Steven Wilson - Remainder the Black Dog (from Grace for Drowning)

Hurricane Blues

Hurricane Blues

Natures power in all her glory

Devastating old Biloxi

Those that fled will live to tell

Of the roar that silenced the rebel yell.

New Orleans under water

Katrina howls her ruthless slaughter

Looting, killing ,crime explodes

Whose nature is this? Hers or ours?

County Jail is out of bounds

A freeway becomes the inmates home,

The streets are empty, all alone,

Welcome to the Superdome.

Basin Street, how ironic,

The Blues live on in clubs iconic,

Bourbon Street is overflowing,

Not with liquor, not with  song,

But with the drowning sorrow of a city destroyed.

*

Months have passed, the waters subside,

Welcome back to the great divide,

The flood of concern that first prevailed

Has returned itself to it’s wasp-ish grave.

Those who lost had least to lose

And yet their loss is greater felt

Delta blues will once more flower

In the face of this un-Godly power.

Alan Kerrigan

August /December 2005

Darragh & The Red Notebook

I have recently read a few books by the American writer, Paul Auster, and enjoyed them very much. On saturday morning I was in our local library and spotted one that I hadn't read so I borrowed it. One of the main recurring themes in Auster's writing is coincidence and it is something that intrigues me too. That afternoon, having scrimped and saved, I brought my youngest, Darragh, to PC World to purchase that long promised laptop/Notebook for his 16th birthday. We chose a very cool Packard Bell model in a nice shade of red. We then returned home and with Darragh happily setting up his new device, I settled down for a read of my borrowed book, The Red Notebook by Paul Auster.... :o)

Bray Harbour April 2006

As today is mothers day, I've spent some time thinking about my dear departed Mam. I wrote this poem about 6 weeks after my mother, Frances Kerrigan, passed away and to be honest , like the rest of my poetry, I have been reluctant to share it with the world. 

As my little tribute to her, I've decided that even though my poetry skills are not up to scratch, I'll send this one forth.

  My father had told me about the day he had taken my terminally ill mother out of hospital, St. Vincents Private Hospital, Dublin  for a little trip just for a change of scenery and to give her some fresh air. My parents were very, very close and often took trips together. This was to be their last and as I sat on the harbour wall in Bray, Co. Wicklow, I tried to picture the scene and to imagine how they were both feeling.........

Bray Harbour April 2006

Bray Harbour, April in the year of her Lord 2006

Blue skies spattered with wispy clouds

Small boat leans low in the tide

Yachts stand proud out of the water

Ropes clanking against masts in the gentle breeze

Idle chatter from two fishermen unsure if the catch will match their efforts

The chatter surely is more worthwhile

They watch uninterested as she is helped from the car

Wanting to run to the edge of the pier

Wrapped against the chill she smiles open-eyed

The swans gather around expectantly

She laughs as they give her their full attention

The odd duck mingled amongst them drawn to her

Watery eyes look out to sea, the same sea she grew up with

The memories mingled with the dreams and the wishes

Her childhood in Dun Laoghaire just north of here

Runs through her weakening mind

Seeming more real than her reality

The future for her is now no more

Clouds gather on the horizon appearing over Bray Head

Announcing a change, a turn for the worst

He takes her arm gently to return to the car

No not yet she implores turning to the swans to say farewell

Puzzling at how this can be possible

Hoping that it’s not so but resigned that it is

Slowly she turns toward him accepting that it’s time to go home

With an aching heart and a trembling hand he guides her to her seat

His spirit broken as she waves to the swans and the ducks

Alan Kerrigan

21/06/2006

extract from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Vulgar Unicorn - A night in the jazz club

Cloths of Heaven

~

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 - W.B.Yeats

Afternoons and coffee spoons.......... (Crash Test Dummies)

What is it that make me just a little be queasy?
There's a breeze that makes my breathing not so easy
I've had my lungs checked out with X rays
I've smelled the hospital hallways
Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline
Someday I'll wear pyjamas in the daytime
Times when the day is like a play be Sartre
When it seems a bookburning's in perfect order-
I gave the doctor my description
I've tried to stick to my persciptions
Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline
Someday I'll wear pyjamas in the daytime
Afternoons will be measured out
Measured out, measured with
Coffeespoons and T.S. Eliot
Maybe if I couls do a play-by-playback
I could change the test results that I will get back
I've watched the summer evenings pass by
I've heard the rattle in my bronchi...

A must have for every 21st Century Beat poet fan

http://www.moviereplicasdirect.com/allen-ginsberg-vinyl-figure---cd-set.html#top

Ginsberg in Ireland 1993

Thornproof: A Beat poet in Dublin

In a postcard dated October 1993 Allen Ginsberg wrote:

Got to Belfast “Peace Line” full of armored cars painted brown… Bono of U2 Rock Band came to Dublin reading … & recruited me to perform…songs for a big TV Blockbuster Special. Part of my Dublin fee was great grey tweed suit so now I look like an elder Irish gentleman crossing customs borders.

On a Kerouac kick... again

Big Sur (1962)

• Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH...

• Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'

• I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

J.D. Salinger

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."



"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."








"Mothers are all slightly insane." 


"When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."



— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

Fear & Loathing in America

By Hunter S. Thompson
Page 2 columnist

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day. The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster. And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners. They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying. We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy. OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators. The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's books include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Proud Highway, Better Than Sex and The Rum Diary. His new book, Fear and Loathing in America, has just been released. A regular contributor to various national and international publications, Thompson now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colo. His column, "Hey, Rube," appears each Monday on Page 2.

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A vagrant optimist.........

“I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.” ~Hunter S. Thompson.

Gazpacho - Desert Flight

Opeth - Windowpane

Riverside - Before (Live at Paradiso (Amsterdam 2008.12.10) Track 13

Blackfield - Glass House (NEW SONG)

The Fat Lady Sings - Arclight