E: Let’s go

V: We can’t.

E: Why not?

V: We’re waiting for Trump to make sense

E: (despairingly). Ah!

You ease yourself
through the days
watching re-runs
of Gunsmoke,
Chester looping up
the long street and
calling out
Marshall Dillon?
Marshall Dillon?
trying to get his
attention and
the answer
before it is
too late.

It is clear. This is it.
This feature. This fashion.
Overly taught. Over-taught.
[That was echo and repetition and tautology and cleverclogsness. Also it.]
But this is really it. This caesura.
Is it medial? Terminal!

[Originally posted in May 2011, the first in this list, and out of sequence here, as are all in this re-posting]

A Tear and a Smile is the Dublin duo’s second album, released in 1972, and is a folk gem, full of Irish lilt in the singing and fine guitar pluck and strum. The self-penned songs are gentle, earnest offerings – melodic, occasional harmony and simply sweet lyrically – and this album is indelibly mixed into the tiedye of my growing up at the time.

Before forming in Dublin, Leo O’Kelly came from Carlow and Sonny Condell from Newtownmountkennedy. Though their next album and later releases included more electrification, this is pure acoustic folk.

Wonderful songs are

Down Day
The Same Thing Happened
So Freely
Hemisphere
Lady Ocean
Goodbye My Love
Two White Horses

That’s 7 of the 10 and I am nitpicking the great from the good.

This post is the first in my new venture to account for my top 50 albums. I have no idea if I can confine myself to such a number but that’s the challenge and discipline. Once I have accounted for the 50, I will then rank them. That’ll be interesting.

Then it’s the next 50…..

And I’m not the first nor the last to start this kind of paradoxically perpetual task.

Awesome
male parent,
so the card half-says,
parental
legal
social,
though not in these words
moreover;

nor the
Institute of Fatherhood.

Connoisseur of
dad dressing, the
biology of epigenetics:

fathers don’t
mother
and are more
than money,
not on the cards
either.

Dad’s don’t always
do things with
apostrophes.

fathers are mothers
mothers are fathers

though maybe not at
http://www.prick’ssportinggoods.com
for razors
guns
hunting gear
old roll of the dice

And yellow dads,
though that might be
mellow,

no apostrophe,

dads make mistakes too.

And DadMusic
always the favourites.

Our secular trinity
still postulates difference,
and data-driven ideas
still fool themselves.

My small baseball gloves
were always for my hands
anyway.

On this day
it’s many things

noting the apostrophe.

I am grinding my teeth
at night
in those deep dreams,
chewing on the days
and days and all
I have shouted
at them.

I feel it in the morning
at breakfast,
in those deep silences
and the not knowing
and the continuing
sense of
pain.

Really delighted to have five previously unpublished poems from my found poetry sequence ‘Novel Finds’ here at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.

Check out the fine selection of others just published at this site too.

I have dreamed so deep
its other world holds me
long into waking,

and reading about injustices
I feel as distant as those
who are responsible.

It is the sleep of knowing
but without a power to change
or create any difference,

and the make-believes
I have experienced become
more than transience.

I continue to – as I have since the day of the appalling event – regale strangers, acquaintances and friends about the asshole Michael Gove [an American adjective, its pertinence soon clear] who as the then Education Secretary banned American authors from being set for GCSE English Literature. This meant the most popular exam text of many years, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, could no longer be set and thus read and studied with both great pleasure and examination success by students.

So today when I again met L out walking the dog, I gave her a copy of Of Mice and Men to read as she had expressed such a keen interest when I recently explained the sad history of its examination demise. I was also able today to explain to L and a friend sitting next to her on a bench, and therefore a new recipient for my wisdom on examination texts, how the current most popular examination text is JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, thoroughly English to fit into the myopic thoroughly English sensibilities of the twat Michael Gove [I am also quite happy to apply thoroughly English adjectives to his characterisation] and how there is a wonderful irony in the way this text exposes and attacks social inequalities in society because of how the rich mistreat the poor, something for which the Tory Gove will in reality approve, though he will excuse this inclination by pretending to empathise with the poor in, for example, condescending observations on why those without sufficient money to cope in 21^st century Great Britain ‘understandably’ have poor diets as ‘comfort’ food to assuage their sufferings.

In a much more poignant way I made a similar observation about this time last year, here.

The how argument
is a test of
knowing,
which is ironic.

Use the
Exists function
and there might
be a path to
functioning.

The nullable
or undefined are
deeply nested in
the not knowing
or another option.