Good evening all my friends of old
I'm glad to find you well.
Please pull a chair and pour a drink
and listen while i list
The common ways I've come to know
for man to lose the mind.

To the bottle where the sun is sought
but all too seldom found.
To the pipe that burns a milky white
in a land where man's forgot.

To the whore who lives
a life so empty
or to a life of
pure monotony.

To the shining lights
of soulless cities
and a lucid leather-bound
prophet in disguise.

They read like gospel
when we're young
When the world is but
a playground to enchant.

But now the ticks have
caught the tocks.
The moon has raped night,
and the withered walk alone
into everlasting light.

Listen now and listen well,
I'll say this only once.
I lost my mind to nothing then,
now there i seek it once again.

In a deed undone
and words ne'er heard.
In a city unseen and life half-lived.

On the plains where mans forgot,
amidst the bottles and the fog,
my search for something ever-lasting
has become a prophet's blessing.

A Hero Dies Tonight

T’was the night before Christmas, or the morning after maybe mid-June for all its worth. My memory no longer serves me, it comes and goes with sobriety. I am master of nothing but my mind. Time and place is unimportant, the details even more-so. You need not concern yourself with my comings and goings, ignore me in life and shun me death.
I was born in to a broken home – an unlit tenement. I was a chain smoker by twelve and a n amorous alcoholic before I had blown out sixteen. I spent my eighteenth birthday under lock and key and twenty-first with the fairies. I was and to this day remain alone in my world of dreams, where I am Judge, Juror and Executioner.
The night it all began, be it Christmas Eve or the twelfth of Never I was in the pub with a family i never truly belonged to - a tradition if ever I knew one. And as you very well know alcohol, “That liquor sweet and most divine”, loosens tongues and hardens nerves. One thing led to another. Dreaming demons of the past arose from out the drunken haze and i was left alone. Here. Darkened underpass.
My so-called story maybe one of many moons, it may be life on repeat. My memories are borrowed and reek of pity like the overcoat that conceals the hollow shell of a body I call my own.
Bodies are weak and deceiving a mere compendium of muscles and bones could never do justice to the soul trapped therein. My body is as old and feeble as the next drunken louts but my mind powerful. I live in my mind. In here I can be whatever I want; I am the behemoth of the booming transport trade, the savior of the soulless subway stations. I am a Herculean hero whose incomprehensible histrionics save the world daily.
I shall not spend eternity in a pauper’s grave with worms as my chambermaids where they gnaw my already mangled frame. My death will not be one of desperation and hopelessness like so many I have seen before. It will be one of martyrdom and people will celebrate my life as the great redeemer of humanity long after I am gone.
The divil may be dead but tonight i rise from out the shadows of my heroes, i laugh at the crowd clawing at my feet. I join the martyrs, and i am free. Tonight in the infinite darkness a desolate tube station a hero dies. In his own words, by his own hand. It is my will. It is done.

Insomnia's Dreaming

I saw him first by Joyce's tower. He stood alone watching the waves crash and foam over the rocks. Now an then his gaze would lift, he looked back at the tower arching his neck – trying to see what great men had passed before him. Then in a swift roll of his neck he watched on forever at the fast disappearing horizon – concealed by fog.
That was long ago though. Now i see him as he is. Not the miraculous dreamer or struggling writer but as the shallow, shell of a man he is. A dreamer through and through. I wrote a story for him. Not about him as such but about all the dreamers in this world who drink and smoke their talent away. I find it easier to write from point of view, i feel like a spy. I get my rocks off below the radar where no one will care if i fail or fly.

Insomnia's Dreaming.

When i was younger i was far from normal, perhaps i am worse off now. The world has changed, is changing and will constantly change. The lies will flow and the Devil will tempt – such is the way. I do not fear the changes as some do. I know not when or how they may come about but i dream of them day in and day out. I dream of the places i may one day hold, the hands i may shake and the faces i most certainly will forget.
My world of dreams does not disappear when the cock crows and the suits scurry to the station, my world of dreams is not held captive in a sleeping cell. It can be found in dirty side-streets (if you care to look). It is the disbarred bordello and the teenage-mother's toothy smile. It may not be a pretty world to live in, but beauty can be found where ever seldom sought, the bottles and the brawls hold more to me than man. I worry about man. Nine to five, straight and narrow – The Suits. The suits serve only to hide the man and leave the rest of us on the back burner waiting for dole-day.
This harsh mechanized world of today has no place for the meek. “The meek shall inherit the world”, thats what they say isn't it? All the part-time preachers who cling to their faith like a mothers teat. They dream too. They dream of Heaven and Hell, long white robes and flowing beards, they dream of halos and puffy clouds soft enough to put a baby to sleep yet sturdy enough to hold humanity. But these are all dreams. Dreams based on a silvery sliver of hope shining through the clouds and making way for the birds and the bees, the men and women of God's own creation and the lovers enshrined in lust in the new and everlasting forever-night.
My dreams are not powerful, they will not inspire. They will not gather a following of billions. My dreams serve only to entertain, if no one but myself. I dream during the day. I dream of Joyce and Behan. I watch the night fade slowly to the day. I watch the moon rise and the stars fall, the ocean alight in a beauteous glow of hope. They say that the dreams of millions are what make the moon shine, the stars rise and the night what it is.
I dream for the millions, on the hour every hour. I dream of nights I'll never know and the places I'll never see.
They don't see me how i am – the suits that is. They see a madman, a lunatic. My dreams terrify and my dreams deceive. I made a conscious decision long ago to do as i please, dreams included. When i am not dreaming i read. I read Behan and Yeats, Joyce and O'Connor, Kerouac, Kafka, Poe and Vonnegut. Each time i read i am born anew. They spurn my dreams and burn the candle. I don the mask and i belong. I am the lonesome traveler, i am a spastic in time. I am everyman. They inspire me, they come to me when i am alone and hopeless and i take whatever piece i may read and i turn it upside, inside, downside out. Each time i am a different character, each time i act it out differently. Each time i am new. And then i am no longer the stranger to himself, i am no longer a mind warped by the paranoid tendencies of an insomniac. I am and shall always remain; a dreamer who dreams his life away.
After nights stacked high with sleepless-dreams the sun will come. It will banish the fairer moon and conceal the horizon once more. And just as the moon before her she will jolt my weary mind and shake my writing hand. The time for change is coming and i can feel it. The meek have had their chance now the dreamer must step to the plate. As of yet my circumstances are unchanging, i have neither the time nor the effort to break a rut but i dream. I dream of life's odd coincidences, the whistle of a train or a crisp clean shirt. I dream of these and those, this, that, then and there. I dream of keys clicking and toes tapping. I dream of the future and the lovers we have laid to rest. I dream to wake the moon. But most of all i dream for the sake of dreaming. I dream to escape reality.

My Life as a Heretic

It was long ago – longer now than it seems. It started with a smokeless cigarette lost in the eden of a foggy night. Ignorance is bliss, or so people say – ignorant people who know nothing else. The same people who say life is hard and you can only reap what you sew. There are liars in this world who may try and force this belief on you, but life? Life is easy and complete. Life is nothing more than an adaptation of randomicity in which the randomers are begotten by strangers, the believers by the non-believers and the truth by a lie so thick and solid shit couldn't stir it.

A smokeless cigarette hung out of the slack jawed mouth of the believer as he hit me with roll after roll of quarters, he bought my poetry and he sang me songs. He slept near enough that i could feel him stir in the night – yet far enough to allow him another cliché of the modern world. - looking back to find humour in depression, beauty in disaster and love in times of loneliness. Time heals all apparently.

My story – if it can so be called is not one of regrets and one on which time's healing hand has yet to caress. Timeless clichés be the plot, liars and thieves the personages – one of those stories in which nothing happens but casual observations on the modern world. One of those tales that despite the nothings and the nevers, the neithers, nors and ne'er do wells serves to captivate and intrigue. It is the all apilicable story of life and love in the Foggy Dew.

it is the never ending circle of lies forever circling, here, there and everywhere – floating and dreaming.

We slept side by side and the smoke filled by lungs as unuttered threats span around my head. I heard him stir in the night and i felt him shudder with storm-sounds making the air reverberate. The Believer had fallen from the Grace of God and landed on the cardboaard beside me. As my story is one of nothing, his was one of everything-lost. A story of riches and women, chalets an champagne, openings, closings, and regenerations. He had had it all, seen it too. He had the picture-perfect wife, two kids, the postcard villa in Spain, everything money could buy – solid gold dancing girls, puple orange juice and a soft spot for space-tourism. But alas ignorance became his downfall. So often is it hard for two emotions to co-exist, so often had he turned a blind-eye, pretended not to see the signs and so as the ignorance grew so too did the love diminish.

The now loveless Believer, believed not in his family. He traded his children's names for another glass of brandy. He forgot his wife's face. Too many parties had left in a state of numbness from which he could not easily escape. Blinded to the problems, hiding eyes from hacking coughs.

His wife is on a hospital bed. He watches her life-blood drip daily, slowly fade away. The believer unshaven and a mess is anywhere but by her side. So he returns once more to his core belief, the redeeming effects of money. Love comes in the form of flowers, and he sends all the health and happiness he can in a mug of random sea tea.

All in vain. She dies alone, he weeps alone.

The Believer stirs again beside me, in his hands grasped is a cigarette packet empty. A poem penned and a picture footed is all I see. A gathering of some sort, people mourning, and in the distance a huddled shell of a man – flameless cigarette ablaze. The poem read.

As i looked out across the bay,

not a thing did my eyes delight to see.

A lone red rose on her bare graveside

and the stump of an old oak tree.

Dressed in black they mourned and wept,

while beneath the earth my angel slept

golden sun glowing

raindrop tears flowing.

I watch undisturbed – unknowing.

While the believer boasts a host of characters, my tale is mine and mine alone. I am the be all and end all of my world. These people come and go, they give me pieces, the half-truths of belief. And yet they flock to me – the forgotten generations of loneliness searching for something new and unseen. I am the man you see, the man you humiliate with shrapnel in a paper cup – don't look at him children. I wear my coat of darkness to keep elements from my back, i wear this hood and cap so you don't see me staring back. I have been too often avoided, too often have children been shielded from my life, but to what avail? Join me in Eden wont you? If I'm lucky you may bounce a coin my way, no nod of recognition. I am here, I have arrived. Your generous donations get squandered, squandered on the casual neccesity of cans.

He is better than me though, belief can do so much for a man. He is one step up on the proverbial ladder. He knows you people from another life, of summer sun and strawberry girls. He knows your customs, your witty anecdotes yet you refuse him. On passing you dip your hat, you cross the road or simply play the fool. Ignorance is bliss.

The Believer is gone now. To where, who knows? Perhaps he found his Rushmore, or another dancing-girl. When I awoke he was gone. He comes to me now and then, in dreams. He tells me not to fear the world, tells me his story over and over. I still feel his presence even now that he is so long gone, i see him in a laughing child, or the young mother struggling to smile. And so i keep one now, just in case, one cigarette forever flamess awaits him on his triumphant return to the life of a randomer.

And when we are reunited, we will live together in our Random City. We will await newcomers to our world and we will show them the how-tos and the whos, we will mould them. The kind and the gentle will be the new Believer and the bitter and violent will take my place when I am gone. These will be the new peoples of The City, they will be awash with new-birth lost in a mug of random sea tea. They will be beautiful and they will be ours.

They will join our forces and as i drift into death they will live. We wish you well and ask you kindly to wipe your feet – this is something new and never-experienced. This is our life, in its truest form – where the lovers are begotten by the rapists, the flames begotten by blooded and the lies begotten by stone-solid belief.

The Morning After an Adventure of Kinds

I awoke with a jolt and glittery scarf,
Haunted by memories of never-dones.
- memories of walking Aideen and Fiona to talbot street.

I'm still unsure who they were
but they had something to do with Roy
- the bells fall silent.

To the Night

To the Night

Here's to half-truths and whole lies,
to cans, mixers and drunken slander.
Here's to the tone deaf and colour blind
- to long nights and bloodshot eyes.

Here's to the star and the moons,
To fondling, fellatio and far off fun.
Here's to the nights we all forgot
and a memory unmissed.

To heart-aches and tooth-aches,
Hangovers - hungover hair of the dog.
To whiskey drenched cigarettes
and long walks in the rain.

Here's to the nights we never knew
(that beat the sun hands down)
When dreams are hard to come by
and impossible to rhyme.

Heres to the night and hoping.

Flame Boy

I was reading some Edward Lear earlier and thought I'd give this whole limerick malarky a shot.................so.............

Flame Boy

There once was a boy named James
Who's face was engulfed in flames.
Doctors knew not the cause for
this most fatal of flaws.
what a terrible shame for poor James.

Well he grew so terribly tired of fire
when the consequences were downright dire
so he went out in the rain, to end all his pain
and extinguish the long burning fire.

- But what did he see beneath all his hair?
He was ugly it just wasn't fair.
So drop a tear and sigh a prayer
for Flame Boy's long forgotten flare.