3rd Odysseus poem...a series?????

Cyclops

You, my fiend
though you held no preference towards me,
were not even aware of me,
your gaze, fixed as it was,
on places far beyond.

You, the beast
I needed to pierce so I could end the fever,
the cavernous ache
that beset every thought,
turning words on the page
into a swine’s dribble.

My thoughts and actions lost
in a foreseeable future,
not real
but imagined as if I had found
the garden of delights -
in truth I had found the fuel
and was consumed with need.

It made me a sheep,
I followed you around,
I wore you down,
the way small things do,
shrunk your gaze
until I filled it
and then
you relented and I stabbed that one place
I had swooned over for months and months;
we both were blinded
for a moment -
you to all your possibilities
and me to the truth

that this would never last

impossible things
never do.

new novel - 1st rough draft chapter two

Chapter two

Ducks, Chickens and Fear

One of my earliest memories is of the ducks. We had three ducks. I was too young to name them, but I remember them. Three Muscovy ducks that followed Mama around the yard, especially when she was gardening. Mama loved to garden.

Sometimes Dada would watch from the porch, laughing at her efforts to bring a thing of beauty into that wasteland. Mama ignored him. When I was older, say six or so, she would enlist my help getting me to saw off branches or to carry the water bucket, the water splashing against my legs as I waddled behind her like the ducks did when I was younger.

I remember the eggs. The piles of duck eggs and the cakes Mama made from them. Large chocolate cakes and we still had plenty of eggs left over to see. Mama wrote a sign at the side of the road. ‘Duck eggs cheep’. She laughed at that sign.

Years later, I found the sign in the shed. I was older then. I finally understood her joke. Cheep. Mama tried to find humor in a lot of things. Especially then when I was younger, when she was younger too I guess.

Then I heard yelling and I never saw the ducks again. I never did discover what happened to them but I missed them. I missed their funny walk. I missed them following after me and mum. I missed the eggs and chocolate cakes.

When I was five or so we got a clutch of young chicks so Mama could have chicken eggs.

‘Not as good as duck eggs, mind,’ Mama said to me as we watch the chicks tumble over egg other in the old shoe box with the holes punched in the lid. ‘Duck eggs are the best for cakes, still eggs will be good for you, help you grow big and strong. And we can sell the spare eggs like we did the duck eggs. Do you remember that?’

I nodded that I did, but I really wasn’t sure. Not until I found that old sign and then I remembered, or I created the belief that I remembered. It’s hard to know which, isn’t it?

‘How many chick eggs?’ I asked. I think I was beset with numbers then. I remember I was counting everything. Ants at the kitchen sink, the yips of the fox at night, the kookaburras and galahs in the trees. I counted everything.

‘We should get a lot of eggs from this batch.  Plenty for us and plenty to sell for some extra cash, so long as we keep the exact number from Dada.’

Already we were conspirators. I understood the rules. Anything Dada could take, he would. Anything he could sell, he would and then we’d hear him staggering back from the damn cesspit of a pub, as Mama was fond of saying to me, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table listening to his loud approach.

We were wrong about the eggs though. All the chicks turned out to be roosters, not an egg layer among the lot of them. As soon as dad understood he grabbed his long knife that lived on the mantle above the stove and slit the heads right off each and every rooster. We ate chick stew (well, rooster stew I guess it was) for all that week.

I remember watching dad eat whole hunks of the meat, sucking the marrow from the bones as if he hadn’t eaten in months. He had. Dada always ate, even if Mama and I sometimes didn’t. Mama would say there was no filling the gaping hole that was Dada’s stomach.

‘The more he eats the more he needs, he feeds his hunger and his hunger grows.’

‘My hunger is growing too Mama,’ I said.

‘Yours is a proper hunger, son, not the bushfire need that is your Dada’s. He will never be sated, just as the fire is not sated, no matter how many trees is devours.’

‘Why?’

‘Because what your dad needs food cannot give him.’

‘What’s Dada need, Mama?’

‘What doesn’t he need. Peace. Forgiveness. Me to love him.’

‘You don’t love Dada?’

‘He never gave me the chance too, Brith.’

‘He scares me, Mama.’

‘He scares everyone.’

Dada scared me so much sometimes I would lie in my bed at night and just listen, listen for his footsteps, knowing he was, at any moment going to burst into my room and do something terrible. I never knew what that terrible thing was, not then, not when I was still young, not before the public hair had started to sprout, damning me because my Dada was already damned and damnation shared, as he liked to tell me, is damnation made bearable… or almost so.

Sometimes I got so scared I wet the bed. Wet it ‘cos I was too scared to get out of it and go out to piss in the yard like Dada did whenever he need to empty his bladder. I remember once Dada seeing my thingy and saying he might cut if off for sport and so I was always scared when he was about. If he was snoring I could get out of bed and piss but when his snore wasn’t to be heard, or worse, when he was banging around the house in his boots (did he ever take them boots off? I asked Mama once and she said, ‘When he’s in the mood that bring me pain, then yes, the boots come off, but only then, then and the once or twice a year when he bathes.’)

I’d lie in the bed and start to rock back and forth, back and forth, my hands clenching into fists, my legs taut as if my muscles could stem the flood.

‘Please go away, piss,’ I’d whisper to the night and even as I whispered the need grew and grew. I’d weep as I rocked in the bed, wide-awake but unable to rise. I knew Dada was up and I feared that knife I’d seen him slice the heads off the rosters with. I had no don’t he’d take my thingy off quick and a flash if I pissed at night and he caught me in the yard.

So I stayed in my bed and then the moment came, the dreaded bursting of the damn, the moment my muscles and tears and whispered words could do no more and then, then the letting good and the feeling of the piss running down my legs, my bum getting wet as the piss seeped beneath, the smell of piss at night as I lay in my bed wetting it because I was too scared to rise, wishing Dada was snoring, whishing the piss would simply vanish, wishing I wasn’t so terrified and sometimes even wondering what it might be like to just let him cut my thingy off ‘cos maybe that would mean I wouldn’t need top piss anymore and so my bed would always be dry, dry and warm like I liked it.

The pissing got so bad I ended up with scabby skin on my thighs around my ball sack and just below. Horrible almost scaly skin as if the around between my legs was turning into some kind of fish.

Sometimes Mama would get the goanna ointment out and give me a dab on my finger, only a small dab, and only sometimes,

‘Cos the goanna must last us a lifetime. I had this one tin on me when your Dada grabbed me and its all I’ve got that’s good and nice, all but you and the flowers that sometimes manage to survive.’

I’d take the dab and go into my room and drop my shorts and rub the goanna stuff onto the scaly skin, thinking it felt now like a reptile’s skin rather than that of a fish but at least the stinging was gone, as long as I remembered not to stretch my legs out to far, then nothing helped but that I must cry and rock myself back and forth as if there was a spot somewhere in the world where I would not hurt if only I could find it.

‘Why do you wet the bed, son?’ Mama would often ask me as she pulled the sheets off the bed and then, with my shamed-faced help, dragged the mattress out into the sun so that another dirty yellow ring would be added to the many others from bed-wettings past.

I never told her about the fear, about Dada’s threat and the way I would hear him some night and think maybe he was just waiting for me to rise and piss so he could slice my thingy off. Instead I lied.

‘I can’t help it Mama, I don’t wake to the need sleepin’ and dreamin’ until it’s too late and the bed is wet, and I’m wet and the puddle is spreadin’ and then I just wait ‘til morning to get up and have you fix it all again. I’m sorry Mama, I know the work it causes and please, Mama, don’t tell Dada.’

‘I never would, son, I never would. And don’t fret about the work, there is worse things your Dada’s made me do than this, so I’ll take your sheets and the wet mattress any day of his demands but think on this Brith. When you sleep, or before you do, just before, think of yourself waking and when the moment comes I am sure you will.’

It never worked of course, her strategy, how could it, when I was already awake, rocking to and fro like the bubble on a toad’s throat. I never told her it didn’t work ‘cos it couldn’t and she never mentioned the failure also, just every now and then she’d tell em to try the waking just before falling asleep.

Some nights when the mattress and sheets and pajamas were wet and it was cold as ice and I’d be chittering my teeth I would lie there waiting for the sun to come up and warmth to return to the world again, sometimes I’d fall at such chilly times I’d manage to fall asleep and when I did I would dream… I would dream of ducks and ponds and eggs falling from the skies and cracking upon the earth until the world was golden under the yolk of their eggs.

Latest edit (25/2/2014) Odysseus poem

A Hot Night, Odysseus Stands Before A Window

The sound of a trumpet,

like the call of a bull elephant

moments before the fabled graveyard

is reached and its pair of ivory tusks

are earthly surrendered as tribute

to the weight of overwhelming yesteryears.

The sound of a trumpet,

like the cry of a heart

in the lost desert of night;

a heart squeezed between two dawns,

blown apart by the memories

of footsteps trod on other people’s dreams.

Odysseus visualizes the trumpeter’s thick lips

pursed with pain that craves to be shed,

cheeks inflated, two walls trying to protect;

the sound produced seduces the spaces

between the disks of his spine

as he stands naked in the night’s ambiguous shrine –

low lights,

the distant hum of wandering beasts,

the cry of an unwell child

struggling with the heat.

It is an implausibly hot night,

the oppressive air

a lair within his head

to catch thoughts

that should have been put to bed.

The heat makes everything unreal.

Trapped before the window - a mast

in the city’s ocean of night - unable

to flee or fight;

the trumpet’s sound creates him,

berates him,

calls him home

and away again

as it pries apart his mind.

He grows fearful he might forget the King

He had become – decides the epitaph

will choose his choices

that cannot be undone;

the actions, thoughtless and destructive,

that litter the waves

like the sun-glinting bones

of lost sailors searching for landfall.

The city’s colours melt, merge,

are bent by sounds, by smells,

by memory; the stars swirl bright,

attack the dark, like the trumpet,

shake his faith as he stands

in the front of the open window.

The belated breeze hounds,

the bricks spit heat,

his mind treads old sentences,

merges verbs to nouns,

imagines a thousand possible excuses

forcibly swallowed, his throaty apple

moving up and down like the slice of a sword,

before the lie is set to flight.

She stirs behind him –

he remembers it was originally her smile,

then the way her right hand

twirled her reddish hair; the blouse

untied and spread and the nipple

not yet erect, kissed

and as he flared

he forgot the promise

and surrendered to the call of the beast.

He had hoped it was a dream,

that his standing before the window,

his right hand

idling touching his limp cock,

was not…

That the picture he had tried to paint

as his life…had become…

that the trumpet was soothing

not The Siren calling him out again.

Would he ever rid himself

of the torment of that mast?

Must he always succumb?

Never be able to resist the echoes

that, like waves, forever call him…

take him further away from the kingdom,

the children and Penelope’s open arms?

When did he breathe so deep

that he inhaled the desert surrounding Troy

and now Its sands

reside within his lumbering lungs?

first chapter (1st rough draft) of a new book

Dada’s seed

Chapter one

The Beginnings that led to everything

Before Dada first did me harm, before the lighting and the storm, before he turned my flesh into his own private yard to hoe and mow as he saw fit, before my life became his to do with as he desired, before the pain became the norm, I lived life, I think, much as any other child. At the least, at the last, that is how I saw it until his actions broke me from my past, severed me as surely as a cocoon removes the pupae from the moth.

I was born in the middle of a century, which century hardly seems to matter nay more and since this is my story we’ll leave it there. The middle, slap bang in the middle, that moment when the frenzy of the beginning has turned to clench-fisted, that moment before the flowering of the end when everyone finds their smile again.

I was born in the black of the middle, the midnight, the shadow. Born when the clouds had gathered but not a drip did fall. It was hot, Mama

 Mama born me on the sheets she was wedded upon, the only ring she ever knew, the only church or altar, the wedding bed, the place where blood promises things will only get worse not better.

I was born on that bed ‘cos, Mama told me once, ‘The river, my dear,’ and her hand touched my brow almost the way a finger is dipped into a font, or it was that year when I went to a Catholic’s school (I will get back to this for it impressed me greatly, that year) before the nuns nosed around the house trying to get a sight of what was which and Dada pulled me back outta school again, screaming, his fist holding fort with the plaster-weeping wall above my head, ‘Damn those penguins and their breastless, milkless existences! (And just here I maybe should plonk in that my Dada always yelled, even when he was whispering which, this time, he surely was not) How dare they come to see what’s what with mine! How dare they try to unearth the seed I keep in the soil as I see fit! Your are mine, my boy, as mine as that godboy on the cross is theirs, even if some He’s just a carbon-copy of that Odin who was hung from a tree a thousand years maybe before!’ Dad liked to read, liked to join the dots, liked to think upon the connections as he sat upon the pot, or so he often told me those days before he brought the end into my bed and caused all that I was to writhe upon the torment he held within, nursed and fed to bring to me and have it visit while I was still abed.

 ‘ Your Dada,’ to follow on with what Mama was saying, way back before I got side-tracked (sorry for that but it will happen, a response, I should think, from what happened to me and why this story is being told in the first place) ‘was busted that evening and besides, your Dada was drunka’ than the arse of a hoary hog’s blind, evil twin.’

So I was born in my Mama’s bed, ‘a tiny bloody thing,’ so my Dada liked to tell me, ‘wrigglin’ like a maggot lookin’ for a feast, squawkin’ louder than mozzies buzzing about the dumb beast.’

I was born without a doctor or a midwife, without caution, thrown into the wind, my Mama howling, or so she said, pushing me forth like a pod pushing the tree out into the world. I was born with water hardly warmed, Dada couldn’t be bothered, without cloth except the sheet my Mama lay upon, or so she told me.

‘It damn near split me, it did. But I was glad you came, despite all the pain, for though half was your Dada’s, the other half is mine and all of you I love as best as I am able.’

Mama often spoke to me about love in the beginning, touching my forehead or brushing the orange-red hair out of my grey-blue eyes. In those days before my Dada came down upon me harder than the hail hitting our shaky tin roof, we spent time together sometimes in her bed, or mine, and mostly in the kitchen, me at the table watching her prepare the food for Dada and what was over for me and then her. Sometimes she’d hand me a carrot and a wink and I knew, even before, I think I had the words to speak, never to mention them carrots or whatever’s she handed across as she boiled the stew for Dada’s nightly, sitting down, everyone shut-up, feast.

So it came to be, if we can get to the point I am trying to make here, to bed the start, as it were. I was born in the marriage bed, though no marriage was ever partaken by Mama, Dada or any Officialdom. There was no ring, no vow, no kissin’ or huggin’ (‘cept the kind that happened later and judging by the facts as I now know them, particularly them relating to my Dada, I doubt there was much huggin' or kissin' then either).

I was born to my Dada and Mama, an only child, a son to carry on the family line, a boy, a babe, a barn. I was born without effort on my behalf, no cord around the neck to strangle, no twisting in the genome or other aspects that could go awry. To do the tally, I had five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot and, as Dada would have it, a healthy set of lungs that ruined his peace from the moment I was unleashed.

Mama wanted to call me Brith after a character in abook she said she once read.

‘I loved that name from the moment my eyes fell upon it, Brith. It just sounds so heroic, don’t you think?’

Dada would have no bar of it, threatened a back-hander to my Mama, or worse, that he’d pick me up and toss me over the fence, leave me there in the field with the cow pads and thistles to bellow and kick and crawl my way to death.

Years later we when I was six we found a babe in that field and I shall get to that anon but for now it’s the naming that we are at. Mama wanted Brith an so Dada anointed me with a slap on the bum and the name Patrick.

‘After dear old saint Patrick who drove the snakes from old Erse them many years ago,’ he said.

‘And he not being a catholic any more than he had any blood of Erin running down the creeks and rivers of his soggy veins,’ said Mama one night.

‘Dada not Catholic and not Irish?’ I asked, for even then, when I was five, (as I was, I reckon, at this particular moment) I sought information, hoping it might protect me somewhat, though it never did, never would, when kick came to punch information is as ‘bout as protective as a wet paper bag.

‘But for me there would be no Irishness in this family,’ Mama replied before tugging heavily on her fag, as if the smoke might add weight to her words.

So I was Patrick, half Irish and half my Dada’s whatever’s, Patrick that was called Pat by everyone and later that Pat became a joke between my Dada and me when he took to the pain inflicting that we’ll get to eventually.

Patrick Congerhill to give you my full name, with nothing in the middle.

‘Why would we waste the air with another title to you boy,’ my father often said. (

‘You may be Patrick Congerhill to him and to “them” (them meant many things to my Mama, but basically them was whoever was not her and me) but to me, to us, when alone, and when we aren’t in our minds, you are Brith September (her favorite month) Doolan,’ my mother would whisper when Dada’s ears were not turning this way and that like the twin satellites dishes they so resembled in size and shape. I was born on that bed and when Mama was able, she scooped me up and placed me on the nipple, let me feed as much as I wanted, then, so she said, she bathed and swaddled me, ‘just like a wee baby Jesus, your Dada playing the part of the ass.’

So that was that, the beginning as they say, the start, the “Go” on the board to let you know you are off. And off I was. Sucking my Mama’s milk and growing as fast as I could never knowing that the growing was leading me to the moment I would forever wish to avoid and not just me but Dada too it came to me when I was able to subdue the pain and ponder the words instead.

Patrick Congerhill son of Dada Congerhill and beloved of Meredith May Doolan, lovely lass with the bright red hair, taken (so the histories have informed as best as I could follow them) by the Congerhill boy when she was no more than a slip of a girl, fifteen at best but her folks were poor and the country was sparse so what we her poor parents to do and Congerhill a man of thirty five at the very least!

I pieced that bit together from the words of Mama and some from the words of Dada, especially those he sometimes yelled at her when things were really bad, in the time before I was finally set free. Poor Mama, with her dreams of love in her head budding like the breasts beneath her dress but where her thoughts were but phantasms were flesh was real and men like my Dada only know about the real, or rather, in attempt to still their own spirits of ill, seek the flesh and then the switch and worse, much worse still and I was to discover soon after the very first pubic hair showed its wiry face to the world.

Mama living on the land, stranded in his bed, cast adrift, cut off, sundered from her world. Her parents lost, her siblings too, though once three of them visited for a watery Christmas stew, but with Dada’s harsh words still ringing in their ears, the siblings fled and were not seen nor head of again, not by me, not near that shack, that boggy, groggy farm that produced barely enough and what it did soon became mostly drink for Dada’s outback throat.