Somewhere near Mullingar on the third or fourth day, a thin boy of five or so stood by the road dropping stones in a famine pot one by one with a satisfying ping, each metallic plink raising the level a fraction like an inverted burial cairn piled by a dead chieftain’s followers. I was walking… Continue reading Somewhere Near Mullingar

THE INVENTOR OF BUTTERFLIES Hanging by mortality’s fraying rope in this reluctant hurry to grow old is the last and saddest surprise of all. Regret is a freed slave turned dictator who passed me on his road to power and waits at every corner, reciting a history of things that never happened. Birds flying backwards… Continue reading The Inventor of Butterflies and Uncle jack

Newgrange, County Meath Just watch these starlings in the twilight, thousands of them forming countless patterns, ink swirling in this glass of evening. Each bird’s tiny impulses contribute in magnifying freedom and beauty to the very edge of limitless space; the world’s mind twisting and turning right before our uncomprehending eyes, hidden in mysterious symbols… Continue reading Emergence

A group of poems just published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety: THE BATTLE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY They lied when they said that nothingwould ever be the same again,when the icy truth cuts much deeper;nothing will ever be different.Turn your back on the challenge if you want to,but at last when we’ve opened every… Continue reading Six Poems

My poetry collection THE COLOUR OF EXTINCTION will be published by Renard Press on 9 October 2024. You can PRE-ORDER now – this really helps the publisher to see how much interest there is. Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested. From the Renard Press page: Under a sky the colour of extinctionyou choose your… Continue reading The Colour of Extinction

FEVER’S CHILD The world reduced to a vague presence in a dream, a quiet, senseless and irresponsible, while the fear is a constant hard wind in the face, the kind that bends trees, weathers stones and strips branches. A body temperature of forty Celsius is a distorting mirror that stretches time out long and thin,… Continue reading Fever’s Child and Thirty Years

A sound no one else in the world can hearthat may not even exist at all,a transmission to an exoplanet.Perfect lines of poetry recitedin a language you knew before you were bornbut will never again remember.The most wonderful story of allthat you cannot begin to understandtold just to you by a million voices.Endless chatbot hallucinations,a… Continue reading Tinnitus

My old town sighs in its sleep as I pass. I know nearly every house and shop, but the names I give them are long gone: Cummings’, Fitzpatricks’, Turners’ and more. Maybe no one thinks of our place that way, but someone must remember the late night train that took us to the waking city… Continue reading Names

LIVESTREAM The city emptied of another day, a half-frozen brook that passed by unnoticed. Twenty-four hours have wandered lost as wasteland dogs in search of a scent; in every one a swarm of instants, syllables of eternal graffiti scattered in splintered disorder, each containing an ocean of moments: unbreakable passwords to a secret we can… Continue reading Livestream and Rock Pool

Days are the carcasses of time:dead copies of how I hoped they would bethat piled up while I dreamed of freedomand freedom dreamed of me. I am in love,but I do not know with whom or what;it is getting dark and once againnothing and nobody has arrived.Tomorrow I will leave this hopeless hope –an unhappiness… Continue reading The Art of Change