'A Cup o'
Nails..'
Selected Poems...
After taking almost a lifetime to decide to share his poetry with the world, other than in single pieces in anthologies and journals, and produce his first individual collection; Sullivan the Poet followed it almost immediately with a second...
This 2nd collection, whilst still remaining distinctively 'Sullivan', seeks to reinforce the poet's unwillingness to confine himself to any particular style or genre of poetry - modern or classical...
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‘A Cup o’ Nails..’
Where are they now?
Those men;
Men whose wax crayon images
filled the empty colouring book of my childhood?
Whose olive drab corduroy and
canvas escarpments rose endlessly
from their tarred and hob nailed leather foothills;
Up and up and away to dizzying felt capped summits
soaring high above my child’s upturned face.
Their peaks, lost, in a grey blue billowing cumulus of
scented and fragrant pipe smoke.
Sweat and work stained shoulders vague,
undefined.
Swimming and shapeless in the swirling cirrus
of a sudden woodbine squall.
The roaring gale of their shouts and laughter,
gusting and echoing
high amongst their florid and razor veined precipices.
Are they really no more?
Where are their voices?
Gravel gargled tones, worn gruff.
Men’s voices.
Born of tar and ember and smoking, spitting steel
in the black, bronchial and fuming bellies
of gestating warships.
“Two pints of black and tan” voices.
Voices that would have smothered the very words
‘Skinny Latté’ at birth!
Vocal fingerprints, tobacco smoked and stained;
Their ridges and grooves scarred, worn rough
and rubbed raw from hawking and bellowing
above the caulkers hammer;
The tom tom tattoo of the riveters’
hissing, bucking, air guns.
Rasping basso profundo pipes that could demand
“A cup o’ nails ‘n some ‘ot water.”
And turn not a single head.
Have they all been silenced?
Where are the hard men?
Those men with the great torn and calloused paws
and gentle eyes that stooped to tousle
my over long child’s hair.
That cuffed my ear, gentle as a breeze,
with affectionate banana bunch fingers?
The same hands that ran, gloveless and unafraid,
the singing steel hawsers; Tight as bowstrings;
As they rode the frost and sleet slicked steel aloft.
Great grey and rust sails, tacking and shivering,
to and fro, fro and to in the wild,
ice sequinned winter winds.
Iron working men;
Men made of the same unforgiving ore
they worked and enslaved and bent to their will.
With their weather worn and nut brown
tobacco pouch faces
and knotted, corded and veined walnut forearms.
Are they all gone?
Where is that child?
Grown now: To grey and sire and grandsire;
Precipice and snow covered peak now to his own gentle
and expectant upturned and tousle haired faces.
The men, the iron men of his childhood;
No more now than waning pastel memories
in a faded and dog eared child’s colouring book.
Where will these new and tender shoots find theirs:
Their men of steel, their towering summits; Their ‘heroes’?
The bright poster paint images with which
to fill the empty pages of their scrap books?
They will find them as I found mine:
The dishonest, the weak and the whey faced,
the craven and the feckless tainted my child’s world.
But there rested not a one in my colouring book,
and there will be none in theirs.
Trust the children… They will find their heroes.
Amongst all the cowardice, deceit, avarice and treachery;
There will ALWAYS be heroes…
© Sullivan the Poet 2008
'Thieves of the Holocaust..’
The Star of David, bright sulphur yellow, squats
forlorn sentinel, jealous and bitter,
aguard its pile of filthy and coarse striped hempen rags;
Tatters; Spilling and bursting forth,
like a magician’s gaudy paper bouquet,
from a battered and bloody cardboard prop.
A dirty brown and faded memory of a child’s suitcase;
Un-remarked and unremarkable.
And yet, set fetter against its broken and rusted tin catch,
a piece of fray ended silken entrail...
Necktie, come noose, come girdle, bright still
in its gaudy rainbow Alma Mater.
A morbid and distant echo of the Vienna Konservatorium.
A gold earring rattles in the bottom of a chipped enamel mug,
as it rocks; Back and forth, forth and back.
Its handle drumming ever more gently
against the side of a soiled and crumpled cardboard box.
Beating its gentle requiem, adagio, to a close.
‘Horadam unt Schminke’. Kunst Lieferungen...
The torn and dirty label, rent above the address and
screaming silently at a broken world.
Flecked here; Cadmium. Spat there; Cobalt.
Chrome, a splash, in mock satire of the ‘Juden’ star and
all vivid on the cuff of the filthy scrap that was once a sleeve.
Puckered and protruding now from the wet and pulp weak
broken corner of its corrugated coffin.
Creased and spine broke; The cheap exercise book
lays open where it cast, atop now the heaped and bundled clothes;
Clothes that even in their filth and fade and disrepair
stood the last of a man’s true possessions. His dignity.
The sin black ink, diffusing and spreading, blue and purple;
Runs from the rain wet page in panicked and headlong flight,
seeking refuge, sanctuary, from its philistine tormentors.
Soaking the hand written script, made untouchable
and for all time, into the smooth blood stained concrete.
Tattooing with each purple droplet the mark of Cain
deep, indelible, into the very souls of its oppressors.
“Opowieść o” were the last words to succumb;
To take their silent message, drip, drip, drip, to their grave.
Hair oil proofed and impervious from three decades of wear
the inverted and discarded yarmulke rocks gently;
rolling with each new raindrop as it fills to overflow.
Like God’s own hands, cupped full of holy water,
it slips and slops; broaching its hand embroidered rim;
Spilling its bounty onto the mud smeared bundle it crowns,
all tied about with its own legs and sleeves.
Its yellow faced accuser twitches nervously,
cavorting with each new pitter pat as it hangs,
like a gallowed traitor, dancing by a single thread.
The book under the pile, sheltering its fragile pages,
peeps a cautious corner... Марков. цепь теория
In educated pencil on it’s bespoke brown paper suit.
Patient and attentive beneath the vulgar cloth stain that hangs,
all dandelion yellow and ham hand crude in its stitching;
Sewn rough and swift and careless like a post autopsy cadaver.
A child’s clothes. Pink and pretty and petite, neat and waiting.
Sat like pretty pink icing. Bright and intricate and little girl loud
on the birthday cake of the drab and threadbare bundle
on which it perches in anticipation of its candles.
All the inherent potential of a lost people - in a cerise pinafore frock.
A piece of yellowed paper, rough torn from a cheap note book,
lies close: A confidence, a whispered tryst tween the dowdy pile
and its glistening concrete companion. Plastered now to the wet ground
and in a woman’s careful hand...“Poeme De La Guerre.”
The raindrops begin to stain now: Soot flecked and dirty...
“THIEF!” Thief the man and thieves his lackeys who took,
wanton and reckless, from this world and all worlds, those lives.
Their treasures; Each precious and delicate and irreplaceable art.
Stole them: Sinful and wilful and murderous in their dogma;
Took them from all the generations, then and now and for all time!
Away the unwritten symphony that will never be given tongue;
The paintings that will never live to bring tears to an awestruck eye;
Gone. The novels that will never see paper or rise to inspire us;
Taken from us; The original thought, the theorem, the mind,
that might, in fruit, have begged mankind stride the universe.
Lost... The poems that might have once taught our blind to truly see;
And squandered, that young life. The little girl in the cerise pinafore,
whose granddaughter might have borne a new Messiah...
“THIEF!”
© Sullivan the poet 2008
‘Gay Guys ‘n Lost Dads..’
Sunday morning ghosts of other outworn lives,
pale and mislaid;
Lost still in their faded last night mirrors they gather.
Hunched; Bag eyed and world weary,
over coldly indifferent bad coffee
in half empty department store cafeterias.
Fleeing each the vacant graffiti stained parking lots
of their weekend existences:
Boarding house and attic bedsitter days
lived at burger chain counters and
coffee house pavement tables
in sleepy eyed Sunday morning town centres.
Dropped aitches in the Sabbath’s cruel ‘ourglass...
No workaday grind and hustle in which to hide,
seek blessed sanctuary;
anchor themselves, brief and tenuous.
Just broke chain buoys; Bobbing and weaving
in the uncertain currents; All adrift
upon their lonely mal de mer seas.
Whilst, as if in mockery, all about...
Fertile families.
Dropping their noisy anchors in jostling flotillas
at freshly wipe washed Formica topped berths
to swarm ashore on plastic coated pontoons.
Cheerful and jolly in their close company and
oblivious to the lost and weed hung floats adrift in their lea...
Snot faced and rub kneed in blue dungarees;
A small boy.
Staring and unselfconscious;
Awkward and tousle headedly blonde;
All laughter and fidget under the comforting
and confining weight of a father’s heavy arm.
A stranger’s child yet oh so, so, heart achingly familiar.
Innocent and unwelcome mirror to a somewhere son;
A Saturday and McDonalds and
A son who comes, dutiful and expectant,
for his treats and his sweets and waves and goes home.
To his other dad... The one
with the comforting and confining heavy arm.
As ‘gay’ as a damp November Monday crematorium;
Wet feather peacocks;
Decked and dyed and camp as Chloe.
Staring out of windows and peering at style supplements
from vainly unread gargantuan Sunday papers...
Squinting through gaudy glasses held folded and awkward
in front of faces sagging with heavy loveless years.
looking, longing, still for that elusive ‘bespoke’ love.
Faces too vain to wear spectacles
but all too head butt and hard fist and flailing boot
savvy to risk a glance at a small boy.
A snot faced and rub kneed small boy in dungarees.
Lovers giggle at a shared intimacy in a corner booth,
oblivious and invisible;
Unseen and unseeing in their secretly al fresco world.
Furtive kisses, demure and innocent, teasing each:
Scented and fragrant candles lit between lovers
fated each to burn as a single flame:
Guttering and dancing in young eyes
and speaking softly of the conflagrations to come
in their stolen and intimate night time embraces.
While sad and hopeless eyes stoop to familiar horoscopes;
And a small tousled haired boy wipes his nose
on the back of his sleeve and wonders, guileless and curious,
why the man in the faded blue shirt is crying...
© Sullivan the Poet 2009
‘Ode to HMS Plymouth..’
(A Warrior Maid)
Half cent’ry gone in Devonport, they forged and laid her keel,
a spine befit a warrior maid in hissing, flame spat steel;
All ribbed about and armoured through to test the shipwright’s art,
therein to beat, loud, strong and true, her mighty iron heart;
Each plate and rivet, weld and seam to deadly purpose sworn,
and thus in fire and blood and iron was frigate ‘
Four hundred long and forty wide, drawn sixteen in her draught,
three thousand tons of vengeful steel to laud the warsmith’s craft;
Set cannon fore and mortar aft to give that vengeance tongue,
that shrill her fearsome battle hymn in smoke and flame be sung;
For shipped she crew near thirteen score, stout hearted tars and true,
to fill her throat with fire and brass to pound her dread tattoo.
They decked her in her battle dress; In frocks of storm sky grey,
and with her smoke black locks atrail, they loosed her seek her prey;
Swift grey assassin sleek and bold, her heart as black as sin,
each iron sinew strained and taut beneath that steel strung skin;
To prowl each ocean, sea and bay for two decades and more,
a restless wraith ‘mongst salt sea mists; Asteer some foreign shore.
Til dark upon, and far away, did fall a loutish heel,
an alien foe with dark intent; Our sovereign soil to steal;
At night ashore a
to call their own within all sight of that foul limpen rag;
All bold they hoist it high and proud on
to dare Britannia raise her shield and south her trident cast.
And thus did
her iron heart ahammer as she forced its pulse to race;
Her turbines’ wail a wolven howl upon the coal black night,
as cruel as any grey maned beast apace a prey in flight;
All flare her jet black nostrils as they set her breath aflame,
a snarling, slav’ring hound of war; On vengeance bent - she came.
To touch with death
there to ashore, with fierce intent, Britannia’s lethal brood;
Proud hen aguard her deadly chicks she brought them all abeach,
til safe into the gath’ring gloom she saw them vanish each;
Then homaged she the martial gods and tarried each to bless,
‘fore turning from their deadly work; Her own dread suit to press.
Swift to San Carlos Water then as vanguard brave she came,
Britannia’s warrior daughter come; Her birthright to reclaim;
Brave sentinel, full square she stood, to flout the birds of war,
and ‘llow her sisters’ deadly broods be safely put ashore;
Though hawk on hawk, their talons keen, tore at her beak and claw,
no quarter gave nor quarter sought although they raked her raw.
Though grave her wounds, and dire their needs, her oaken hearted crew,
stood each their station, steadfast all, good yeoman stock and true;
And to the beat of shot and shell; Each bomb that set her reel,
sang loud each throat her battle hymn in notes of fire and steel;
Til bloodied red in tooth and claw; And rent and torn and spent,
her duty done and task complete she ‘llowed herself relent.
Twas then she saw her finest hour: In Stanley harbour’s lea,
first warship in, proud ensign high, for all her foes to see;
Til last in
as the garrison surrender in
‘Fore battered, bruised and sorely scarred she northward rode the foam,
the lochs to tend her grievous wounds: Then Devonport... And home.
And now her turn, so boldly served, has brought her to her rest,
to take her place in history ‘mongst bravest and the best;
But not for her the cutter’s torch, nor yet the gunner’s mark,
not while there breathes a naval salt or Janner worth the hark;
To bring her home to Guzz again; To ‘gainst its foreshore lie,
and rest her keel a final time beneath a
© Sullivan the Poet 2009
‘Rest in Peace Harry Patch..’
“And did those feet in ancient times;”
Walk ankle deep each in gore and fatherless limbs
and the spent essence of zealous and imperfect youth;
As strove each and every ill natured and misguided
nation to build, in their own fractured and distorted
images, their new and utopian Jerusalems?
To build their fragile empires, and their emerald cities,
on the bones and the bodies and the everlasting
graves of the faceless and forgotten fallen of a
thousand nameless and tear sod generations.
Ten thousand obedient and expendable armies
under proudly godward thrust colours and marching
all arrogant and manly and pious in their shadows...
Until time and bleak accommodation cast each to the
inevitable funeral pyres of greed and ambition;
And to the wet mouthed blasphemies and bloodlusts
of a legion of cruel and vindictive gods...
“Or close the wall up with our English dead!”
As in staunch and dam and defiant bloody bulwark
piled we all, in our outrage and in our best intent,
heap on putrefying heap the bodies of our dead and near
dead; On which to climb the blood slicked ramparts of our
own self righteous and sanctimonious martial indignation.
With God and gods our cause assured to turn back, repel
and smite, with the wrath of those same deaf and blind
gods each foul invader from our shores and our pages;
Those same deaf gods laud loud in each opposing heart.
And, as all and in all each war; Each war to end all wars;
All spoke so easy and found so hard in the eye of man.
Laid now cheek by jowl with its gore spat and exhausted
and futile fellows; Silent and unheard in the must and
amnesiac graveyard of victory’s imagined history.
Its lessons lost and unlearned and soon forgotten from
the minds and hearts of hostile man until again...
“I believe it is peace for our time."
Until again that cracked and hollow bell tolls loud,
the morbid and discordant death’s knell of yet another
sorrowed and hollow eyed graveside generation;
Solemn requiem bell to the grieving heart broke and lost
child weeping mothers and bereft and sonless fathers
that elegy millennia on bloodied and rag hearted millennia.
The styx of all human existence swole again and raging in
war spate with the stolen tears of the lost and scattered;
Endless and sinless the sons and daughters of all the years.
Torn each whole and bleeding in sorrow and in pain from
the reckless loins of a lamenting and godforsaken Adam.
And yet, in feral and stone heart abandon, do still the
wet lipped politicos and their fearful and fretful generals;
Their anxious, dribbling and wild eyed Caesars;
Lessoned not one caution from wounded aeons of futility,
toss cheaply their unfulfilled seed encore into the inferno.
“And at the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
we will remember them..”
And in remembering never has one broken heart borne
shameful man’s wretched inhumanity to his brother so long;
Nor one soul laboured on so oppressed by man’s deeds and
its dreadful doings and carried unspoken the weight of all
its sins and its untold miseries with so little complaint.
No one pair of gentle eyes ever obliged to bear, tear filled and
untarnished, witness to the reckless horrors of three centuries;
The terrible steel and fire and sulphur forged scythes of Lucifer’s
dreadful Autumns; Thunder wracked and lightning dawned in the
gathering in of his gore soaked harvest again... And again.
Nor yet one tender mind forced endure the livid scars so long
of his own forced and unnatural barbarity in foreign fields;
Has ever a single soul embodied all that is of the best and of the
worst in man in the light of their one frail and flickering candle;
And in that light; So captured the hearts and minds of a nation...
“Rest in peace Harry Patch: Rest in peace...”
© Sullivan the Poet 2009
‘The Black Dog..’
Oh faithless cur! Black curse’d hound,
that soundless in my shadow walks;
Who dogs my heel by but a bound,
and in each footfall cunning stalks;
Then dare I lay to beg my rest,
pants dark and brooding ‘pon my chest.
And there in siege each wakeful hour,
assails my wits this mongrel spawn;
About my mind’s ill fortressed tower,
until the limp, exhausted dawn;
Yet still the beast no sojourn takes,
and with my faintest stir – Awakes.
While still its foetid breath pervades,
the farthest of my spirit’s deeps;
To spread again its visc’ral shade,
all sly from ‘top my chest it creeps;
To crouch upon my chamber’s floor,
twixt me and madness’ open door.
To seek the air in anxious flight,
I wrench my windows open wide;
But yet the dawning’s purging light,
braves not upon the fiend inside;
And tighter still my chest constrains,
to gulp what taintless air remains.
‘Til stifled thus I flee my room,
to soothe my throbbing heart a while;
And freed I of that morbid womb,
hap purge my breast its vapours vile;
But bright the sun and sharp the air,
serves nought to lighten my despair.
How bright the rays that blessed star,
serve but to black my shadow more;
All better questing eyes to bar,
the loathsome creature at its core;
Which sensing reason strain and crack,
climbs foul and heavy ‘pon my back.
‘Til bold it dares my shoulders rise,
where all on razor claws it hangs;
To snuff and huff and hid my eyes,
unsheathe its’ wetly glist’ning fangs;
In savour of the feast to come,
when reason must, o’erwhelmed, succumb.
And burdened thus about my days,
one foot within dementia’s hall;
My morbid melancholy plays,
the hell hound’s loyal, crushing thrall;
Until fresh tortures it devise,
and dreadful, frightless, panics rise.
Its breath all sulph’rous on my neck,
like fire begins my skin to burn;
All sense no longer at my beck,
as wretched knees to jelly turn;
While fearful lungs denied their fill,
ask thund’ring heart pound harder still.
Oh! would that heart seek leave to burst,
in those black moments if it plead;
To bear not one more hour thus cursed,
to cheat the beast I’d gladly cede;
But fierce as in my chest it leaps,
It labours on and silent keeps.
Until the dawn that gentle steals,
upon the day in tender lights;
That brave my chamber floor reveals,
to sweep away the terrored nights;
No curse’d hound acrouch the floor,
and there, shut tight, stands madness’ door.
My heart, once more, its frenzy stilled,
thuds softly in my grateful chest;
And greedy lungs once more swell filled,
while tortured nerves seek to their rest;
‘Til humour, freed, untethered lifts,
to look anew on being’s gifts.
To feel each blade ‘gainst naked feet,
I brave the nettles’ acid stings;
So clear the air, its perfume sweet,
conveys each note the skylark sings;
Cry Carpe Diem! – “Seize the day!”
While hell’s dark hound seeks other prey!
Then do I praise my stoic heart,
which gravely tried no mercy asked;
My will, all twist and tore apart,
that stood its ground though sorely tasked;
Their gift to me another dawn,
another breath so grateful drawn.
Though still a cautious shadow lurks,
the brightest day can not dispel;
For in my psyche’s darkest murks,
stands stiff ajar the road to hell;
Where in the pit its hunger burns,
until the beast, to feed, returns!
© Sullivan the Poet 2008
‘To a Friend..’
When bears my soul its’ darkest moments,
and desperate begs this journey’s end;
There stands at arm a burning beacon,
a caring face; A treasured friend.
All put aside his trials and terrors,
no heed to how his own cares weigh;
To take upon his back my burden,
and crushing not one sigh betray.
As grief bears down and steals my senses,
‘til every vein runs pale with tears;
There comes a hand upon my shoulder,
and my friend’s gentle face appears.
To bear with me my every sorrow,
no matter how his own heart aches;
Upon his own soul every anguish,
so freely from my yoke he takes.
While ruin calls my pockets empty,
ill fortune lays my table bare;
Though harbours he an empty belly,
his last few crumbs are furnished there.
Each borrowed coin so willing given,
no mind to if it be repaid;
Enough to know a friend is needy,
scant care he too be debtor made.
If will falls weak beneath my labours,
each tortured sinew nigh its end;
Close at my side ‘thout charge or bidding,
hard labours there my constant friend.
That his own sinew, nerve and muscle,
fresh from his own toils lie near spent;
No instant’s thought be asked nor given,
as free to mine his back is bent.
Without reproach so swift forgiven,
that angry word unthinking spoke;
Each selfish act so quick forgotten,
or thoughtless promise easy broke.
Those liberties so freely taken,
and all advantage wanton took;
No wedge betwixt our friendship driven,
as each and all are overlook.
Should peril cast its cloak about me,
in death’s black shadow dare me go;
Against my back, as faithful sentry,
stood fast will be ‘gainst any foe.
No hesitation, doubt or waver,
although his own life be depend;
Whate’er the task, the cost, the danger,
My sword, my shield, my rock… My friend.
© Sullivan the Poet 2008
‘Sonnet to a Winter Garden..’
My love’s lost song alone to her I sang,
each note and chord aloft as wing’ed tears,
that one soft tone fresh from my heartbreak sprang,
might light perchance upon those wanton ears;
There on, to flow, a single salted prayer,
to fall, if chanced, upon that ice bound heart;
Bestowed; Its tender, tragic warmth to share,
and prise those bitter hoar struck bonds apart.
Set free, let flow that hotly passioned blood,
and melting, set each frozen vein afire,
to scarlet bloom each ice encrusted bud,
made blossom in that
And in that garden; Rediscover yet,
love’s tender song must needs be sung duet.
© Sullivan the Poet 2008
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