Poetry & Short Stories | Martin O Regan

What DO they think

Posted on October 31, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

What DO they think of us

Our parenting books

Our observational comedy

Our moaning about fatigue

Expecting sympathy

Perhaps even pity.

What do they think

Raised hard and poor

No TV, no distractions.

Electronic nannies!?!

No nannies, no babysitters at all

Except the eldest

Who kept the youngest along

And the other in line.

What do they think of us

With our worries and our fears

Those who witnessed glass smashed,

Fingers broken and much more.

What will we think when we’re like them?

The Hapless Elephant

Posted on October 26, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

The ideas intellectualising

And I see the evasive gestures

Intertwined in the silence

That space between thoughts and written words

And war weary

cast ashore in that talk of the weather

Nobody dares mention the critical

Instead in the mediocrity, sparse honesty

Carefully chosen each destination so as to not bring anyone too close to the fire,

Or worse, beyond it – into the darkness

That has always surrounded us.

In Plight

Posted on October 20, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

My mother’ grip weaker but tighter too

A desperate plea to me and to mortality

The love abounding but unstable

The conditions placed upon herself weigh badly.

“Was I a good mother?” the plaintive quest to understand

The fear of an Unforgiven.

Yet what her memories paint and what of them remain

I cannot judge

But what I can induce is blame

That reassurances will never penetrate.

A child robbed of youth;

Or the joy therein,

Robbed of a father through the maraudings of a mean mother

And when his death arrived

Though grown

She was left alone against the politics of the justifiably estranged

Strained through years of conflict and contradiction.

So what then of my future in this mess?

A hand that will grip tight long after death

Is made of love and not the need for love

To reciprocate is joy

But to give without expectation is strength

And to never look for reassurances is brave –

Especially at the end.

Across a notion

Posted on October 15, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

In the faded blue now turned dark

There sparkle the settlements of an age

An eyesore to the unspoilt landscape

A sign of hope to the weary traveler

A beacon amidst the puffs of clouds

Which dispel the views our tired minds are longing for.

Holding on just this little bit longer

The time now measured in our descent

as the clouds embalm us

The darkness almost entombing –

But we pray, collectively,

That engineering, yes science,

Will save us again,

Will transport us safely into the bosom of our destination.

We are the pilgrims set out against life

In search of it

In the nuances of every step

We are fools hoping for change

And yet we see it,

We feel it,

Perceive it at every turn.

But collectively we become lost in the mantras

The panic,

The sheer superstition ,

Rock Face sheer, cliffintine,

We have it, it us

And shattered in our communion

We scream injustice

Searching for our scapegoat

The voodoo functions

The blame is cast

The snake eyes removed as was our Judas.

And again as we set down we forget our hysteria

And once more we move beyond the limits of our fear

Into the freedom that forgetfulness and ignorance afford us.

ItchyMalley

Posted on October 10, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Back again my pretty creepy crawley

With school start and hair washed-

It doesn’t matter.

You discriminate not though many on your behalf do

They shout “You filth” and they do not mean you.

The psychosomatic impulse

The hand that reaches, scratches, passes back to point

And waits

The tendency engorged by fitful, fanciful, frantic

Imaginations!

And back again to torment, Cos that is what you do.

The morning’s bus-stop-wait inspection

The routine, the chore imposed.

Each itch, each scratch, questioned

Queried, curious, cautious

And paranoid, yes paranoid,

The present you endow.

A song

Posted on October 5, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

I didn’t try today to remember
Nor forget for I thought that unwise.
I didn’t reach for tears to quench the fire
Nor would I allow my heart to burn with rage.
I never promised anything nor were oaths given
And yet I felt betrayed by what you’d done.
While I the innocent stone thrower
Lay down my implements of hypocrisy.
Refrain: I regret not knowing you
And you not loving me
I despise the taint I threw on thee
I blame my self as is my fallacy
Noone was wrong to let a thing just be.

I didn’t die that day
When you released me
Nor did I relish in
The new found misery.
I guess I begged
I may even have seemed pathetic
I was new to you and never asked for this.

Yet I wasn’t the victim of a hit and run
I believe we fought two pugilists as one.
You may have cracked my heart
With belittlements’ array
While I internalized the rage and came undone.

I didn’t lie that day upon failed laurels
Instead I fuelled my dreams from painful memory
Not like a trooper nor a troubadour
But like a man who’s lost and carries on.
Sometimes empowered by self-righteousness
Sometimes alone and left distraught
I have at times given weight to thee
And wonder if you’ve ever even thought of me.
Refrain: 1 or 2?

In the end, Love

Posted on October 4, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

To hold the shadow dear, the faded memories

The loves lost

The fights had

The friends, the feelings:

To position them in a place of some importance

Each one a tool

To teach

To tempt us forward.

And yet upon a pedestal too oft residing

The pain descending

Like hot wax dripping

Time measured in its and your destruction.

Time measured backwards towards the hurt

As if nothing mattered anymore.

The blind fool lives for what is lost

The wise one dares to tread once more into the minefield

that is the heart.

Drink

Posted on September 30, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

The mind’s allowed freedom,
To roam, to express
But without some temperance
It could lead to distress.

A Coming of Age

Posted on May 27, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

A coming of age a rite of passage

To write in remembrance to commemorate

I’m not mourning and yet I may still

For what I have done to that old tired beast.

I’ve slaughtered it, humanely,

in the name of expression.

Stood there in the limelight only the darkness to see

But like oft has been mentioned, I felt them, faceless, expectant,

and when I sat down swaddled in the spotlight

I sat down with the weight of their individual silence,

Each of them protruding through the inky veil,

To sit beside me on the sack cloth coughing:

This is poetry, culture – steak after all,

And I played my part tonight.

And I come away less vilified than deified,

Though the truth, I know, lies somewhere in between.
I shake the remnants of a beer from its hiding place,

hunting it down with my greed,

And allow that though momentarily I was sophisticated,

I am, in the end, Still me.

Burdened

Posted on May 5, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Morning’s minions drawn from their downy warmth
To be flailed by street amid the swarms
Dark night shifts to grey sky warning
That the gloom arrives though day is dawning.
And onwards into the belly of the beast
Never satiated by the thronging streets
Each day then cursed to repeat again
Man’s fate sealed subservient till the end

Category Archives: Poetry & Short Stories