Gentleness

He could see it in her eyes the way she looked at him from behind the screen. her hand reached out to touch her son who had returned. The reinstated gentleness in him as obvious to her as the colour of the fields or the taste of hot tea after a walk of a stormy day.

The blood flowing in his veins cleaned and cleared, his mind behind his own eyes softer, more aware of the world around him, with memories fleeting but still there to be welcomed for the precious time until they flittered back behind doors not locked but jammed shut in need of prising open when the inclination would come upon him. Sometimes they just swing open on their own accord. A glimpse of beauty wrapped in a gift of feelings and images and heightened sensory delights.

he recognises in himself the words of the nurse. “when your mother says no she means no” with a smile on her lips for the respect for a woman of determined mind while it roams in a desert of uncertainty and fear.

In himself he embraces the gentleness. his words comforting his soul as he listens to conversations and recognises a calmness he lost among the chaos and the process of living.

not that the time between gentle tides was anything but filled with wonder and joy too. the ebb and flow on the sunny beach needs the ocean’s scream to sing the mellow tune of peace.

(c) Frankie McGivney 10/05/2021 (feeling blessed)

Talking to the Junkies

The white of the clouds is lying on the ground and you have a hoodie on and wrapped around that a caridgan with a hood and you forgot your cotton socks and the extra thick ones  from pennys are wearing thin and your mind is wandering and the times they are a changing.

but not for you or others just for some. Somewhere out there over the rainbow where the sun shines and the frost melts, a man with no goats or attachement to the land or the sea is singing a song he heard somewhere that goes “the mad ones never forget”. The girl on the bus beside him asks how to get of but he cant remember and the crowd sings waltzing matilda

so

he screams

and

she screams

and

the bus man roars and all at once there was crowd, a host of junkies on the quay.

they have held hands through it all. from the start to the end from him shitting in the bed to her doing the same. they have given their bodies to the brown and we walk by in disgust and once i said hello to them and he sneered and she winked and i wanted to tell them i didnt care if they stuck brown crap in the veins, no more than i didnt care if i am talking to a judge or a priest. but they didnt want to know no more than those others wouldnt want to know either. The identify their souls with who they tell themselves they are but all i see is the eyes and the skin and the mind and the thoughts

i’m selfish. I want to hear their stories, to laugh at the madness of their tales. the ones they tell once they give over with the sadness and the self pity. She would have been a ride in her day before it took it over. He was as ugly as fuck and dangerous looking in his wee skinny intimidating way.

the world passes on

 

And i apologise for not posting since 2016. more to me than to anyone else. I write at home on a laptop and few if any see it. The words are my friend and the sentences when  poetic my lovers and sometimes of an spring day they are hard to share because maybe no one else will embrace them the way i do but then i dream and i realise the truth of a butterfuly being only truely majestic when it flies free.

Hill of Tara book shop

A visit to the hill of Tara and the bookshop where lies the smell of words and wonder all waiting to be read and assimilated into your consciousness. Loads of hardback books from hundreds of years ago waiting for us. Me and Luke my son were lost in the shelves when the owner told us to mind the house as he stepped outside to partake in some business or entertainment of one nature or the other. Luke said after about 10 minutes daddy he is still not back and I laughed and said this is what Ireland is all about. We have to stay and read and mind the house of a complete stranger until he comes back because that’s what we do in the land of green. Here are the books I bought