Tag: fear | Peter O Regan

Tag Archives: fear

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 Future

Posted on November 7, 2019 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

It may feel all so benign
But it’s not
And no longer.
That flagrant flame of youth

-Misguided, burned out, upended-
All but floated and away
Into the flighty fancy of a memory
But things change
Have changed
And the energy expended
Now finds fruition.
The shadows of ideas
Pilfered in the half-light
Of fear and misunderstanding
Grow clearer, defined
And spell hope, recognition
The Phoenix forlorn
Mistaken
Spreads wing to take flight
And at last in the darkness of a globulus eye
Peering, searching, domineering,
I see reflected the being
That I had many years ago created
And which I’d sheltered
As I dared
Against the world
But it’s time has come
No longer hiding against the tide of criticism
That may or may not follow
On toward the destination
Plotted many moons ago.

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.

Trudell’s* Therapy

Posted on April 12, 2018 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

In the dappled moment deranged
The orange glow growing
Cancer chosen again.
The despair spelled out in Circus
The cold brought in from the spy
Douma denounced, despaired over, denied.
Sabre rattling no more
Giants braving the brawl
Borders inundated, shattered –
No divisions in blood.
A child’s nightmare comforted
While one’s own sleep deprived
Fists pummelling the shadows, haunted again,
The dark days returned.
And the people despair
Or delight or don’t care
And the people morphed out again:
No men in no man’s land.

*John Trudell

Winter is coming… Again

Posted on March 22, 2018 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

(International Poetry Day 21 March, 2018)
The spring just turned and fled
Before my very eyes.
One day the warmth came, gone the next,
And again the dreaded ice.
I wonder if this year at all
We’ll see anything but snow?
The white sheen spread across the land –
Though romantic – now must go!

Moving Back Again

Posted on March 8, 2018 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

And once again I sit
Another last time to contemplate,
The kitchen’s almost bare
The living room hollow echoes
As the kids watch something to distraction.
A cool draught saunters in for a second
Hand in hand with the sounds of the city
And then back to the inside
The plughole gurgling at a deeper depth
Threatening the surface
The tap hasn’t dripped for some minutes
Somewhere an awful song sung in Hungarian
If the original is any better I cannot tell
I’m just not in the mood.
Plastic crackles, the reality where a fireplace would feature
But let’s return from twee
My geansaí grey but I’m not a Yeatsian fisherman.
I sit here a moment in a kitchen that will fade
Realising and those moments in blend almost already gone.

©The Hairy Teacher, March, 2018

Love Once More

Posted on March 5, 2018 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

That far flung dalliance with Destiny
Forever fettered by my idea of beauty
Instead searching as I do the memories
Trawling all the bars, as Stu said,
All the vacant corners of the heart
Where ridicule and sentiment abide
Torn close because the distance threatens
To ensue a truth as well as any falsehood too
The latter factored in beyond my conscious mind
The former as much as always a surprise.
“And yet your talk of women only…”
Tis true
And this because the void therein was once defined
Inside the mind
Inside the soul
Of youth and sorrow
Inside the pain that brought no pity, and so
I rose a desecrated entity by my own hand
And with the lip and glisten
Kiss and touch
And doubt and anger
Only fear
And with the fear I straddled beauty on a dockside
And somewhere in a moment I found Life where breath no longer reigned
I found shape in a distortion of the romance in which I had failed…
And it is now the very essence of my being.

©The Hairy Teacher, March, 2018

From the gutter, sky!

Posted on December 20, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

My soul intoxicated by the vestiges of emptiness,
I let my breath, my fear, evolve into the detriment –
that well-defined entanglement of love
And desperate, all-embracing, drunkeness.
I felt the pang of guilt, my memory,
the thirst for lust, my psychology,
and my harboured sense of what was once a duty, now a chore.
For I had once assumed authority,
the one who’d travelled far and wide,
But now I felt myself inadequate:
The memory fades but not the pride.
And so in empty quarters of my soul
I chose to redefine myself as whole
And in attempt I felt my sanity,
though ironically yet not my vanity
Till finally I lost not Just my mind…
But Everything

Selling out or taken in

Posted on November 25, 2017 by martinoregan • 0 Comments

Sometimes I write terribly he said
You never do I assure you
But of course I do as everybody does
No actually nobody does
Well what do you call this then? Will I read it for you?
Don’t bother I’ve read it, and while I don’t like it I believe others could.
You’re mad!
Says you with your generalizations
What!?
Well you claim to know everybody’s mind
Indeed I do not
Then why do you proclaim your writing shit
I said I write terribly but anyway, because I know it’s so.
You know you don’t like it is what you mean.
Yeah… And…
But who are you to judge?
Surely I’m the best judge
Hah! And why is that?
Because it’s me who’s written it.
True, but is it you who buys it, reads it, criticises it and comes back for more?
No, but…
No, and therefore… Shut up!

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.