Of Sufi poets, evangelists and Allah’s nine and ninety names,
But in all the faces staring back - only Man I see.

Murder at Christmas

Christmas music stifled
By sectarian genocide.
Christ shrivels in the womb,
Reluctant to be born.
A bomb in the manger,
Love stillborn.
Christ crucified before birth.
Within a span of hours
The Angelus our requiem,
The Church a charnel house of guilt
That even Christ can’t cleanse.
Grey stone, grey hearts, black minds,
Last year’s right this year’s wrong,
A faithless faith a-dying,
An ecumenical ping-pong.
Protestant and Catholic kill
To prove their way is right
To God’s most perfect peace.
Muslim wars with Christian,
Everyone kills the Jew.
The world’s a religious abattoir.
“Love!” exhort the holy men,
“Your enemy and neighbour”.
Love them to death if necessary.
Dear Christ, is anybody there?
We’re drowning in the blood of love,
Doesn’t anybody care?

Psychobabble & Verbocrap

Don’t be grody to the max, be a little froopy, man.
Conceptualize your personal meaningfulness,
That’s in the space where you’re at.
No macho-tripping or pulling the head-honcho number.
Simply redefine the parameters of
Your interface with integral mutual massage.
Feldenkrais functional integration, man.
Like experiencing the whole eclectic Gestalt
In the Cosmic overview – awesome.

Other Worlds

A world within a world
Of dragons, knights and druid wizards.
Sharpened spoons for cutting gizzards.
Big hairy monster who devours
Little boys among the flowers.

A world of rescued maidens,
But not quite sure why,
Because they always seem to cry.
Triumphant battles, quests and deeds
And Tigers crouch among the weeds.

Blowing bubbles into space,
Where rockets whizz and fairies grace,
A world where any wish takes place.
All within a world within
An English country garden.

Pothos

The truly great poets such as, Eliot, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy and
so many others are flowers, exotic, elegant, fecund flowers.
Flowers nurtured in a rich soil of education and literary
environments, brought to the full blossom of the English
language with care and constant attention'
I, on the other hand, can never be a flower. Despite a warm,
safe and loving home my education was garnered without
awareness in a back street, down-beat school.
A single saving grace was a love of reading, everything and anything,
Untutored, unguided, totally indiscriminate. A love that unlocked
that first important window in my mind - a troubled, disturbed
feeling that somehow, somewhere, I was missing out on
something important, something tremendous.
Thanks to the encouragement of family and friends and all the
'flowers' many more windows have been unlocked and I have
grown from the poor soil of my early years into, at the very least,
a weed. Proving that even weeds, with a little pothos, can
break through the concrete of their existence.

Elysian Fields

The gateway to the Elysian Fields
May not be draped with angels
Or lit like a heavenly fairground.
It could be a rotting five bar gate
Hanging off its hinges,
With an obstacle to test your resolve.