My next novel, Anvil Soul, is coming out this week.
My publisher, Pen Name Publishing, released this great post. Please have a look at the book covers I loved, but did not make the final cut.
See this interesting post here:
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writing
Anvil Soul
Check out my new novel. Coming soon.
A priest named James O’Ryan, moves to a new town. There he uncovers a sexual predator in the church. Alone, he has to confront the danger. Alone, he has to deal with threat. Can he save the town without losing his soul?
A memory, a conversation. Words written in a quiet, sad moment.
The Sun drops, heavy with life
A cold white Moon ascends.
How often I have been blind to beauty, that falls softly
Secretly, silently,
Like the night dew.
She pointed out the sun to me
Not by making me look
But by showing me warmth.
Too late you find
Too soon it’s gone.
At the quiet moment, a young man asks
What is the best way to love?
The older man says;
With the heart.
Heavy thoughts kill what is important
But what is important always dies.
Time waits, but then steps forward
Knocks down what you have built
And snatches away all wealth.
Two visions
An elderly man stands in the art gallery,
Before a picture of the Virgin Mary, and weeps.
I see him, tears on his cheeks, eyes swelled in red-dreams.
I can only imagine what he is thinking.
The years have washed upon him
In a frenzy, unexpected, unstoppable
Time has stepped upon him and moved on.
Now in front of such beauty, he weeps and in weeping feels sorry
For all the things he missed, either
In long nights at home in suburbs, wondering what could have happened if only…
Or
Merciless nights in bars, finding new lovers, never settling down and finding, too late
That it is too late.
Both, both miss much.
You cannot have it all,
And if you are lucky
At 90, stand before the Virgin Mary and weep.
This morning, at the bookstore where I meet old friends,
A man shouts into his phone
“We pay the payroll not them!”
He continued beside a shelf labelled ‘Literary Classics.’
“It’s not those guys who call the shots. Well you try it your way and if that works
Then well done,”
he stops before a shelf of poetry, and his hand reaches for but stops mid-stretch
“But I’m telling you; it will not go down like that!”
Speech finished, he hangs up as he passes Shakespeare.
He leans against a pillar as if he is out of breath
Out of life
And then pushing his phone deep into his pocket he takes the stairs,
Ascends to the street,
And is gone.
Something had taken his appetite for reading
A payroll will starve a poet.
Hand on the telephone
Do you get sad, sweetheart?
Sitting in the park rotunda writing on your phone
When a man comes in and sits near you; He smells of wine and faeces
You leave, hearing him cry out as you go.
You tell me how horrible it was at that moment, his yellow teeth, yellow face, black eyes
I saw him sleeping on a blanket outside a café yesterday, or someone like him.
The flowers of the city have been trampled
The trees are wrapped in protective boards
men work through the night cutting up the tiles
the scream of their drills echo in the city streets as I walk home.
But alone is really alone.
You have to close the curtains because the glow of the buildings
Light up your room
With painful, sharp white lights
I See the white steam rising from the building rooftops
And wonder where she is
Most likely she isn’t thinking of me.
Instead, she has a hundred phone messages to answer
Remember though-
Sitting in the Roman Room of the museum
How she sat and read her phone, not looking up at the 2000-year-old jars.
How that annoyed, how I complained
Those artifacts of human history, made before Caesar ruled,
Are not as interesting as what Michael or Brett are doing.
Close your eyes and forget,
Life is hard enough without recalling the past, reliving regret.
How will you get out of bed in the morning
If you let the fears of life
Sit on your chest like fat angry devils.
The day I saw God
There are no more Gods
Still, I have mine.
I ask my Gods for help
And I curse them
I have them in the trees and the rocks.
I was busy, thinking about cigarettes and architecture,
Standing on the side of a road
An old man pulls over in a small truck.
He hobbles out of the car, one leg shorter than the other.
A pretty dark eyed woman
Maybe his wife, younger than he is, sits in the passenger seat looking frightened.
“Do you believe in God?”
He asks me.
My mind races, what answer should I give him?
It would thrill me to say no-
To say something mean about it all-
But I say yes I do.
“Good!” he says pleased, and then invites me to his Church.
As he drives off, I watch the woman in the cabin. She is pretty, her skin shines like money.
You don’t own anything
I lost my sunglasses the other day
I’m not sure exactly when,
But they were good ones
Expensive ones.
I think about them occasionally
I wake early, and I wonder where they are
That empty feeling enters my guts
And I feel sad
I tell myself it doesn’t matter.
But it does matter, a little.
I wonder if other people lose things
And if it worries them.
A three a.m. worry, when it is dark outside, and you are missing something
And you look at the other side of the bed
And it’s empty.
I lost her too,
She left me
That feeling when you know you will never see her again,
you remember following her out of the apartment,
seeing her leave through the front door of the building
Into the cold misty morning
knowing that you will never see her again.
And I woke up thinking about my glasses.
Yesterday, while I walked the city streets…
I found a café in a back lane in the city,
it looked like a nice old place, so I went inside
ordered a cup of tea and some toast.
An old woman, dark, with long grey hair brought me my order
and she stood before me a moment and said I looked like a man she used to know,
only I am a little fatter.
This man used to live on a farm,
she said,
he would take her for walks along lonely dirt tracks
they would light a fire and make love when the night fell
all in the open,
under the trees.
One day they were married
and he took her to the city.
She held up her hands and showed me the rings she wore,
this one, she said, pointing to a golden ring
is her wedding ring.
Three weeks into the marriage he started to beat her,
and he would beat her at least once a week.
It was the city that made him crazy,
she said.
But he is dead now
his heart stopped.
I’m glad the beatings have stopped.
She stood beside my table for a few more minutes
looking past me out the window.
The lane shone in the weak light,
its narrow spaces made the city seems taller,
but inside the café it seemed like a country town.
I’ve worked here for forty years; she said finally,
quietly
and moved away, leaving me behind in silence
leaving me with her memory.
Advice on life
Listen, the cop said to me, the thing that really gets you
Is when you’re standing there and their goddamn phone starts ringing.
I mean she’s been dead for an hour or two and her phone is ringing
And it’s on her.
You actually think you should answer it,
But what are you gonna say?
Listen, the cardiologist said to me, the thing is
These people have heart attacks
And then we fix ‘em and get them in for exercise
And the goddamn idiots
Actually complain about how hard it is to exercise
And all we ask them to do is walk a bit and maybe ride an exercise bike
And they don’t want to.
I tell ‘em not to eat cheese because cheese blocks up the arteries
I explain to them that they have to watch their diet
And they say
No doctor I really like cheese.
It’s riding two abreast,
The paramedic tells me
The cyclists shouldn’t ride two abreast,
I saw this just last week.
One guy knocked into the other
And they both went under the rear wheels of a truck.
It’s safer to ride single; I tell everyone.
I gave up cheese and riding two abreast, and I keep my phone on silent
But still, there’s a lot wrong with the world.
People get hard, and then they get crazy.
dreams
I sometimes imagine that I had written
To Kill a Mockingbird
or The Great Gastsby
or Catcher in the Rye
or any of those great novels.
Then I imagine that, because of my fame;
all the women love me
and would stay.
But then I remember that all those authors are dead.
What good to me is her love
if I’m underground?
