Cassandra Voices

Tag: Peter O’Neill Cassandra Voices

  • Eastern European Poetry in a Time of Trauma

    I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace the build-up of my current library which I started developing in 1999. I should preface this by saying that before 1999, I had been living and working in France for the most part. So, when I returned to live in the Republic of Ireland, just before the millennium, I was really starting from scratch.

    I should also mention, as it is extremely important, particularly in the context of tpoehe present discourse – primarily focused on both personal and professional growth – that I had just experienced a profound trauma at that time. In 2000, I lost someone very valuable to me, and not only that, but also by losing this person I lost a whole way of life. So, in many ways, when I started buying my first books they were, without a doubt, instrumental in helping me face the trauma on an daily basis.

    So, what kind of books did I buy and read, twenty-five years ago? Looking at my library, which is comprised of around six hundred or so books, I know exactly which shelf – there are thirty-five in all – that I should start with. These are ones I began reading when I arrived here in Dublin; predominantly poetry books written by Eastern European authors that have been translated into English by some wonderful translators.

    Why Eastern European poetry in English translation? I craved humour in my life, but not just of the glib and cynical Hollywood kind, which I was also relying on at other moments. You see life in Europe after World War II was not easy. Countries that had been torn apart by the most appalling violence were trying to put themselves back together. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Serbia were three of the main countries whose poets and poetry I was particularly attracted to. I will take each of these three countries in sequence and describe some of my poets I loved to read almost a quarter of a century ago. I will also try to identify the very specific humour that these poets displayed, and why this appealed to me at a time when I was trying to get over the traumatic event that had such a destabilizing effect on me.

    Morskie Oko alpine lake in the Tatra Mountains, Poland.

    Poland

    Let’s start with Poland, as it is a country with which we Irish have a lot in common. Both of us experienced brutal colonial history amid violence, economic hardship and a profound engagement with the Roman Catholic church. I am going to describe very briefly the work of two Nobel Prize winning poets, Czelaw Milosz (1911-2004) and Nobel-laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), both of whom I loved to read during that period. Undergoing a lot of emotional suffering, I appreciated in particular their wonderful sense of irony.

    An experience of profound suffering can do many things to you depending on your personality type. Some people, for example, simply give up. Life loses all its spark, and you sleepwalk through it for the remainder of your life. This is not living, but merely existing, and it is not my approach. Of course, you don’t know how you are going to adapt to a personal crisis, particularly of the kind that I was facing.

    Of course, when you are suffering, you become very poor company to others, as all you want to do is think about yourself. Self-pity, is a terribly egotistical response, but when you are genuinely suffering, you generally don’t have any time for other people and their particular problems. These two great poets, however, allowed me to empathise with others. By reading their work I began to take an interest in other people once again, as it was quite clear from reading their poetry, that they had themselves suffered enormously. For example, Milosz particularly in his early poetry, describes the Warsaw ghetto.

    Wislawa Szymborska was of the same generation of poets such as Milosz and although her poetry is less explicit about her experience of the war. There is a steeliness of spirit, as in Milosz, behind the subtlety and irony which mask these experiences. This I found deeply inspiring. Indeed, when I think of Szymborska and her poetry, I think of three lines, which were translated beautifully by her translators, Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

    The joy of writing.
    The power of preserving.
    Revenge of a mortal hand.

    The last line is particularly arresting, particularly in the context of today. Revenge is not exactly a motive for the majority of so-called poets writing in this country, or so you would imagine. We are so governed to restrain ourselves from such notions – formerly by the Catholic Church, forgiveness being key – and latterly by the all-pervasive ideology of political correctness embedded in institutional ideas such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Integration). The bland platitudes that have become the calling card of spokespeople in corporate cultures and NGOs have obliterated such notions as Szymborska seems to be conveying in the lines above.

    Like most people who suffer, I felt that I had been wronged, and, as a writer myself, what Szymborska had managed to do, in just three lines, was to give credence to a whole worldview, or artistic philosophy. She made me think of Dante and Joyce and other writers down through the ages, who all had the same belief. How did this translate to me? Use your suffering, but don’t be poisoned by it. Use it with some irony and wit!

    You see, I was beginning to become more human. This is what reading such poets had done to me. They were achieving two results: teaching me to be a ‘mench’, and, at the same time, teaching me how to write.

    The Federal Assembly in Prague.

    Czechoslovakia

    Again, in the former Czechoslovakia there was the poet and immunologist, Miroslav Holub ( 1923-1998). Holub became a hugely important writer to me during this early period what we affectionately now term as the ‘noughties’. I began with a wonderful collection published by Bloodaxe called Poems Before & After, referring to the period before the Soviet occupation and after. As with Milosz and Szymborska, Holub had this beautiful steely quality. All three poets were tough, resilient, and strong. They were not ‘woke’, for want of a better word. They were not full of bright, dewy-eyed idealism about the future having tasted the bitterness of Life, with a capital L,. Yet they managed to deal with it, on terms which they had made their own.

    The Gift of Speech

    He spoke:
    his round mouth opened
    and shut in the manner
    of a fish’s song.
    A bubbling hiss
    could be heard
    as the void
    rushed in headlong
    like marsh gas.

    Sometimes the poems read almost like ‘nasty jokes’, as I came to describe them. I loved this quality the more and more I read Eastern European poetry. It was full of what you might plainly describe as ‘tough love’. This is exactly what I needed, right after getting my ass kicked by some girl. Such was my trauma! Here were poets, of such stature, writing about world war, relating directly some of their most apocalyptic experiences, Holub and Milosz particularly, and they were making light of it! What pain had I in comparison? It really helped put things into perspective. I was just a little bitch, in comparison, moaning about some girl! Jesus, I needed to Man Up!

    Golubac Fortress by Danube river, Serbia.

    Serbia

    Finally, there were the two Serbian poets, Aleksander Ristović ( 1933-1994) and Vasko Popa (1922-1991), who brought the very self same qualities as Holub, Szymborska and Milosz: a steeliness which fortified them against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. I discovered Ristović first in a beautiful little Faber edition that had a detail taken from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Hieronymus Bosch, which had been one of my favourite paintings as a boy. The poems were translated by a fellow poet, Charles Simic, whom I later went on to read. This short collection, simply titled Devil’s Lunch, was a selection of the Serb poet’s work, and it was a delight that gave me hours of pleasure. Here is a taste.

    The Glimmer of Gold

    Nobody reads poetry anymore,
    so who the hell are you
    I see bent over this book?

    I loved the directness of approach, the bookish and almost medieval humour. The poetry of Vasko Popa was very different. Again you found the steel, but, the humour was less present, more a kind of violence that lingered uneasily in the background. For this reason, I read less of him, but his enigmatic micro-constellations that inhabited defiantly every single page made me sit up. I came away from his poetry marvelling at the very distinct approach of these formidable writers.

    Over a decade later, after first obtaining a degree in philosophy, I went on to complete a masters in comparative literature where I found myself translating the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. I would spend the next decade and a half translating his work, and I see the self-same qualities of steeliness and inimitable humour in Baudelaire. It is something that I find really lacking in contemporary life. There is a war going on in Eastern Europe yet again. I know that both Ukrainian and Russian poets are writing about this old theme, yet again. I see some of this work being posted thanks to poets like Nina Kossman, who is also an avid translator, particularly of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).

    Yet, when I look around here in Dublin – a city I have been quite active in over the years organizing festivals and readings – I very rarely find Irish writing with a similar vigour. You see it in poets like Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, of course, both coming from farming backgrounds where the violent nature of life is a constant backdrop. Heaney’s first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) was all over such themes, while Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), is without a doubt one of the greatest long poems written in the English language in the last century. It is also extremely funny, confronting an eternal Irish problem, sexual repression.It also aligns with the stoic sense of detachment that all of the aforementioned Eastern masters brought to their work.


    Feature Image: Prague from Powder Tower

     

     

  • Fiction: Yer Man

    Inside the castle’s gift shop stood White, reading the biography of the artist whose work was on exhibit. She was not a local. White had expected as much. It was often the case. Arts councils promote the work of foreign writers and artists, liminal beings that they are.

    Yes, I mean, why else would they have done it? Artists are, after all, liminal beings forever inhabiting society’s margins, and that is why so many among their number are consigned to travel abroad. Even on foreign shores their natural domain is to live out on the perimeter. So to be permanently precarious, is in a sense, an ontological grounding for them, of sorts.

    The work on display was surprising and novel, he thought. Artistic tropes were being explored in both complex and perhaps popular ways. A Bacchic display of human like heads whose hair had been transformed into great tresses of grapes at once reminded him of those chiseled river gods which adorned so many public buildings and bridges in the inner city, or humorous reworkings of the once risqué Sheela na gig, now easily hung on the walls of someone’s room. But whose?

    No, there was something not quite right there. White considered the surrounding geography, the demographics of the local populace. What used to be thought of as middle class couples;  a dying breed that were the glue cementing a working class on one end to the rich on another.

    How were they immediately indentifiable, the middle class? Typically, two cars. The drive- way foregoing any semblance of lawn or front garden as now the mortgage payments to maintain a three-bedroom plaster board edifice made it imperative that both parents work. Which meant two cars despite one’s carbon footprint on the environment. What an utter sham, and it had happened almost overnight. The newspapers had just announced an average cost now for these three-bedroom abodes was over half a million euros.

    White couldn’t afford one and he was convinced that this was one of the reasons why his father had only ever stepped foot in his place once during the last decade, out of shame. Although, unless pressed on a drunken night, he would never dare admit to it.

    Appearances were everything. Post-colonial societies were a bloody nightmare. The REP was no different. REP was White’s name for The Republic of Ireland, which was such a fucking mouthful, that if you uttered the phrase it was as if your mouth was overflowing with snot and phlegm.

    The elderly woman behind the gift shop’s small counter remained on the phone. White hung about now just trying to get a bit of information on the whereabouts of a local writer’s group he had once been a part of, so many years ago. Well, being a part of was perhaps too strong a word for it. White had long since ceased being a joiner. He was the most liminal of them all.

    A stroll might reveal if there was any indication at all of the existence of the writer’s group to be found in the shop. He had already checked the walls in the hall leading into the café but to no avail. Then, hovering by the counter, he noticed a few paperbacks placed on a corner table by an entrance leading into the castle itself. Sure enough, he found what he had been looking for. Two titles were by members of the writers group. One was a local who had been a tradesman all his life in the inner city who upon retirement had moved out to Sker to settle down in a three-bedroom house built in the nineties. An older housing estate to the one where White lived.

    John Freed was the man’s name. White had met him about a decade ago when attending the writer’s group one Saturday morning. John was almost mono-syllabic at the time, but that was what was attractive about him back then. Now, emboldened by so many open mic sessions, and with the latest coup of finally getting a book out, John had left behind his former persona filled with quiet reticence and smouldering frustration, a rather charming cocktail White had thought, only to replace the former qualities with a newfound confidence and stupidity that filled White with despair.

    What is it about society these days? he thought. Everyone’s a poet or an artist. You would see it on their LinkedIn accounts; Profession: Poet at Writer. How many poets actually made a living from writing poetry? With six published collections behind him, White wouldn’t put Poet as his profession. In thirty years of writing, he had earned about six thousand euros. In all that time.

    White felt the furies coming on, so he made for the door of the gift shop and got the fuck out. Far as he could away from that place. Anything might set him off.

    On the way, he would message John and ask him about the possibility of a gig. He was going up to the castle on a regular basis now, particularly as he was using the rose garden in the castle grounds as a centre-piece, in a sense, to the new novel that he was working on. So, it made perfect sense to reach out and enquire about facilitating a reading or a workshop of some kind. Readings and workshops! Hardly were the words out of his mouth and he was again driven to the depths of despair. Christ, but what a god-awful fucking society they had become!

    Looking downhill on the whole surrounding territory before him, White sent a brief message to Freed enquiring about the possibility of a reading followed by a workshop or something and a nominal fee of fifty euro or so. Should he invite Freed out for a drink down in the bill local where they both used to read together? White liked Freed, as a person. He simply hated what he had become and this was more a societal thing as Freed was just caught up in it all.

    White’s iPhone addiction was getting to the point that he would find himself either reading texts or making audio messages while he was out in the middle of one of his hikes. But now he stopped on the pathway that interrupted the flow of the descent. The view was simply overwhelming if you actually took the time to take it in.

    His surroundings went back to the mid-seventeenth century. A main house and an estate which had been cleared of woodland. But the castle itself had really only come into its own at the beginning of the eighteenth century and then was further developed in the early 19th. It was easy to imagine, White reflected, looking around him at the great expanse of sea before him. The little harbour floating illusory upon the waves of sometime mercury only to be replaced by emeralds and aquamarine when the sunlight danced upon it. Sker’s own micro-climate could be summer-like which White was experiencing just now, only for the skies to suddenly cloud, and he would beat a retreat back into the woods from whence he came.

    Yes, it was very easy to think back to the early 19th century, the time of Jane Austen and Napoleon. Or Ludwig van Beethoven, who White once listened to for years on an old Walkman. Until that ancient machine finally gave up the ghost. It had been a kind of statement. His stubborn refusal to use Spotify. Somehow, playing compact discs, which he carried around in a special satchel, allowed him to keep connected to the eighties and nineties, to a mythical past when he had attained his apex.

    Now, most certainly, he was in the grips of irreversible decline, which was fine. One could not reverse the inevitable. That would be folly. Acceptance then? Nay! Embrace, rather. One had to embrace one’s age. One’s own and also that age into which one was born.

    Besides, White thought, it had all really started, his decline, in his early thirties. That had been the start of it. Age thirty-three to be precise. The age of Christ! What a fucking joke. It was too rich really, but then, life had always been surprising and rich in irony. White recommenced his walk. The slow decent of the hill sped him gently on his way. Freed had responded by a thumbs up. Detestable habit. What a cunt, White thought, laughing to himself through the almost audible strains of the Eroica booming again in his ears.

     

     

  • SUVs: A Symbol of Our Demise

    This article has been gestating for some time. I must admit to a long-standing loathing for cars. Far from mellowing, this hatred has only escalated with the passage of time.

    Into my mid-fifties, I still recall over thirty years ago when I was working as a kitchen porter in a family-run restaurant in one of the suburbs west of Paris, awaiting a lift from my then father-in-law. and actually hurling insults at the espace des boites en métal sur quatre roue!

    So, where is this anger coming from? What’s up? Well, as the title of this piece suggests, the SUV has become symbolic, for me anyway, of many of the fundamental ills of the Western world.

    In the relatively wealthy enclave in north county Dublin I have lived for the last decade or more, the SUV is the ultimate symbol of middle class affluence.

    I grew up with them. Indeed I remember their origins. The Range Rover dates from the 1970s when British Leyland unrolled them and they were pretty utilitarian in design and generally, as four-by-four vehicles, designed for multi-terrain or cross-terrain purposes.

    So, farmers and builders and other rustic types would have been the first customers, but as the vehicles grew in popularity, second generation models began appearing from the 1990s, targeting high-end users such as the Sloan Rangers in London, named after Sloan Square, an affluent part of London where the horsey types in jodhpurs and boots became a social phenomenon.

    Going from agrarian utility to gender and empowerment, you see how these vehicles are symbolically so charged as to be of interest to anyone who wishes to cast a critical eye on contemporary society!

    Of course, the military element is also there, as the SUV stems from the jeep, which had such iconic status in both World War II and the Vietnam War. And here we come to the crux of the matter: might is right! When you are sitting up in an SUV, you command the road. Particularly the fifth-generation types that you see on the roads today, and which are so vulgar in their display of wealth.

    I am thinking especially of the polar white coloured models with so much chrome and bling that you generally associate them with red-carpet type celebrities. Every wannabe designer or football wife now seems to be sitting inside one, suitably suited and jack booted, with god- knows what lying in her trunk(s)?

    So, it’s a metaphor for ostentatious living, opulence and success. So much so that if you wish to appear to be successful you need to have one of these sleekly curved, designer beasts if you really wish to assert your societal success.

    This is how shallow life has become in the West, and it has been that way since the 1980s. Of course, we haven’t even brought in the themes of the energy crisis and the environment yet! All evoked by the same means of transport…

    As a writer, and poet particularly, metaphors are what I need to traffic in. And when I think of today, and the era that we are living through, going back the last thirty or so years, I am also reminded of how literal we have become in our expressions.

    Take the world of poetry. In a realm where you would imagine metaphor to be found in abundance, you literally could not be further from the truth, as it is mostly Spoken Word these days. What the hell does that even mean?

    We have become literally so literal, in other words, so lacking in metaphorical thinking, that we literally can’t even think in metaphorical terms any longer. Hence the appalling state of poetry at the moment, particularly in this c(o)untry where Spoken Word poets are more dominant than any other kind of beast!

    When I think of a master of metaphor, I have to go back to Beckett which, again, like the Range Rover, was still around during the 1980s. His whole world of tramps, hats, dustbins and solitary trees; in that constellation of metaphors, I can see the whole post World War II years. Beckett could only have come out of the total ruins of a global conflict that resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people.

    It’s all there contained in his metaphors. As Hugh Kenner was to point out, Waiting for Godot was both directly and indirectly inspired by Beckett’s only flight with Susanne from Paris, when the Gestapo were quite literally looking for the two of them and they both had to, quite literally, hide by sleeping rough or finding lodgings.

    The play, which became synonymous with post-war Europe, having been born from very real vagrancy and all of the anguish that might come from such a tenuous life; the couple hid out for the remainder of the war in Roussillon.

    Two other poets, masters of metaphor, were of course Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. The former employed bog bodies, while the latter adopted the crow, but when compared to the bleak visions of Beckett, in sheer terms of metaphoric power, any one can see that the Sage of Foxrock far out-does them.

    Perhaps one of the greatest examples of the stupidity of our current predicament, a predicament which now sees us in direct conflict with the great powers of the East, who see how weak we have become, is perhaps the famous ‘End of History’ phrase used by Francis Fukuyama in 1992.

    Here we can identify, at the end of the Cold War, the collective West’s deluded belief in its omnipotence. This we should remember was a period of unparalleled wealth, which finally gave way in 2008 to a global downturn that was really the culmination of corporate greed, of which the SUV is now the best metaphor for.

    In the figure of Fukuyama, we can see, again quite literally, how literal people were thinking. Even historians. Whatever happened to the philosopher historians, a dead breed that included Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Hegel and Giambattista Vico? These were metaphorical thinkers who could imagine history as another idiom and thereby create metaphoric space in which to speculate on the nature of history and origins.

    Vico, with his three ages of man theory, would have declared, no doubt, that the period we are now living through in the West is in the third age, when society, as we know it has peaked.

    In architectural terms, think of the Corinthian columns, which resemble great flowering heads spilling out in opulent abundance, which is a natural phenomenon. Compare them then to the spartan simplicity of the Ionic and Dorian column.

    The Corinthians were a civilisation in excess. Apparently, their columns heralded a demise. Only the metaphor remains, and, of course, the ruined columns!

    To return now to the SUV. The sports utility vehicle. I only have to look out my apartment window here to see one. There it is, parked glistening in the sun, awaiting its bold glamazon.

    My wife (she drives a Fiat Panda, so a mini one) has often remarked on how the very worst drivers tend to be the women who drive SUVs, as they are generally so contemptuous of everyone.

    Might is Right, remember! Fuck You! They seem to say just by merely being; both driver now and vehicle. And, this is a sign for us to emulate, as a society! These are the values that we have now been brought up to revere! The Fuck You arrogance of absolute veneer.

    It’s funny, when I was last rereading Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin I was struck immediately by the brash vulgarity of the local Irish princes and princesses. Merely substitute the SUVs for their chariots, and you find the same vulgar trappings of power and wealth.

    The Táin is an old work apparently first originating in the first century AD, yet the manuscript dates from the twelfth century. We need, it seems to me, fresher chronicles. Fresher metaphors, more room to breath. What a culture; Spoken Word and SUVs, my arse!

  • Poem: Hope in Despair

    Hope in Despair

    I have always loved museums, no doubt having a kind of prophetic disposition I realised the somewhat terrible and prodigious potency that was entombed in their almost sterile yet  paradoxically life-affirming grace. Loss, chronic loss, is the ultimate domain of all humans.

    It seems to me that the problems here below on Earth have reached such an escalatory saturation point that we have been probing space, and for quite some time now, in an almost frantic bid to escape, but, as William Shatner recently said, and I merely paraphrase, space is just full of more cold, dark and hostile matter.

    The tremor of the tympany, the delicate frisson which all ten digits can bring, the storm of sounds trembling just as you are standing alone, right there on the brink…

    Slow read. Be not fraught with the weight and trouble of your servitude, but rather cherish the day and be more aware of it harbouring amplitude.

    Feature Image: The National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, Dublin, sometimes called the Dead Zoo.

  • Poetry: Commuting with Baudelaire

    Commuting with Baudelaire

    We are living in a time when there are no gentlemen.
    So, women stand for hours without being offered any seats.
    It’ s a privilege which they have laboured for and for centuries,
    It appears! Madness, I know, but you must respect them.

    As you watch their small fists tightening on the headrests,
    And the veins on their slight wrists seeming to almost split…
    That is just at the point when you must resist to offer them a seat
    And rather plant your own arse further into it!

    As I have said before, we are living in a time without any gentlemen
    And highly vocal women, who apparently know exactly what they want.
    The children are so dissolute you could be forgiven for not showing!

    Resist, resist, resist! Resistance, apparently is the source of all Art.
    Resist recapitulating altogether. And whatever you do,
    Don’t Fart!

  • Fragment Number 64

    It was Saturday morning. Maher was lying in bed. He had just woken up. It was early yet, before eight he could tell. When he had been a much younger man, he had been able to lie in for hours on end but ever since he had passed 30, which was almost twenty years ago now, he had found it impossible to sleep on once he had woken, which was typically before eight on the weekend, maximum, and 5 or 6am minimum on the weekdays.

    He looked around him. Light was already beginning to filter through the dark yellow curtains that he had bought particularly for his bedroom. This had been one of his greatest discoveries in terms of interior decoration, as the soft light they diffused helped him to acclimatise gently to his surroundings. And, considering he was such an early riser, he needed this bit of morning douceur. It was the first in a complex and methodical line in his defences against the onslaught of the day. For Maher, life was an unending struggle, or at least, series of struggles. War in short. He had always felt this, ever since he was a young boy. So, when he finally came across the figure of Heraclitus, in his first year in university while majoring in philosophy, he had been endlessly consoled to read fragment 64, literally translating as the thunderbolt steers all things. In other words, from out of conflict came everything!

    As he lay lying there on his bed watching the wedge of light widen a little through the gap in the heavy curtains, Maher could not but help think of the unending cosmos. This was reflexive. Maher, obviously, was a morning person. It was, without any doubt, one of the plethora of reasons why he was single. His ex-wife used to joke to him, after they had separated of course, of the years of abuse he used to subject her to with cosmologically ruminations like this, first thing in the morning. She would joke, sometimes almost seriously, that she was sure that she would be open to pursuing a claim for psychological abuse after the years that they had spent together and all the subsequent trauma she had faced after being subjected to Maher’s monologues.

    She had a rich sense of humour, Maher smiled, thinking about her now. However, obviously not rich enough.

    As Maher finally lifted himself up off the bed, he heard the pitter patter of Dave, the dog. Dave was a Jack Russell. Mad as a box of Jacks! Maher had read somewhere that the breed was rather particular as they were convinced, apparently, that they were human, not canine, which as far as Maher could tell kind of helped to explain their rather anti-social behaviour vis a vis their four -legged brothers and sisters. Dave, for example, basically wanted nothing to do with other dogs. Except of course when he had an urge, and that was basically it. Apart from random acts of sodomy, typically rather perversely involving a rather aged mongrel, Dave, as far as Maher could see, did not particularly give a shit about his fellow quadrupeds.

    Maher sat on the side of the bed, half contemplating the face of his pet who was, as was his systematic habit, sitting in the most physically endearing position imaginable, for human empathy at least. That was another character trait, Dave the dog had a most uncanny knack how to make himself cute as possible, somehow shrinking himself by adapting a very specific posture, typically first thing in the morning, making his shoulders go in, contracting every part of himself so that he appeared physically as small and so as defenceless as possible. The head would tilt then slightly, that was when he really wanted to work on Maher, he would tilt his head in this impossibly cute angle, the eyes then would look appealingly at him so that the invisible bubble-like memes above his head would float up.

    “I need you.”

    And Maher would just look on, indeed as he always seemed to, helplessly with some amazement at the eternal ingenuity and downright cleverness of the creature. Only that very year, animals had been granted sentient status in a government bill, in the UK. Maher had greeted the news with incredulity. After two thousand years and counting, finally, they were now recognised legally as being thinking creatures! Christ, Maher, could not think of any human who met a Jack Russell’s level of conniving and sheer trickery. Personally, such attributes he found rather admirable.

    “Okay, Dave, I’m with you man!” he addressed the dog.

    All too often, Maher observed, Dave was the instigator of communication. Non-verbal, of course. Dave was only prone to bark on two occasions. Firstly, when someone approached the front door, typically in the form of a courier or the postman and secondly, when they were down on the beach and Dave wanted Maher to play fetch, typically with a common stone that Maher would throw for him along the beach.

    Maher sat in a face-off with Dave for a further few moments before Maher eventually capitulated and got up off the bed.

    In the kitchen, Maher approached the coffee machine. He had ordered it from Italy directly from the manufacturer. Oh, it was nothing fancy. It was more like something from the nineties, Maher’s favourite decade. In other words, it was still quite mechanical, rather than electronic. Maher didn’t trust technology, at the best of times. He was of that generation that was somehow in between both worlds. Not quite wholly 20th century, not quite wholly 21st century. Born on the cusp, as it were. And, fundamentally so.

    He ground the coffee which he retrieved from the big golden foiled packet which he also ordered online. It came from Naples. The Neapolitans were great blenders, and particularly of coffee. Maher had once visited the city with Claudia when they were still in their honeymoon period. Oh yes, the days of magic they still remained in the great storehouse of the mind. Golden memories reflected back to him now in the reflection of the light on the coffee packet, such were the unholy correspondences. There was never any escape from memory. It was Proustian, that equation.

    After grinding the beans, he filled the cartridge with five spoons of the precious powder, before screwing it in place. He prayed that the filter was clean before pressing the start button. Miraculously, it sprung to life and poured, literally, into life. When the espresso cup was three quarter’s full, he flicked the switch and admired the colour of the coffee against the white quartz of the counter top. It was a thing of beauty, he told himself. Then, he filled a mug with soya milk and placed it in the microwave heating it for 75 seconds. It was the same beautiful ritual every single day. Finally, when the latte was ready, Maher versed the content of the espresso cup into the mug of warm soya-milk. It turned a beautiful tan. The first sip was always delicious. This is what he needed. Such continuity. Every single morning. It was, after all, the only thing he could be certain of each and every day. This, along with the incredibly rich taste of the coffee in the warmed milk, was what made his morning ritual so particularly special. Maher stood in the kitchenette staring down at Dave. Mornings never got any better, he thought.

    Once Maher had taken Dave outside the front door, the usually circus started. Every time it was the same. Dave, the minute the collar was placed around his neck, would start barking and jumping about. I had forgotten, there was indeed a third criteria for Dave when it came to barking. This was inevitable, the barking. Also, the omission. Maher, considering himself to be a prisoner himself, in the most global existential terms, he had nothing but sympathy for Dave’s predicament, and what is more, rather than get frustrated by Dave’s constant frustration and ultimately his persistent rebellion, Maher openly approved of it. It only cemented, at least for Maher, their already precious bond.

    “Good man Dave, that’s it!” Maher would encourage him.

    “Don’t take any shit, from any of them!”

    It was almost as if by addressing the dog thus, Maher was in fact talking to his alter-ego.

    Up in the castle grounds, Dave, typically, was in his element. Maher had taken him across the cove as the tide had been out and then they had walked across the sandy expanse of coastline, which was usually completely devoid of any human activity. Maher found it was a real tonic as it helped to clear away all of the white noise that still lay combusting in the furnace that was still his mind; all the accumulated stress of the commute, the apparently unending tension which earning a monthly paycheck necessitated, life being reduced as it was to a strict timetable and series of schedules involving train times, scheduled appointments with customers or clients and all of the countless minutiae that made up a working day X 5.

    So, in this way, just watching his dog run about the castle grounds without so much a care in the world somehow seemed to ease Maher’s peace of mind. It was almost as if the dog’s delight was a symbol or sign of Maher’s own peace and contentment so that he began to see Dave almost as an extension of him, in some way.

    Typically, Maher would then take Dave through the small wood which ran alongside the edge of the cliff looking down onto the beach below, although you couldn’t see the cliff’s edge from the paths as they were too far inland, approximately 25 meters or yards away from the edge and whose visibility was also blocked by so many trees and plants and other forms of vegetation.

    Maher loved to walk under the great boughs of the trees and while Dave typically would scamper about the wood, going in and out between the trees just enjoying the general feeling of freedom of movement without having the leash attached to him, Maher would, at the same time, stare up at the sky directly above his head and marvel at the colours that would confront him. The deep azure of the sky contrasted sharply by the verdant colours of the leaf in spring and summer say, although now it was midway through Autumn and there was a slight chill in the air as if someone had switched on the fridge.

    There was a certain section of the wood where the path joined two others and some beautiful old trees formed a kind of island in the center of the junction forming a clearing, effectively, where the sunlight would stream in, particularly during the summer months, but even in the Autumn too like right now. Maher stood there as if appraising the phenomenon of the light pouring into the clearing almost as if in liquified form. It was a phenomenon that he really enjoyed as it made him think of Heidegger who likened these kinds of clearings, for he too was a great woodsman, or Lichtung, to the spaces in the mind where thought could occur in illumination…

    Maher thought it was an extremely poetic analogy or idiom and he often thought of the German thinker when he passed this clearing in the wood. Thinking, in general, is one of the reasons why Maher would come up here as he found the great expanse of space and time, the unlimited acreage of the demesne allied to the timeless nature of the walk, in that he was, for once in the week, not bound to some schedule be it train or academic (Maher was a Lecturer in a third level institute in the city), brought a truly metaphysical dimension, in the proper meaning of the term that is, in other words when spatial and temporal notions collided in a rather fortuitous manner, so actual thought, as opposed to mere reaction, could actually take place.

    Indeed, Maher often found himself engaging in discourses with Dave his dog, in other words, while he was up walking in the local castle grounds, which most of the time were devoid of people, Maher found that it helped him to actually give physical embodiment to his thoughts in the form of his own voice using Dave the dog as a receptacle. It was the old Socratic method of uttering what one thought, (or was it Platonic?) and by doing so one could actually physically embody one’s thoughts in one’s voice so that one could clearly see them better, as opposed to just leaving them unvoiced in the cocoon then of one’s mind.

    “The current situation, it seems to me,” Maher began, throwing cursory looks around him there in the wood to make sure once again that he was in fact alone and seeing that he was he felt further emboldened so that he could continue his discourse proper.

    “Concerning the sexes, that is. It would appear to be really quite clear that there is a profound discord in the nature of popular discussion today between the sexes, that is to say between men and women. Why is this? Well, first of all, let’s try to clarify further what it is exactly we mean by this statement. So, when I say that there seems to be a rupture in communication between men and women I really want to further specify between heterosexual men and heterosexual women as public discourse between the two seems to have become completely splintered or fragmented into the overall discussion of identity politics which seems to be interminable now and which is really strange as both heterosexual couples would appear to be completely excluded in current popular debates, having been taken over by fifth wave feminists now and queer ideologues.”

    Maher laughed aloud at this pronouncement as he imagined the startled sighs of dismay if he had actually dared to utter such a statement on an unsuspecting public in a public forum, it would go off above their heads rather like an invisible bomb. This was good, he imagined himself now preparing to support his thesis before them, standing behind the rostrum. Dave his dog, meanwhile, ran on through the vast expanse of fields embracing, without question, the unlimited nature and scope of physical freedom.

    “I mean, take poetry, for example. In the current context, here in the Republic of Ireland today, you have an almost ludicrous situation where heterosexual men have almost been banished from the public spectrum of debate and in many public readings because of the extremely predominant nature of identity politics which indeed has completely taken over the realm of all public discourse and particularly in the arts, poetry, always being the poorest medium, being the place where the damage has been almost terminal. What are the reasons for this? Well, without a doubt, poetry was always the preserve of white male middleclass privilege in this country, especially since the origins of the state right up to the 1980’s and nineties. You only have to look at an anthology of Irish poetry from this time, take John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse, for example first published in 1974 and you can see that the representation of Irish men to Irish women is 52 white male Irish poets, and generally hetero, to 2 Irish female poets covering the period from W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939) to Montague, which is a truly shocking figure, I grant you. The two Irish women poets represented in the book were Evan Boland and Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin. That ratio is worth repeating so as in order to better take it in.

    52 / 2

    That’s covering a period of say, 100 years.”

    Maher let some time pace, as he walked with his dog, in order to let the content of the figures sink in. This was the country that he had grown up in, after all. If this wasn’t a sign of patriarchal orthodoxy, he didn’t know what else to call it. And it certainly existed, until the sudden war of feminism, which started in the eighties, and then the other voices entered in the nineties. First Gay, Trans, and then Lesbian. Maher remembered it all well and clearly growing up in Cork and the arrival of the first gay bars and vegetarian coops. They were the original pioneers in the new quest for cultural and personal identity.

    Maher stopped to take in the view of the Irish Sea before him, the vast expanse of mercury tinted liquid shimmered before him in the breeze.

    Those were such very different times, he thought. The shoe now was very much on the other foot. Maher was representative of the white middleclass heterosexual poet personified and completely sidelined to such an extent that he couldn’t even get a book published in the country, so under-represented was the nature and style of his work. The situation was actually bordering on the ludicrous. He remembered only just a few weeks previous sitting in a public park where the Arts Council had installed a screen with a number of black and coloured poets reading their work, all women of course with a token gay or other ‘under-represented minority’, that was the preferred terminology, wasn’t it? And this was all happening as a response to the Black Lives Matter protests that had recently happened in the USA and also in the UK. Here was the thing, the percentage of black Irish nationals in the country was hardly similar to the percentage per head in the populations of both the UK and the USA. But that point, extremely relevant you would think in the context, did not seem to occur to the blessed powers that were. No, they were just conforming to the international zeitgeist of identity politics, as opposed to actually considering the literary value of the work. Maher had watched the lectures and talks of Harold Bloom dating from as far back as the nineties when he had seen the whole catastrophe of identity politics taking over. And, he had been right. Look at the situation today!

    Maher just laughed and continued his walk with an even greater vigor. He wanted to go to the walled garden where the flowers were, they were his quarry. He wanted to savour the aroma of a carnation, whatever type of flower was currently on display, Maher wasn’t discriminating, flowers after all were flowers. Though some, it is true, had a greater, or better, aroma than others, it was fair to say.

    Upon entering the enclosure, Maher kept a firm hold of Dave as he seemed to grow even wilder within the enclosed formal garden tethered to the leash once again.

    From the corner of his eye, Maher saw the first flourish of orange roses. These were the L’oreal Trophy which were being buffeted by the breeze. Maher could barely contain himself any longer, he approached the first big carnation, the superlative as it were, which could be clearly distinguished by its vibrant colour. Dave seemed to become even more agitated as he approached the flower. Les Fleurs du Mal. Its many-formed leaf burst in a dazzling display of rich and light orange hues depending on the intensity of the sunlight and the degree of strength of the individual pigment of the leaf. Maher stooped down placing his nostrils firmly yet gently over the flower. The aroma or perfume emitting from the flower penetrated in an unmistakable scent of vanilla with hints of tea. Yet, Maher only thought of her cunt, and how he missed it so!

     

  • Open Mics or Open Micks?

    I immediately twitch with an almost intolerable discomfort when I hear the words freedom and equality. Alas, they have become quite meaningless.

    Let’s take freedom for starters. Where does such a notion come from? Freedom implies choice and yet we are offered so few, in this world or ours.

    For example, did you have a say in your birth? No, you didn’t. This singular event, without a doubt the most tumultuous and catastrophic in a whole litany of debacles you call your life – the one which possibly defines you the most – you have had absolutely no say in it.

    So, right from the beginning you were forced, without any choice, to take part in the whole abominable exercise called Life. And, when you think further about it, the choices did not grow from thereon in, they only diminished all the more.

    Your family, your country, your social background, your people’s history, again, you were not consulted in any of this. Nor in your sex, creed or language, might I add. All of these profoundly important features were thrust upon you.

    Look at your body? Listen to your heart beating. Who determines that? And your lungs. Are you in control of them? Is it not that whole horrendous mechanism that houses that thing you call a spirit? Isn’t your body but a vast cell entrapping you in its ghastly prison?

    Grammar of Being

    As a language teacher, again not by choice, I call it the Grammar of Being! For, as in language there is very little freedom – if none at all – until the day arrives when you have mastered the extremely complex mechanisms of any language.

    Anyone who has learned a foreign language will attest to how difficult this endeavour is; there are grammatical and lexical rules, as well as social rules, conventions and idioms – culture in a word – that you must also be aware of. There is Very little freedom until you have mastered all the systems.

    Freedom? Where is the freedom in any of this, I ask you? Will you choose the day that you die? Well yes, only if… Camus spoke of suicide as the ultimate act of freedom, and, on this, he was of course totally correct.

    And what about that other word: equality? I am reminded of the Spartan at Thermopylae who turned to his immediate neighbour, upon hearing him utter the word, and laughing at him pointed to the oncoming Persian army and said that one single Spartan was worthy of a thousand of ‘them.’

    Jumping forward…

    So, what does freedom mean here in twenty first century Ireland, the Republic of Ireland at least? That idea of a country we have.

    What does freedom mean to us here? When we think of freedom, for example, what do we see? Do we see a rainbow-coloured flag? Sometimes this appears to be all it represents.

    I work in a school, for example, and outside my classroom door (I teach foreign students who are obliged to learn English as a foreign language for their visas) there is a notice board which I instigated. Although originally it was to be a place for student messaging, there is now a lone flyer explaining the origins of the rainbow flag, which we see so prominently all over our towns and streets.

    Indeed, on Culture Night one inevitably sees a veritable sea of multi-coloured rainbow flags, which come from the government-backed Arts Council. Indeed, when you attend any Arts Council-funded event these days, you come to expect the usual plethora of rainbow colours everywhere you go.

    So, I hear you ask. What is the problem with this? Are you asking: “Is he one of them – a homophobe?”

    On the contrary, as a writer and artist, I have been profoundly influenced by gay-lesbian- trans and bisexual writers and artists since I was an adolescent: William Burroughs, Jean Genet, John Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Lee Miller, Mae West… the list just goes on and on.

    So, on this point, I can assure you, I am not against the LGBT community at all. What I am against, and profoundly so as an artist, is the notion of equality that the Arts Councils, and arts groups in general, would appear to be promoting. I am against this for an important reason that is often lost sight of.

    Open Mics

    A few days ago, I was on my way to catch a train when I bumped into an acquaintance. The man was familiar to me through certain public readings – open mics as they are called – as I sometimes had the occasion to join him at them.

    The open mics that we both attended at the time promoted very strongly the ideas that I am now fundamentally opposed to, so much so that I have now adopted an anti-open mic policy.

    This notion is that all writers and artists (just like all lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals – who decides who goes first?) are equal and so should have the same time frame allotted to them at a public reading (usually a mere four minutes).

    This means that a complete novice, who wouldn’t know a stanza from a portmanteau, is given the very same amount of respect as, say, a translator and poet who has had multiple books published and has been working very diligently on their art for over thirty years.

    A professional musician asked me the other day if I had been attending any open mics recently. In return I asked when was the last time that he had shared a stage with a bunch of amateur musicians for free?

    He suddenly smiled and about-tracked, finally realising what it was he had been asking me. And yet open mics are now all-pervading.

    Where once they were regarded as a rather harmless exercises promoting ideas of inclusivity, now they are the absolute norm. Yet they are only considered normal in the world poetry.

    Why is this? My friend, the musician, understood very well my situation. He knows me as a semi-professional writer and translator that is expected to share the stage with any newcomer at any number of so-called arts festivals.

    I attended one recently for which I was very generously compensated. It had been funded by the Arts Council, but when I looked at the website after the event, to see what kind of photographs had been taken etc., there were simply thousands of photos of so called ‘poets’, meaning the actual poets who had attended were lost in an absolute avalanche of amateurism.

    Beckett of Joyce

    My friend at the train station also asked me what I had been up to of late. I mentioned that I was going down to Cork to present a paper at a Beckett symposium, but that I would be deliberately present on James Joyce, just to annoy the Beckett aficionados.

    In response, my acquaintance looked at me with a kind triumph in his eyes – a look he could never have had twenty years ago – and declared that his opinion on James Joyce was just as valid as anyone else’s.

    He made this boast with such firm conviction that I assume he actually believed what he was saying. I remained mute.

    What could I say? After all, both of us knew he had never read Ulysses not to mention Finnegans Wake. As I watched my acquaintance shuffle on – with some bravado I might add – I couldn’t help, there but for the grace of God, go I!

    Featured Image: Marina Azzaro

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    The Bridge
    After Meryon

    Bridge of Be-ing, all arches mirrrored upon
    The river running – Heraclitean ;
    Looming above… turret trumpeting,
    All Barnonial excess, pure 19th century.

    And aligned in sheer proximity the great monolith
    Of glass and concrete, its emphasis
    Presenting a sheer 20th century existentialism.
    Seen from the quays, it’s pure Baudelaire!

    The candelabara of Street lamps whose
    Illuminating auras burnish the passerby
    Ghosting them with their luminance, and lustre.

    Fate drops like a Stone in the water
    Troubling the stillness with ripples outward,
    And whose faces Flow forever onward into the Dark Pool.

     

     

    Heidegger’s Dasein 

    There is a philosophy born of storm to encompass Be-ing,
    And it assails in the tumult of the unending assault of the days.
    To storm troop on and over into the assailment of the heavens;
    God forbid, what is left of them those splintering fragments!

    As in the woodwinds onrushing conducive to the Heart-fires
    Still governing, just about, out from the holocaust of Thought.
    Essence at the forefront of being, attuning to the tumult
    Of the Sway, like anyone finding their ground.

    Such as the down and outs rolled up in sleeping bags
    On the public benches on the boardwalk,
    Those pupae, or premature mummies,

    Whose alarm clock would be police siren,
    Heineken clock and other hallucinatory prey,
    And whose breakfast would be coloured by the sweet aroma of Hashish!

     

    Gothic Landscape 

    Thought’s colour broodingly bleeds through to the skull,
    Seeped to pour and stream into the brain.
    The bridge is moored there through its anchor
    Above the liquified riverbed afflux.

    The skeletal fragments of a backdrop,
    Etched architecture of a Gothic replica.
    Its organic structure today looms out of the fog
    Which to the stoner is a mesmeric enterprise to induce Funk!

    Through the viral air of a city masked,
    Its denizens the very harbingers of their own Hell,
    Introduces the notion of Dantean comeuppance.

    Tramping along on Bachelor’s Walk,
    Crossing the widened Carlisle over Gandon’s hump,
    Only to reach Eden – the irony sits well.

     

    Roman Noir
    “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
    Raymond Chandler
    For
    Daniel Wade

    John A. Maher, Private Detective, peered out
    The window of the fourth floor of Lafayette,
    His vantage point on par with a Gargoyle!
    The river split the city like a fissure, before him.

    It was a city divided by accent and money.
    On the northside, speech was contracted to the point
    Of almost unintelligibility, which he liked
    Never quite trusting language himself.

    While on the south, it was all accent darling,
    Barring the odd enclave. Maher moves through it all
    Monosyllabic, stony-faced and with mild amusement.

    Humans are weak creatures, so prone to error.
    And some are driven to crime; one needs a hard fist,
    Copious amounts of alcohol, and a certain penchant for metaphysics!

    Feature Image: Lafayette House and O’Connell Bridge © Peter O’Neill

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Irish Rail

    Dublin, that old whore, with her piss -stained pavements
    Abruptly transforms into a woman of a certain station.
    Such are the, at once, brutal and subtle shifts where
    In an instant, Hell aligns in an altogether strict

    Congruence… Like when you climb aboard
    The final commuter train of the week on a Friday
    Evening on Platform One at Pearse Station.
    And, as the train finally pulls out, leaving

    Behind her the contents of a working week,
    Passing images are reflected back to you
    Through the compartment windows, revealing

    Dune and marram at Portmarnock, to a passing
    Lagoon at Malahide, and then the panoply of imagery
    Miraculously washes away all of the whoredom from your mind.

     

    The Great Burnishment

    Your Pirelli calendar moment must last, at least, twenty score years;
    Nobody makes this very important point entirely clear.
    So, try to remember, while cavorting in the Sun,
    That the memories must endure, and for everyone!

    Call it, if you will, the great Burnishment.
    When like two figures from a fabled myth or play,
    You roam the most remote shores and the very
    Earth appears made for you both alone.

    It is the cliché – you look on her then and on those mythic shores –
    With the aroma of wild rosemary, myrtle and Goat;
    Desire bears you both ever onward with its emblazoned sail.

    Fast forward two decades now and she stands before you in your kitchen,
    And the initial violence of the sun from that first day,
    Tell me, do you still feel its impact burning your skin?

     

    The Flies 

    The two house- flies, Beckett and Joyce, buzz about you
    And the TV screen. There they land, buzz again
    Before flying off to Memphis copulating
    And multiplying on the wing. As a sign of virility,

    The Egyptians displayed them on their amulets.
    That great race, unlike our own, had a great respect for insects!
    Even the Greeks showed a similar respect,
    When having a BBQ they offered a sacrifice to Shoo Fly Zeus.

    The crabby meat men, in this way, could eat their own
    Undisturbed by patrolling swarms and Oxen that had fallen
    Were replaced by Lotus Eater, and burning eucalyptus in the Sun.

    Now, you look at the books of both these modern sages
    That you have been reading for an eternity,
    And still you hear the flies buzzing across the pages!

     

    The Vico Road

    From the vantage point of Strawberry Hill,
    A Victorian Villa recently selling for a cool 5 million,
    A place more evocative of Raymond Chandler
    Than anything remotely Irish. I am reminded,

    Again, of the Neapolitan philosopher who
    Peopled his New Science with giants. In fact,
    While lunching there on one of the picnic tables,
    I had a slightly hallucinatory vision of Gulliver

    Striding in 18th century breeches, and croppy hair
    Over the Sugar- Loaf Mountain, while
    The Lilliputians below discussed the ongoing

    Business in the property sector: vulture funds
    And NAMA; hedge funds in Texas,
    Where the multi-headed Cereberus roars.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Poems in the Manner of the Devil
    After Alexandar Ristović
    (1933-1994)

    If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
    The bounty of bedlam,
    Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
    Or Last Suppers.
    Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
    See the world now through the light of wine.

    Do you have confidence in the morning?
    Do you have faith in toast?
    Each morning, do you spread marmalade
    Under the clouds in the sky?

    Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
    Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
    And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
    To honour the martyrdom of little buns.

    These trees that surround you,
    Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
    Holding peaches up to the clouds?
    Where have all the flamingos flown?
    Into the jaws of baboons in hell.

    Columns, arches… shit!
    Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.

    But know also this,
    That within all of this madness
    There is one alone who sleeps quietly
    Nestled in dreams like a bird
    And she dreams of housing owls
    While presiding over countless committees.

     

    Break  Fast 

    The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
    It had a very simple olive pattern,
    The kind you might find in a good café
    Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
    The kind you might find your hands floating over
    Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
    And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
    And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
    Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
    In order to settle the bill.

    Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
    The whole panoply of artifacts,
    Suddenly is in freefall before you,
    Like that last joke you heard before leaving.

     

    The Familiar  

    Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
    Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
    For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
    As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
    Over the same old living space. Here, then,
    Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
    And, in memory! The ontological shifts
    Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
    Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
    The words vibrating, each particular element,
    Each particular word, key, shape or movement
    Given the proper attention it deserves.
    Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
    And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!

    Janus  

     I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
    As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
    Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
    For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.

    So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
    Physically and you will have the opportunity
    Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
    If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!

    Putinize – a verb designated to describe
    The systematic annihilation of either a person,
    A place, an animal or a thing so that the object

    Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
    Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
    Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.

    Kyiv 

    After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
    for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
    to either madness or so- called reason.