tis the season to be jolly

He's making a list.
He's checking it twice.
He knows everyone
Who's been naughty or nice...
*****************************
(Pic: Irina Kuksova.)

a meditation on clane hospital

doctor herterich sleeps
the babies in their test tubes are still
the flow of water from the mains keeps them alive
ready to serve the will
of him who became a god through the agency
of a modern university degree

the stars glister
it is written that once before
they fell from the sky
to wage war
against a nation
what has happened once
can happen again

doctor herterich let your sleep be uneasy
not scholar nor doctor nor terrorist writes the law
and the stars in their ridings fell down to fight against sisera

morning becomes a splendid peroration against independent newspapers manipulative misrepresentation of the reality of sex abuse throughout our culture

Dawn at the Chateau De Healy.
Ireland's greatest living poet and his Mammy are seated in front of the computer checking emails.
The door opens and the Dad, wearing a dressing gown, peers in.
"That Tony O'Reilly stuff on your blog is nearly past its sell by date," quoth he pleasantly.
"What do you mean Dad?"
"It's gone by. There's no reason to keep rehashing it."
I digested this.
"Okay," I said. "But I have the unmistakeable feeling Independent Newspapers is going down. They've run up debts of one and a half thousand million dollars while claiming to be selling newspapers to every home in Ireland. Now the truth is coming out. They never had any readers. They never were popular. It was all a monstrous con. Yeah. We could all declare massive readerships if the idiot banks were throwing 1.5 billion at us to do with what we will. The great jeering anti Catholic Marxists and the great sneering anti life atheists of Independent Newspapers, the immortal Gene Kerrigans, the shleeveen Aonghus Fannings, the odious Emmylou Harrises (a husband and wife team who spent the 1960's and 1970's cheerleading for communist Russia and/or communist China and/or anything else Arabist, Islamist, murderous and communist they could find on the surface of the planet earth), these rancid geniuses that O'Reilly hired and promoted as the stars of Irish journalism, these clypes and clowns, these blocks, these stones, these worse than useless things, have in less than three decades, bankrupted a 150 year old newspaper group. But that's not the worse thing they did. In the process they dechristianised, decultured and debauched the ancient nation of Ireland. With just a few decades of their vitiating cretinism they furnished to us signed, sealed and delivered, the violent society, the abortion society, the condom culture society, the contraceptive pill masculinising women and feminising males society, the porno society, the drugs society, the unprecedented levels of child abuse across every segment of the populace society, the MTV sexually disrupting ever younger and younger children society, the babies murdered in their homes by psycho bitch bastards in Sligo society, the old folk violated and killed in Leas Cross nursing home and countless other nursing homes society, the Blackrock schoolboys murdering teenagers outside night clubs society, the Doctor Neary violating women on the operating table at Drogheda Memorial hospital society, the bankers forcing us to finance their losses while still paying themselves massive bonuses society, the Judge Liberals and Prison Warden Liberals releasing murderers to kill kill and kill again society, the rulership of corrupt trade unions society, the gangs taking over the cities society, the couple of hundred thousand Muslims biding their time for civil war society, the debased scoundrels standing in judgement on the decent Christian people who built our nation and our freedoms society. All of this. All of this came via the crass dessicating propaganda of Independent Newspapers. It's a tremendous accomplishment And I'd just like to send them beneath the waves under fire. Not let them make a quiet exit. I'd like em to go down with the sound of cannon fire ringing in their ears. You know. With incoming from all sides. I've no intention of allowing them to retreat to some remote port to refuel and refit. By which I mean, I have no intention of allowing them to compel our corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government to use borrowed money to prop them up and then force the rest of us to pay off the money they've borrowed to save their atheistic hedonistic crapweasel friends. I. Am. Not. Going. To. Let. Fianna. Fail. Bail. Out. Tony. F---ing. O. Reilly. And. His. Dying. Newspaper. Group. And. Or. The. Abysmal. Anti. Catholic. Bar. Stewards. In. The. Irish. Times. And. Or. The. Miserable. Lying. C---s. In. RTE."
The Dad shrugged and exited stage left.
The Mammy chuckled.
"Why do you think he's wearing a dressing gown?" wondered she.
My handsome preraphaelite features broke into a handsome neo Platonist grin.
"It's early," says I. "And maybe he thinks he's Nero Wolfe. He might be about to start solving mysteries."
"It's more likely he thinks he's Hugh Hefner," quoth the Mammy.
We tapped away agreeably on the computer for a few minutes.
Eventually growing bored with my email correspondence, the Mammy made her excuses and left.
Presently MC Hamster emerged from a hole in my left sleeve looking a bit shook.
"What's up Hammy?" said I.
"I'm getting old," said the Hamster.
"You've lived a year and a half which is longer than most hamsters," I told her.
"Tell me about it," she replied.
"You were a vital and vibrant little golden mouse when you came here first," I remembered fondly.
Hammy looked at me fiercely through the hole in my jumper.
"I'm still vital and vibrant," she cried defiantly, "it's the jumpers got small."

the monica leech laugh in

The Irish Times lost 95 million quid last year.
The editor of the Irish Times Geraldine Kennedy is paid 400 grand a year.
The managing director of the Irish Times Maeve O'Donovan is paid 400 grand a year.
The Irish Times self nominated journalist of the year Kate Sheridan announced on national television that it was a shame that Sean Fitzpatrick of Anglo Irish Bank was going to suffer criticism during the banking crisis as she knew him and deemed him a decent man.
Fitzpatrick carried out a series of horrendously corrupt transactions involving billions of dollars in order to conceal the cataclysmic collapse of Anglo Irish Bank right up until the moment his friends in the corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government indebted the Irish people in perpetuity to bail out Anglo Irish Bank.
Seriously though they're doing a brilliant job.

a scientist's prayer

meteors

bright the sky

the god of miracles

and molecules

sits on his throne tonight

that the humble

and the mighty

may rejoice

the nephew files

John

goldener oktober

She got up to go.
Oddly alluring motion.
Poetry in motion.
And off she went.
The ghost of CS Lewis appeared.
Nobody else in the Costa Cafe on Dawson Street seemed to notice him.
"Now that's what I was talking about," said he, inviting himself to sit down at my table. "She's a proof of God. When she smiles it's enough to repudiate every darkness. You know James, the world is so charged with proofs of God's existence that the forces of evil have to struggle constantly to get us to misinterpret them. The best they can do with a girl like that is to try and get you to disrespect her through lust. Otherwise you're just going to be rejoicing at the majesty of the creator and the wondrousness of life every time you see her."
"You got that right CS," I murmured.
In the corner of the cafe the ghost of George Harrison started strumming.
George Harrison sang:
"She
Is so lovely
I can think
Of nothing else
While my guitar gently weeps."
I rather liked the plaintive note George got into his voice. Bit like Jim Croce's Time In A Bottle. Or The Alan Parsons Project's Old And Wise. Yeah I liked it.
But CS Lewis was less impressed.
"Hey George," quoth he, "did you ever think of getting your guitar to tell a joke or something? The weeping routine is getting kind of old."
The discussion might have developed further only at this moment the ghost of Rudyard Kipling walked in and pulled up a pew.
George Harrison shrugged and went up to the counter seeking latte.
His guitar remained sobbing in the corner while he was gone.
"What was she talking about today?" Rudyard Kipling asked me.
"What do you care?" I shot back.
"I heard you say something about favourite books," said he.
"Don't worry, it's not you," I told him.
Kipling's bristles bristled bristlingly.
There was an awkward silence.
"Who was it then?" he asked after a moment.
"She says she likes Nabokov and the Marquis De Sade," I told him.
"Bloody hell," interjected CS Lewis.
"My thoughts exactly," sez I.
"No mention of The Jungle Book?" wondered Kipling.
"Er no," sez me.
George Harrison returned to his corner with a caffe latte.
"Do you know Kipling?" I asked him, indicating the newest ghost to sit at my table.
"No," said George Harrison. "I've never Kippled."
Soon he started singing again.
"She
Is So Lovely
Reading the Marquis
De Sade
While my guitar gently weeps."
The other two ghosts shushed him peremptorily before turning back to me.
"Alright!" said CS Lewis.
"Alright what?" said I.
"Presumably you won't be meeting her again," said Kipling.
My piercing blue eyes widened piercingly.
"Wotch you talkin about Rudyard?" I demanded.
By way of answer Kipling stood up and began to declaim one of his poems.
He declaimed thusly:
"As the dog returns to the vomit
And the pig returns to the mire
The fools wavering finger
Goes wandering back to the fire."
I nodded sagely.
"You've lost me," I told him.
Kipling sighed.
"Okay," sez he, "try this."
He began to declaim again.
"As the Jihadi returns to the jet liner
And the suburbanite returns to his Weetabix
The lustful dim witted twit
Goes wandering back to the dominatrix."
The noble Heelers found this a bit too much.
I waved to George Harrison.
"For God's sake George sing," I said with feeling. "Sing with all your might and main and cornyness. Sing or these two crushing bores will never go away."

the cloak

mid the grey desolation

of a rainswept dublin street

colour tore my vision

from dreariness and fret

a cloak of ebon silk

lay crumpled in the mud

meshed with silver hues

and ochre tainted gold

a spider's web of threads

sent blood among the sheen

woven so by fingers

with a knowledge that is gone

and knowing came upon me

in a drumroll of heart beats

the lost cloak of poetry

the mantle of john keats

and hunger came upon me

i snatched at it in greed

but it fluttered and it melted

into concrete into clay

 

an open letter to the priests and the nuns and the christians of ireland

Tony O'Reilly, proprietor of Independent Newspapers, is about to pop his clogs.
He is an old man and is due a rest.
As are we.
When he dies you will be asked to attend his funeral.
Before you decide whether or not to attend any funerals or other family events hosted by the O'Reillys, I ask you to consider what Tony O'Reilly's newspaper group has attempted to do to the Catholic church.
Recently one of O'Reilly's employees a mendacious malign coward called Ian O'Doherty wrote in the Irish Independent that the Catholic Church is a paedophile ring.
On another recent occasion in the Irish Independent one of O'Reilly's even more pathetic employees by the name of John Cooney called for a boycott of the sacraments.
Yet another of O'Reilly's employees Ger Colleran editor of The Daily Star falsely and grotesquely claimed on national television that children had been screaming for help in every Catholic church presbytery in Ireland.
The irony is that Colleran while being O'Reilly's employee is also an employee of British porn baron Richard Desmond with whom O'Reilly has a publishing deal regarding The Daily Star.
This is the age we live in.
The cowards, the conformists and the porn barons are presuming to set themselves up in judgement on the ancient church and her members, to set themselves up as judge, jury, and executioner, on the very people who gave us a free country, a literate country, a numerate country, a country where you could openly state your opinions, where women were respected and equal members of society, where the vast majority of children could grow up in safety, where murder rates and sex abuse rates and rape rates were virtually the lowest on the planet earth.
In just thirty years of lies, O'Reilly's Indpendent Newspapers, and their allies in The Irish Times and the State funded Stalinist broadcaster RTE, have all but vitiated 1500 years of christianity.
And they have done it whilst hiding behind a smoke screen of recycled sex abuse cases.
They have done it while colluding desperately and diseasedly to prevent the citizens of Ireland ever finding out that 99.99 percent of sex abuse crimes actually take place in family homes at the hands of near relatives.
They have done it while deliberately and doltishly concealing from the general public the fact that sex abuse, murder, violence, rape and drug crime are off the scale in the present era.
This is an age of massive sexual abuse.
This age.
Not the past.
The preponderance of sex abuse cases and the worst of them, are committed by atheistic or satanistic people living in our midst.
Not by priests.
And the public doesn't know.
Because Independent Newspapers and their friends have covered up this fact.
The sex abuse crimes of today, the rapes, the violations, the tortures, and the murders, make the worst crimes of the past pale in comparison.
And I'm telling you all this is Independent Newspapers' work.
Be assured.
They will never stop their attempts to destroy the Catholic church.
They can't afford to.
In their own minds they believe the truth would damn them.
But they are going out of business anyway.
They are sinking giggling beneath the waves as their readership collapses yet further and further.
And they are singing the same old song as they go down.
"The evil Catholic church causes all the sex abuse in the world, our readership collapsed only because of the internet not because of the lies we tell, glug, glug, glug."
Goodbye Independent Newspapers goodbye.
It's all very sad.
And goodbye Tony O'Reilly.
There is a high likelihood that the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin will attend O'Reilly's funeral and will attempt to compel significant numbers of the priesthood and sisterhood and the faithful to attend also.
Tell him no.
Tell him he can betray the ancient church if he wishes, but that in this instance Tony O'Reilly and his horrendous family and his vile sycophantic newspaper group, can handle their own funerals.
Let the dead bury the dead.

a russkie in dublin

ART VS COFFEE

By Irina Kuksova

Last weekend Ms Luck brought me to Sligo – a town in the North of Ireland. "You'd better come with us for a pub quiz, that town is a kip!" – said a friend. I'm not sure if we can be friends any more. The guy was obviously trying to keep me away from this little gem, lest I should bring in more tourists.

As I had a full day of solitary incognito bliss, I made sure no time was wasted. All the feminine sentimental desires, previously blotted out by hectic city life, flooded my consciousness.  And what do you think? – yes, I gave a good rummage to every crafts store on my way. And my way was - from a crafts store to a crafts store. It took a good few hours to fill my eyesight – not my lady bag – with all sorts of hand-made cuteness. By the time my legs started to, as they say round here, "give out", I thought James would never speak to me again if I don't visit W.B. Yeats's – a famous Irish poet's - museum. Given how tired I felt, it was the last place to visit that day.

The museum – my alibi to cover all the window shopping -was closed. The plate at the door stated it's always closed on weekends. And so is the cafe. No caffeine to help me drag myself back to the hotel, so. What the plate also said, is that the building houses Sligo Art Gallery. "Last chance for a glimpse of culture before hitting my bed," I thought.

As I entered the gallery, it was a relief to see that I was not the only visitor on late Saturday afternoon. I'd have felt urged to leave if I'd been the only one. Instead, I took time to study a one-man show of an artist I've never heard of.  The fame didn't matter though. What mattered was the way small pencil drawings of a road in the woods grabbed my attention and ordered me to stay THERE – in those woods. Unlike bric-a-brac shop items, that make your eye jump from one to another, and scream "Hurry, hurry, look at me, touch me, me, no, me!" these black-and-white drawings were telling me that there is nowhere to rush and there is nothing to hear or feel – but calmness.

I left the gallery feeling refreshed. There was no need of coffee anymore on that day. Cool calm and collected, I wondered streets of Sligo till dusk, contemplating the possibility of all coffee houses going out of business if art was more accessible. That will never happen tough. All the "woods" drawings are sold out already.

party piece

we are all dying more or less
in body in spirit
slaves to a process
not bitter or malign
but limitless
each moment each decade
unrolls in the shadow of the scythe
we laugh cry caress
doomed enough for ones so blithe
blithe enough for ones so doomed
revellers on a runaway train
exultant into the night

dances with saudis

Coffee with Russki Dux.

Heartbreakingly pretty.

Not the coffees.

Her.

She told me she'd been at a party with some of her Russian friends and a few Saudis.

"Russians get on with Saudi's?" I asked somewhat surprised.

"Yes we're very alike," she said.

"Oh God," said I.

"What?" said she.

"Were there many women at the party?" I probed.

"Just us Russian girls," said she.

"You know women aren't allowed drive cars in Saudi Arabia," murmured I.

"I don't know about that," said she.

"You know women aren't even allowed walk down the street without a man in Saudi Arabia," I ventured.

"These guys aren't like that," said she.

"Any of em terrorists?" persisted I.

"Oh James they're just students," said she.

"Did they show respect to you as a woman?" I asked.

"They were perfect gentlemen," said she.

I thought for a moment.

"And why do you think," said I, "there are no Saudi girls at parties in Dublin?"

She was quiet for long moments after that.

the poetry is in the pity

It was evening at Kilcullen theatre.
The play Poets In Paradise had just come to an end, thrilling all who saw it.
Thrilling them, not because it had come to an end, but because it was soooo good.
The actor who played Yeats was particularly brilliant.
Ahem.
As you join us, cast and crew are glad handing audience members in the foyer.
There is much talk of television productions and Broadway runs, and so on.
Mainly from me.
Through the noisy and demonstrative crowd, a stern looking fellow of striking mien marches with purposeful tread in my general direction.
"Heelers," says local worthy Michael Kelleher (for it is he), "Why are all the Irish poets in your play so fat?"
It didn't sound very polite the way he said it.
Some of these local worthies are not worthy of the time I give them.
He eyes me austerely down the nose, like a school head master waiting for a reply from a nervous pupil.
This is because he is a school head master.
But I am not a pupil.
No dammit.
I am the master now.
I.
Darth Vader.
Sorry.
Lost it there for a minute.
Where were we?
My reply.
Oh yes.
"I can only speak for my own portrayal of WB Yeats," I told him coldly. "The fatness was deliberate. I wanted to give a well rounded portrayal of the character."
Ah bold readers.
That old gag.
It wasn't a good enough come back for the line he'd used to open negotiations.
But it was the best I could do.
I should have just told him to f--- off.
The whole situation is redolent of what the French call l'esprit d'escalier.
Staircase wit.
The idea is that French people regularly trade insults as they walk down the stairs from their apartments.
And it is often the case that the person on the receiving end of the insult only thinks of a snappy comeback when the other Monsieur is long gone.
That's l'esprit d'escalier.
Where you can't think of a good reply at the time but one comes to you when it's too late.
If only I'd thought of telling the local worthy to f--- off down in the theatre.
But I was back at the Chateau de Healy before that particular gem of repartee crystalised in my brain.
C'est la vie.
I bet it never happened to Oscar Wilde.