Writing | Martin O Regan

Category Archives: Writing

A collection of everything

In The Beginning

Posted on February 23, 2025 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

I am God!

I have always been

A designer in fact

Of my own destiny

Open to chance

A brittle reality

Shattered distorted

By time

And thought

I am God!

The Alpha Omega

The rendering

And sundering

The dream in the haze

The far flung shadows

And the stark

Clear reality

Defined by my ways

I am God!

A devil in failure

A harm to the innocent

Around me

Inside me

My thoughts

Needling me

Creating reality

Self-propagating

By mine own hand designed

I am God!

Therefore powerful

But left alone in the sandpit

Of my doubt

Grown unstable

I’m reinvented

Become human

Lost my way

In the wilderness

Not emergent empowered

Rather weak uncertain

Flesh and bone

I am fearful

By mine own hand

Now I’m mortal

Notes on a bus going somewhere… again

Posted on October 8, 2024 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

I cried, and cried really – fitfully,

Frightened of the night to come

And days to follow.

I cared not for friends

And how they would comfort me,

For I had thrown away a love.

A life once mapped in notion

Now lost to fantasy

To regret

To the shadows of another being

For he and I no longer identified

For good or bad, he was a different man

And so it was my soul

That bled asunder

Wrent by my own wretched hands

My tongue in fact

My thoughts –

My future for a cigarette.

Could it really have been that banal?

A voice, in answer, on a phone some weeks later blamed me anyway.

Old haunts, old habits

Posted on August 1, 2024 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Trying to remove myself from the dependency of crutchdom, I find myself revisiting places that became the staple of another time. But leaning philosophical, every day presents another time. Still, retaining some sense of civility, I am amused by the fact that at the very moment of reminisce, I stumbled across old heads from old times. They themselves were never my bar fellows, but they haunted the edges of that life. Now, I feel like I’m back on the tracks after a total derailment, and yet I wonder, like I do every morning on awakening, whether I’m just deluding myself. And yet I’m also inclined to believe that that is what it is like to chase a dream. Always infused by a vibrancy I one time tried to replicate through booze,…but far be it for me to demonise, afterall it is only those who can’t handle it that speak of a glorious life without it. Plenty’s the guy who never missed a day in his life, never feigned illness to skip a moment’s work…(I secretly pity them but that is just like my opinion man!)… But that is not my point. All I wanted to say is that it is nice to find myself again living with intention, not simply prey to mundanity, and even if I had the luxury to choose another way, and nearly always I have had, I believe that one some time in one’s life needs to experience the weakest aspect of their being in order to understand their strength. It’s clichéd I’m sure, but tell that to those who’ve died trying. To all and sundry, I bid you a good morrow.

The last time I saw Roy

Posted on May 14, 2022 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

It might’ve been the last time I saw him

That trip up north along the coast,

At least at points inevitably so.

And in all its vagueness surely,

It’s still further shrouded by that doubt,

That almost disbelief:

Surely there was at least one time other.

But if there was, the memory’s withholding

Insistent upon the poetry of this –

The final memory,

The beauty and the beast.

I never cried on hearing he had passed

But stopped to think a thousand thoughts

A thousand reasons

Why our paths

They should have crossed.

But we didn’t know each other

And though I bow to some intended whisper

The wind is only pandering to

My own instilled importance.

We had become nothing to each other,

Just echoes of other worlds

That perhaps we’d wished we had explored.

A yoghurt later

Posted on August 19, 2020 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Gatch up to Gellért afterwards
armed with a decent bottle of wine
and some munchies,
look everyone in the eye and smile graciously…
Then wake up screaming
in your bedroom
in that darkness before Dawn
and let the fear linger as you try to brave the moments
that stretch interminably before the coming of day
and your salvation
and again imagine yourself invincible till the night creeps in again,
the opportunities to move beyond the dream strangled again
and deny your fear as you down
a bottle of rancid cheap wine while
telling yourself you could have gone, you could have gone
until you can’t remember where
nor why it would have mattered anyway.

The Vacant Lot

Posted on August 19, 2020 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

The empty space
Where my hand falls
The room to spreadeagle
Tormenting
The hollow room
Unwelcome echoes
The door snatched open
By invisible hands
When the darkness subsides
And still alone
It’s the hope that nurtures
The light that leads
The meal for two
Once lasted for days
Disappearing quite suddenly
In a drunken haze
And yet it’s those places frequented
Now passed by in shame
Not wanting to be recognized
Nor needing to explain
They steal away
A chance at humanity
A chance at the high life
Or some other taint
The streets once strolled down
Hand within hand
The nights loosely forgotten
Now etched – infinite
And yet even still
Intellectualising
Trying to paint pain
The stuffed toy on the mantle
Levelling that façade
Until again in the darkness
That primordial glitch
Where the veneer of bravery
Shattered – in bits

The dream family

Posted on July 28, 2020 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

I introduced you last night
You and your brother-
Or your cousin…
Right now I can’t remember,
And I’m trying not to care-
As if somethings are more important.
Last night I shook your hand
And whoever else’s-
As I introduced you-
But to whom?
Even now I wonder if
In reality
Family can be less elusive,
As they seem in dreams:
As ours was not to be?
Was this the real reason for the division?
Or do some couples grow apart,
Not from each other
But all others
And the things they once enjoyed?
I enjoy my life
Yet see the distance
Closeness can create:
Delving into the dream of those who matter
The foundations finally falter
The façade ripped off exposing
The shallow lives we have led.
Maybe it’s just fear
Avoiding company with excuses
But beneath all notions
Perhaps therein lies
Pain, fear, uncertainty.
Perhaps for everyone –
And perhaps across the void
As our hands reached out
Mine asleep, yours eternally,
I only understood
Base wishes;
The truth
The distance
Shall remain.

To Joe

Posted on July 28, 2020 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Last night
Or this morning a’round dawn
A thought
Wandered in on its own
Twas an idea
Of who you once were
The stories
Regaling us all
The devil
Residing in you
No different
To the ones in us too
And this morning
Or last night Or whenever
You returned
From that place of forever
And I lent
You an ear, or mind’s eye
Leaving
A vision of horror subside
Realising
Just how much I cared
Surprised
Yet not drawn to tears
Tony

missing you as he will
Honestly
I think of you still.

Dias del Dinero

Posted on May 31, 2020 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

The subtle thoughts

The Day of the Dead

The loss made image in a prayer.

The flower stall blooming

And business is booming

But ONLY Halloween is unfair.

The gravity of the moment

More grave with every plot

Stepping over friend and family

And the stranger that time forgot.

The Day of the Dead

When all become saints

Beneath a tumble of well wishes and thoughts

When all axes well ground

Are buried with hope

That all grudges in the end become nought.

And that one day in our due

we’ll avoid being forgotten too;

Not left to dwell in a stoney silence

Hidden by time and grass

Removed from a construct

We like to call the past.

Margit’s Bridge

Posted on May 31, 2020 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

The erratic heartbeat of the city

As rubber padded thunk moves level

Carhorns join in melody

The rush hour music playing strong.

The hum, the purr, the growl of engines

Darkness descended, the beast’s upended

To prowl in search of life outside

The daily click clack,

The daily grind.

And on in bursts of ebb and flow

Below the Danube creeps past slow

A moon appears to offer light

But not tonight… Not tonight.

Illuminating city streets

Arising from the shadows creep

There is no need for stars tonight,

Fluorescence is the guiding light.

And deeper, darker, into the hollow

Blending with the nighttime cheer

The beast appears to disappear

Appearing once again tomorrow.