Back to Black...Boards

Back to Blackboards


But the blackboards are bare
teachers prefer chalk-less fingertips
and sitting on chairs
or standing behind podiums
we are herded
like old times
in chairs in a room
but this time
they ask us to plug in
to laptops
and take class online
while in class
so meta
so metaphorical
for the times
education
is a dying art
a dying breed
we are headless
dirty old men
flinging bills
at lecturers
who say
click on this page
and give a provocation
because
it is time to grade fair
in fairness
fair for all

PAYBACK

"He realised that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by men who made money in industry."

D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover 

"The dark side of the sense of fairness is the sense of unfairness, which results in gloating when you've got away with being unfair, or else guilt; and in rage and vengeance, when the unfairness has been visited upon you."

Margaret Atwood, PAYBACK

It's A Gas

the only sense

you'd like to have

is the two cents

i owe you

i woe you

i woe

for those

cents you have

been adding up

to ease yourself

will eat yourself

one day

at a time

Text Testimonial

"Portrait of a Lady"

The city was a vast emptiness. He stood at the window of Finbar's hotel and looked down at the River Liffey which was mud-brown after days of rain. He closed his eyes and thought about the rooms all around him, empty now in the afternoon, and the long empty corridors of the hotel. He thought of the houses on the long stretches of suburbs going out of the city: Clontarf, Rathmines, Rathgar, the confidence they excluded, the sense of strength and solidity. He thought about the rooms in these houses, empty most of the day and maybe most of the night, and the long back gardens, neat and trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. Defenceless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across the garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the house of a sign of life, for alarm systems, and then silently prising a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing the room, opening doors, not making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible. 


Your mind is like a haunted house. He did not know where the phrase came from, if someone had said it to him, if he had read it somewhere, or if it was a line from a song. No, he thought, it could not be a line from a song. He had stolen these paintings from a house that looked haunted. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it no longer seemed to. He had stolen the Rembrandt whose reproduction he was looking at now, plus a Gainsborough and two Guardis and a painting by a Dutchman whose name he could not pronounce. The robbery made headlines for days in the papers. He remembered laughing out loud when he read about a gang of international art robbers who had come to Ireland. The robbery had been linked with others which has taken place in recent years on the European mainland. 






excerpt from Finbar's Hotel

Is This What You Wanted

Why Does She Weep

Hush then
why do you cry?
It's you and me
the same as before.

If you hear a rustle
it's only a rabbit
gone back to his hole
in a bustle.

If something stirs in the branches
overhead, it will be a squirrel moving
uneasily, disturbed by the stress
of our loving.

Why should you cry then?
Are you afraid of God
in the dark?

I'm not afraid of God.
Let him come forth.
If he is hiding in the cover
let him come forth.

Now in the cool of the day
it is we who walk in the trees
and call to God "Where art thou?"
And it is he who hides.

Why do you cry?
My heart is bitter.
Let God come forth to justify
himself now.

Why do you cry?
Is it Wehmut, ist dir weh?
Weep then, yea
for the abomination of our old righteousness,

We have done wrong
many times;
but this time we begin to do right.

Weep then, weep
for the abomination of our past righteousness.
God will keep
hidden, he won't come forth.

D.H. Lawrence

Mischief And Repose

The Story of Ferdinand, Fictional and Far Away

If only I could be Ferdinand,
and sit here
quietly
smelling the flowers
there would be a single
cork tree in an empty pasture
and I would sit there
not feeling
lonesome in the breeze
or anguish in the sweat of droplets
no fuze
no short circuits
not a machine of a human
but the patience of a Spanish fictional bull.

James Jacques Joseph Tissot