David O'Sullivan's Blog, page 29
June 21, 2015
Moonlight swims
Once I get my drivers license I can go up to Rennicks Lake anytime
but for now it is too far away and I can’t afford the train ticket.
I ride my bicycle to work
even when it’s wet or when it’s cold.
The worst is the cold, when my fingers freeze and numb
on the handle bars
and the wind cuts into my face.
The best time is 6am
summer
and there are no cars
just the gentle sun waking in the east
and the streets as quiet and gentle
as any christmas cartoon
or poster image of Ireland’s pastures.
After work I spend time in the second hand shops
buying art
what I look for are oil paintings
or water colors.
But I will buy posters if they are really interesting
or well framed.
Can you imagine me
trying to get a big painting
home on my bicycle?
June 20, 2015
Actual confessions from various anonymous people
1
I had been wishing for Simon Weston* to be dead for a long time. Since I was 15 years old. When he did die I was 22 and it seemed strange to me. We were the same age, he had given me a hard time in high school. I found out he was dead from the internet.
He died in a car accident on a dirt road. He had crashed into a tree. I later heard, and it might have been a rumor, that he was drunk.
He left behind a daughter who was maybe 2 years old and I thought, was it right all those when I was a teen to have wished him dead?
He left school at 16, I never saw him again. But now he was dead and I was afraid it was because of my thoughts.
*not real name
2
I saw her again, this time she was running late for the bus and I asked the bus driver to wait for her. He waited and she climbed in the bus. I did not speak to her but I kept watching her.
I am sure she knew I was watching her and it probably annoyed her.
I don’t understand women.
3
I used to work at McDonalds as a teenager. Some of the managers were sometimes really mean to me so one day I stole a bag of chocolate fudge and another time I stole a box of chocolate flakes. (for the sundaes) I don’t feel bad about it because the managers would give me such a hard time. I mean they really screamed at me and made fun of me.
4
A guy did not stop at a crossing for me. I looked at him driving the car as he went past, he looked like a fat slob for hours later all I could think of was cutting his throat like the terrorists do. Later when I calmed down I thought, maybe he just didn’t see me, it was dark and there was a big car parked right near the crossing entrance. Still I had thought about running the blade across his fat neck.
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On the 24th of June, (only a few days away) my debut novel comes outs.
Get your copy of The Bomber as soon as you can.
It is an incredible work of fiction.
June 18, 2015
THE BOMBER
If it is winter where you live, it’s also ideal to read in bed on a cold rainy day.
Pen Name Publishing @ pennamepublishing.com
Leaving home
She was, I suppose is, my best friend.
She left home last week. She moved to the city.
Our last night together she made me bring over all my art books and she put on The Smiths and we listened to the music and we went through the art together. My favorite was a picture of Icarus (see pic) her favorite was a Van Gogh but I am not going to tell you which one because that is my special memory and I feel it would make it worth less if I shared it. (not worthless but of less worth).
We were in her room and she told me all the things she would do in the city, she was so excited. She would be studying art and going to the theatre and working part time in a place that sends out a lot of internet orders and she would be in the office doing the paper work.
She asked me if I would come and see her, I will of course, but I don’t know when. I said I would send her a copy of my novel when it comes out next week. (I haven’t any hard copies yet) and I told her I would come up and see King Lear at the theatre in December with her.
She cried a little and put on an old Neil Young album called Harvest and we sat in the dark and spoke about life and literature.
“I think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick up, take it down to LA…”
The next day I came early and helped her to the train station. We sat on the platform and waited and it was a grey dark day. The clouds came rushing over like a tempest being born. We sat side by side, looking out at the birds in the farms nearby. The track was long and cold, we spoke little but there was a peace over us. Her bag beside me, separating our legs. I looked down at her poor little knees, she wore a yellow dress and a denim jacket.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“I mean for my first day in the city?”
“Good, you’ll fit right in.”
“I hope I fit in, but I hope I stay myself you know?”
“I know,” I answered but I didn’t know. “You’ll have a great experience. You’ll be seeing everything for the first time, with fresh eyes. Use it in your art.”
“I want to. I can’t wait to meet all the artists. The school I am going to is really good.”
The train came around the corner and we watched it roll in. It’s blue engine pulling quietly down the track.
“This is it,” I said.
“It is.” she hugged me, and she was warm and soft. I felt so sad.
“I have something for you,” I said. I gave her a copy of The Great Gatsby.
“Thank you,” she said. I liked her, she never overdid anything. You could give her something or say something to her and she didn’t get all mushy or fake about it.
When she climbed on I saw her only one more time out the window as she waved to me over the top of some old women. I waved back and watched the train pull away and disappear down the long straight line. She was gone and I was alone and the wind, as if knowing I was alone blew cold and the first drops of rain began to fall, I hurried home.
She called me that night, her first night in the city.
“I can access the roof and I can see right over the city,” she said. “It is a beautiful view, but I can’t see the stars.”
“No,” I said.
“I hate not seeing the stars.”
“How is the apartment.”
“It’s okay, it’s small but at least I have it to myself. There are so many people on this floor. The art school is only just down the street so I can walk there easy.”
“Be careful if you walk about at night,”
“I will be. I miss you.”
“I miss you,” I said.
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My debut novel The Bomber comes out 24th of June. Have a look at it in the links on my page.
I can’t wait to send my friend a copy.
June 16, 2015
Kathy
She wore a yellow dress
I love her yellow dress
it matched the sun
whose rays crept through and touched the golden skin beneath
her father did not like me
but she let me hold her hand
and walked her to Church in the fresh, newly grown, Sunday morning
All week it had rained
and I love the rain
the roads and paths were muddy
but now the sun came up like her yellow dress and revealed to me the heaven of the day.
We sat a while, not yet late for church
on the granite boulders behind the rectory
and as she laughed and placed her hand against my cheek
and said that my skin is pale and hers is honey
and how funny they look together.
She left me to climbed higher on the rocks
she shouted that as children they would play here
she asked if I could follow her and I could
because this had is where I had been a child as well
on these large familiar heavy rocks
that not centuries or thousands of centuries could move.
I would like to see the ocean
I would like to sail a boat
she said, she said
anything she said I listened to and recorded in my mind.
This was our Sunday morning, this was our Church
and I was blessed by Kathy.
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The Bomber will be released in one week. Check out Amazon or speak to your favorite bookseller
June 15, 2015
Bloomsday – Ulysses by James Joyce (excerpt)
(In this excerpt, while watching a fireworks display Gerty catches Leopold watching her. She leans back so he can see up her dress, she reveals her legs and underwear. Leopold is masturbating and when the roman candle explodes, he ejaculates.)
— It’s fireworks, Cissy Caffrey said.
And they all ran down the strand to see over the houses and the church, helterskelter, Edy with the pushcar with baby Boardman in it and Cissy holding Tommy and Jacky by the hand so they wouldn’t fall running.
— Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It’s the bazaar fireworks.
But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremor went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hot-blooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she’d never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn’t do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors’ photographs and besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did.
And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and they all saw it and shouted to look, look there it was and she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was flying about through the air, a soft thing to and fro, dark. And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirt-dancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O!O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!
Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl. He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been. He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell.
Side of the road
Simon and Robert were walking along the side of the road heading home. The road was quiet because it ran no where but up past a few old houses and then some farms.
Simon lived next door to Robert, their houses backed onto a forest and the boys spent a lot of time walking through the trees, swimming and playing.
A truck had been down the road recently, they could tell because it had run off the road and left huge tire tracks on the dirt.
“I wish the school bus’d come down here and drop us off, instead a makin’ us walk all the way from the highway,” Simon said throwing a rock at a fence post and hearing the satisfying clang when it hit.
“Yeah but I spose for just us two there ain’t much point. I like the walk anyway, it’s a good half hour I don’t have to spend at home.”
They walked on looking at a dead snake that lay rotting in the long grass. It was flaky skin and bone now. They had been watching it since it was newly dead, run over. First the ants had eaten it now it was baking away in the hot sun.
“When school ends next week we’ll have to get busy on that tree house by the lake.”
“I reckon.”
“What’s this we have here?”
The boys walked up to some things lying in the grass. It was a box, busted open. Inside were books and magazines. It was a treasure chest and the boys flung their bags down and gathered around it.
They began to pull the items out.
“Look at this here,” Robert said pulling out a pornographic magazine. He pulled it open and held it up. “Look at this Simon.” He turned the magazine around to show a blonde woman completely naked laying on a red background. Her blonde hair fell down around her face and she had a large smile. Her huge breasts pointed up at the camera and she had hard pink nipples.
“I would say…” Simon responded but didn’t finish.
“My brother showed me a few of these type magazines he has. He says he likes the snatch shots best.”
“Yeah I reckon the snatch shots work out the best.”
“You know what a snatch is?”
“Shure do.”
“What is it?”
“It’s when the photographer gets the lady when she ain’t looking and it looks natural.”
Robert laughed but he didn’t say anything. “You mind if I keep this one?”
“No you have it, My mother would kill me if she found it.”
“You have what ever is left, it’s just books and shit. I don’t want it.” Robert pulled open his bag and pushed the magazine into his science book and closed it. “Ain’t no one looking in there.”
Simon went through the box and pulled out a few things. They were all bad books mostly. Girl’s books about high school, dating and horses. He found a manual for an old mack truck and a Ford Motor Company brochure from nineteen-eighty. He had given up of getting anything when he found a book. It was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. He was about to throw it to the side of the road as if it were another piece of pulp fiction when he remembered the name. His mother had spoken of the author and said he was the best there was and the local library didn’t know what he was like or they wouldn’t have had his books there. He remembered his mother saying Lawrence understood how to write about life and love better than most others. He pushed the book into his bag.
“What cho get?” Robert asked.
“Just a book.”
“You like to read don’t you?”
“Yeah,”
Robert said nothing and the boys walked on.
“If you come round this afternoon I’ll let you shoot my air rifle.” Robert said looking at the crows gathering in a field beside them, “If you ain’t too busy reading,” he laughed.
June 14, 2015
Crawling
Crawling over upturned daggers
the blades cutting into my hands
my fingers being lost.
A camera set up in the retirement home
allows you to watch them as they grew quiet
and die
Fifty thousand men shooting animals
in the forest
bullets tearing the leaves, flesh
what ever they can hit
the woman who never gains knowledge
and lives in a dark world
settling for the first man
who promises to support her child.
A cabin in the woods
one cold night
catches fire
because a coat left in front of the fire
catches a spark
everyone looks up thinking the world will end
because an asteroid hits us
but the world ends for another
obvious reason.
I can’t stop eating junk food
I think the weather is getting warmer
I think that I’ll never read all the books I want to read
before I die.
June 12, 2015
Shunt stone
She began to take the things off the shelf one by one,
first she took the radio and flung it against the wall and it came apart in three neat pieces, it reminded me of the time at work a fellow fell into a pressing machine and had his head split open. His body lay next to the top of his head, while the middle part, the brains and the rest, lay in a messy warm pile on the floor. The radio had three parts too, the back, the middle with all the electronics and the radio’s body. The only difference was the lack of blood. When that man died, there was blood everywhere, like wine from many smashed bottles.
Next she grabbed the children’s art they had made at school.
She flung these about, pages of paintings, clay sculptures, paddle pop stick things, all thrown and smashed.
Then there were two glass vases that went against the brick wall, they exploded with beauty and crystalline dreams. The powder floated for a moment in the air.
Last was a lamp. It was a woman holding up a light bulb with a delicate silk shade.
She held it in the air for a moment, taunting me, she knew I loved it, then she sent it to a shattering death across the room.
Breathing heavily, half naked she stood there looking at me. I looked down to her bare feet.
“Be careful you’ll step on some glass,” I said.
She raised her feet as if to stamp on the glass, she held her small well shaped foot there for a moment and I waited. But sensing it would hurt her more than me, she took it away, crossing the room carefully. She locked herself in the bathroom.
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It comes out on 24th of June, then you can buy it in hard copy or e-book
