Ophelia's Nun

FinsburyParkCarrots

I'll have to master the technology of transcribing tape to CD to mp3, first. However, I have my CD demo on my pc and I suppose I should find a website to host that, for anyone who might like to hear it.

Thanks.

anOmis

*raises both of her hands*

FinsburyParkCarrots

Zebedee and Zachary were drinking Cabo Wabo
on the pier just where the seawall starts to split.
The bottlelight was catching dreamy gleams of shiny dayglo
when Zebedee nudged Zak, "See, this is it!
Just catch this streaky accident of rainbows in a glass:
I hold this greeny bottle to the sun,
and voila! That's it! There's magic! Now, before it comes to pass,
a poet's job's to go and write that down."

"No, no", said Zak, his cheeks sucked in, his forehead rolled in furrows:
"No, poetry is never gold. It's grey,
As the deep encroaching seafoam beats a broken wall, so harrows
Time upon my flattened mind each day."
Zeb roared "You've mixed your metaphors, you self-important clown:
Please, either use a trope of 'sea', or 'soil',
But not the both at once. You see, the clearest verse is fun;
A word of toil will always read like toil."

Sun hid in cloud. Zak groaned aloud, "Oh deepest night of thunder!"
Sun showed again in yellow. Zeb whooped "Yay! Bro'!"
Zak:"Oh, but in that time of darkness, did you lose your wonder?"
Zeb: "Did I fuck! I had me Cabo Wabo!"
All about the pier resounds this argument of drinkers,
Questioning the crux of what is poesy.
All around the world we argue, with our thinkers' blinkers:
It's grey, or sunny Cabo Wabo cosy.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Fifteen years I've known you, near enough,
And in that time, you've written quite a bit,
Sending me odd drafts, however rough
and saying 'Please be honest, if they're shit'.
Somewhere, I've got, filed, your great big stack
of poems from when we were seventeen;
If you ever want to have them back -
you CAN'T! - okay, you can, if you're that keen.

And now you've got a novel coming out.
I have to say I'm proud of you, you know.
You've always been intent and so devout
to make it, writing always. Well, look now.
It's time to tell you straight, so, let me say
I really knew you'd make it good, one day.

DopeBeastie

it's a veritable soul train in here


BUMP

FinsburyParkCarrots

Here's a brand new one, finished seconds before submission of this post.


Song For Aunt Teresa

I remember watching how the hens
would strut and jut their heads about your skirt.
You'd empty bowls of swill into the pens,
down on the pinkish snouts of pigs, moist dirt
and sweat from all day working on the land
caked on your brow. And I remember, too,
You turning over earth, with spade in hand,
digging spud-drills, each good furrow new.
Teresa, when I head down to your farm,
The farmhouse wallpaint peeling in the wind
That roars from Achill, I lean down my arm
upon the wall from which that scraggy, kind
mutt of yours, old Rex, would wait for cars
To bounce along the grassy boreen road,
Then pounce down, barking, tire-biting. Bars
of your pen gates have rusted brown; the broad
Old hayloft's roof shows skylight from where tiles
Have come down from last August's hurricane.
Over all this land, your years of miles
of work, the rush you'd conquered grows again.
But in my song, your memory will live
As long as readers see you work and thrive.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Cliffcall. Cattlecry.
Ocean hush. Boot trudge. Black night.
A man of dead loves.

FinsburyParkCarrots

I wrote this in January but it needs to be sung in June. Please sing with me. It's called "Freshwater Blue Cascade."

Lover: don't you know
You're the green dell at the angels' playfield?
Freshwater blue cascade
brings the bliss you weave.
With your soft hairflow
Upon your breast, here at the black ford
noontide
Let your call be made.
Eclipse me beyond all loves.
Lover: don't you know
that you've me won?
You're the fire
of my reborn sun.

And darling, don't you know
You're the palace of my place of wonder?
You're the first and the last
who'll ever really hold this heart.
You kiss my furrowed brow
and brightly warm a soul
Too long in winter.
We'll kiss away the past: in your arms I'll build our start.
Darling: don't you know now, what you've done?
You're the fire of my reborn sun.


(Chorus)
Freshwater blue cascade
Freshwater blue cascade
Freshwater blue cascade
You're the dream gods weave


Julie, now I know
the wisdom Grainuaile has whispered to me.
Through her castle walls,
I've been hearing her sound your name.
And I've discovered how
I had to journey here for love to find me
Embrace me at my calls:
I'm home! I'm home! I'm home!
Maybe we were led to meet as one:
You are the fire of this reborn sun.

EvilToasterElf

The quantity of quality work here is staggering

FinsburyParkCarrots

Cheers, mate. Well, your fine poems give me something to be competitive with, in the friendliest of all senses.

DopeBeastie

clears throat

sings

FinsburyParkCarrots

Yellow holes of light
Peep low from tonight's black cloak.
Kitchen lights star out

Where in the blue day
Houses necklace Achill Head.
Midnight island life.

Here, on the mainland
All's black, bar willo the wisps
on the Fahy road.

Still, Joe Conway knows
where the roofless houses stand
Mindmapped, on black;

Where Corrigan lived,
and the Lenaghans, all ten,
and the McGuires.

And he sits up tonight,
Studying the midges that
Cover his window

in their thousands, and he
Laughs at their migrant light-lust,
Craving his lamp glow.

He bows. He won't, now,
Leave for England on that trail
For a new life's bright

start. Neither will he
Go, join the islanders where
There's light in darkness.

He dreams warm kitchens
He could look to as a child,
With their candle gleams

Shimmering across
The silence, seen from Drumslide
out to Dooreil. He dreams

awake, seeing no
light at all, no light at all.
He is not alone,

Though, he knows. He owns
a colony of winged beasts
And he commands the light.

DopeBeastie

kitchen lights star out



nice, fins

FinsburyParkCarrots

The blind corpuscles see, what's more they speak, dodgem-driving meridian lines and alleyways of feeling, joyriding the strictures of stiffness, loosening up the heart's around-body superhighway. Joy! Joy! Joy! Cuticles don't feel like dead cells, as pulsing fingers type fast on the keys to explain the process of here, the process of now. The process of HER!!! The being of Her. Her heart. Her eyes.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Hey, talking of firecrackers of the more substantial kind though, I just noticed seta's here! Good to see ya, man. Thought I'd tease ya and write a poem called "Beat Poetry Is Shit."


When I was fourteen years of age
I bought a pair of boots.
Brown suede, they were, or maybe beige.
Who cares. I bought a pair of boots,
and bought a roller neck. Pure black.
And bought some black jeans too.
I bought a nice new paperback,
"The Beats". And then I grew

My hair down to my chin. I went
about the town like this,
Writing monologues to vent
My woe in peoples' bliss.
But really, what I knew back then
But wouldn't quite admit
Was something I should state: Ahemnn...
Beat poetry is shit.

Kerouac knew this too. He said,
"That Beat crack's some old caper."
That's why he typed up "On The Road"
on rolls of toilet paper.
All dem feckers knew this too
And that's just why they rhymed
"Doobee doo bee doobee doo"
with
"angel hipstah dirtroad lemony tinted morning cricket motorcycle angst hardon bullet ashtray rivers of the holy Virgin sweating in sunsilk deathray icecream peninsula wavecrashes of cosmic Marlon Brando"



jk

Just 'avin' a larf wid ya.

dyaogirl

we be gigglin he he he

FinsburyParkCarrots

After the Birth

A lamb's placenta,
A drape on grey bogland stone
Flaps, empty, in rain.

FinsburyParkCarrots

A: "Remember the day I showed you the farm?
You wore daisy chains that I made for your arm.
Remember the poems we wrote on the hill
With the sun on the banks, and the grass lying still?"

B: "I remember those nights on the balcony row,
Drunk on Gardiner Street, with the children in tow.
I remember the promises left to the wind,
Like your flowers that bloomed on the mountain behind."

FinsburyParkCarrots

http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/comedancewithkittystobling.html

FinsburyParkCarrots

I have grown tired of the ways of men
Who stand on mountaintops and bless the meek.
I have grown tired of the ways of men
Who claim to know the answers people seek.
I have grown weary of the ways of men
Who preach to congregations of the weak.
I have grown weary of the ways of men
Who speak for us before we get to speak.

I have grown happy in the ways of love
And loving laughter's unencumbered sound.
I have grown happy in the ways of love
Where no messiahs blight our private ground.
One woman's love is more than words from kings.
One woman's love is more than public things.