The Upturned Boat

"Art is the air pocket in an upturned boat" Jeanette Winterson
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/



For the past few years I've been writing on available surfaces - walls, backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, occasionally my skin...
This autumn I' decided it's time to start pulling the fragments together. In no particular order...some are dated, some I remember from where I wrote them, or what ink, pencil or lipstick I used...there doesn't need to be logical progression in writing, any more than there's logical progression in how we perceive the world. We are living fragments, and around us the world takes shape through own imagery. Some of those fragments are mysteries to me. Surprises from my own life and my own art.

Two poems from A Little Black Notebook
- works in progress, y'dig

[@ National Portrait Gallery, Dublin. 2007?8?9?]

Dead art, voices of dead men
A hung rabbit, slaughtered
Cocks, lobster boiled blood red.
These are their banquets:
Old men's faces, dead hearts
In dark oils. Breughel
Lays his venom of venious
Life in layers of paint.
the darkness of the soul -
No life or beauty leaps out
But sinful dark and wormy age.

************************

[@ County Clare...can't remember the place name...]

Lake's like the Lady with her mouth wide open
Calling from the bottom of her throat
Calling 'come and swim here' calling 'come and fall'.
You can't resist it, taking up the note

Water pulls like gravity: reed coils.

When you hear Her, the world begins to slip
Slick and smooth, she breathes and draws you down
Rope of reed and rushes tightens and is pulling
Don't resist it, follow up the call...

Road coils down below you, sticky...

Lake's like the Lady with Her mouth wide open
Calling from the bottom of her heart.
Calling 'come and swim here', calling 'love and fall'
Lake is like the ending or the start.

Ache with the loss of Her watery redemption

**************************

Treasure

Grey day. Umbrellas' red, yellow burst / 
punctures clouds. Like gold found in mud, sweet in salt; treasure / 
is simple; glory easy; movement.

Fridge Poems

yes, I had to clean the fridge eventually...all those words back in a box ready for more!


Today's Tanka...for the weather that's in it

Rain pours, flows, floods, bites a trench through road /
Grey sky; window. Crane fly thrashes in spider's web, 
trapped /
Rock of cloud smothers the mountains; black.

Autumn tanka...

Welcoming us into autumn...today's tiny tanka

Feel bonfire's heat. High wind rages/
Blows sheets of sparks: run and stamp and rescue / 
Our precious home, our lives, from burning


And today Shoemaker Kennels have their dog show in aid of Halfway Hounds Greyhound Rescue - so here's a pic of our much-missed Mollie at last year's show - Best Veteran Dog indeed!

Hillsborough 96...

Yesterday the Hillsborough Report finally proved the police cover up and stupidity that caused all those deaths 23 years ago at the Liverpool match. Took 23 years for the police to own up...and Norman Bettison just can't give it up

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hillsborough-police-chief-continues-to-blame-1323347 

Documents published by the Hillsborough independent panel relating to the Sun's April 1989 "The Truth" front page splash, which falsely alleged that drunken Liverpool fans had urinated on police and pickpocketed the dead:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/sep/12/documents-hillsborough-panel-sun-story?intcmp=239

I remember in 1990, someone reading The Sun in a railway station -  a guy flew up to him and ripped the paper out of his hand and stamped on it...seemed fair enough. Liverpool fans could be a scary mob alright, but pickpocketing the dying? Don't think so.

Alexi Sayle did a TV programme a couple of years ago where he filmed people's response to being offered a free copy of The Sun in Liverpool. Excellent. They all refused it; said Hillsborough was why.

So let's honour the dead and respect the living. And think especially of the 43 who would have lived if the cops hadn't decided to call off the rescue at 3.15.

Rally for Justice (we could be saying this all the time these days)

RALLY FOR JUSTICE!


Anglo Bank committed fraud, the Quinns were sentenced to jail. Why?
Money was advanced by Anglo Bank (then a commercial bank) to Sean Quinn and his family, When Anglo was nationalised by government decision, this money became a taxpayer liability. The Quinn  family offered to repay all monies advanced within 7-10 years without dispute: Anglo & the government refused, instead they seized the Quinn  Group and sold Quinn Insurance for €1.
Free Sean Quinn. RALLY FOR JUSTICE, Ballyconnell, Co. Cavan 5pm Sunday 16th Sept.


"...Bankers stroke their wallets 
While the workers take the chop

Selling off the country piece by piece
Ink don't dry on the landlord's lease
Fracking in the Northwest, fracking in the east:
Repossession new aggression, NAMA is it's name
Whichever way we walk it, it all works out the same..."

from 'Community Development Blues' - yup, it's a work in progress, just like community development...

The constant motion of life

Yikes, I really will get it together to post more regularly...my, how time flies.
The indestructible corrupted behemoth that is our government cuts health services with a slash hook and we just keep going...staggering from pharmacy to a&e without any plan for the future...

and the rain pours sullen and the potatoes are blighted...well, not mine, actually, since I used the old spuds from the bottom of the veg basket. Phew, spuds for Christmas.

and winter came...
Yes, I'm having one of those days.
So, here are two tankas. Different days, different emotions. Illustrating the wonderful constant motion that keeps us alive. And that what goes down will rise again :-)

I

Moon floats on the sea of sky clouds waves / milk truck bobs along country road, bouncing curve of fields / Moon’s rudder pulls our wet boat home

II

Can’t even see this pass for grey mist / the road’s gone: holes in the track, soaking wind and no way home / Keep driving. Cliff edge is near, but blurred.