Tag: darkness | Martin O Regan

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.

My Death Reflected

Posted on December 13, 2019 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

I have seen my corpse.
I saw it today
Reflecting back at me
As I stared out
Into the darkness.
It wore the ashen
Grey bone mix
Almost regal against the night, the rain,
And the glass window pane.
I have seen my corpse
I saw it today
Not prostrate to the tempting tomb
But erect
And rigid
Almost alive-
And it peered at me
Through darkened eyes
Down all my days
And I surrendered.
I have seen my corpse
I saw it today
And it told me of my future
And not some dainty priestly tale
Of death nor immortality-
It showed me all the treasures
In its ragged decomposing,
The leathered skin
In binding me
My winding sheet becoming.

The title Lost

Posted on October 18, 2019 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Inside, the tap-ad-slap of falling raindrops soothes.
Outside it drenches to the bone.
All adventure set aside,
all such plans they dissipate…

along the fear inflected path…
“Enough,” I say “Enough of that!”
And yet the pen in fruit-continual
Bears Hope in words residual.
The easing of the ex-hibitions
Perhaps to failing my contrition
At every corner subterfuge
The ego does the man delude.

Pessimism

Posted on March 15, 2018 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Another step, a neighbourhood
And yet the worries call.
The darkened corners of my doubts
Put service to my fall.
The imagination builds on high
the towers to collapse.
And in the end ruination
– but what will be the cost?

©The Hairy Teacher, March, 2018

Hollow

Posted on February 26, 2018 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

The darkness casts long its net tonight
The Beaver on its heels not yet fully alive
In the bite drop temperature inclining still
A notion breathes life and breeding beats.
The green sold out to cyclic adds its flourish of orange then red
And stepping tip tap to the black then white
The progress towards wherever is a destination
Spelt celestial in the flight taken path across THE satellite
While other routes marked for what is planned
A momentary passage and yet the one of man.

©The Hairy Teacher, March, 2018

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.

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

Tag Archives: darkness