We all like a poem. Our own laureate Gingerella (AKA Paul Holland) has penned some poems for GFB and here they are in slightly higgledy piggledy fashion for us all to admire. I’m a little bit jealous. There are even drawings with some of them!

We hope you enjoy them.

Fish and Chickens (Paul Holland)

I like the folderol of blue embroidery

On the white tablecloth’s cool brilliance

Today’s breakfast coffee spills join

Yesterday’s

Drips and crumbs of our meals together

Are lifted and shook out

Before the cloth is put away on it’s shelf

Ready to be smoothed out table set

For our next meal together

Or we’ll maybe wash it

And use the one with the fish and the chickens

They instead marking out

The songs of our days.

The Pass (By Paul Holland)

Neutron Star (Paul Holland)

With greenest of bright openings

Four cardinal points of fern

Push out beside the rill

From the Winter’s

Last clinging beech leaves

Drops fall

Into sharply cut waters

Squaldroons (By Paul Holland)

The Brute (By Paul Holland)

Can it be true

Is this what a man is

What is a man

What is it to be a man?

Belly forward,

Smart jacket,

Out the scowling door.

Son scuttling behind.

Son young enough still,

Young enough to briefly pause.

Time enough

At least,

To help his mother on with her cardigan.

This moment of weakness

My hope for his future

Strength.

He followed his dad.

She swallowing her Grinding pain.

She wincing,

She taking it

Bearing it.

Sucking it up

Grimace after Grimace.

With small shuffling

Agonizing steps

Followed out.

Out the A&E door

Off into the night.

Would it be too much to expect more kindness?

A surfeit of kindness.

God but for a bit of kindness.

Thoughts of Wampum (Gingerella)

I met the man who drank the farm.
He again slapping his heavy hands together,
Talking at the bar’s sweet spot.
He was
Well…busy busy.
Slapped his heavy hands together,
Rocked on his heels,
Stepped back
Stepped forward,
Looked smiling around the bar.
No one paid him much mind.
Maybe some if they could be bothered looked away.
Who wants to catch his eye.
Sucked down his rum and coke.
Made great play of just enough ice in the glass.
Slapped his callused hands together as he wilted.
Standing at the bar
Past travels done,
Worked over.
Conversation empty
Best slap the hands together.
Rock in and out of the Bar’s sweet spot.
Hard earned
Single handed applause from all.

Tyrella Beach by Moonlight (Gingerella)

I can see all The Shore as my dogs bound away in grateful release.
By a dune’s stump
It blasted away by a storm of eight years ago
I sit and stare south in winter’s moonlight.
I know this beach.

St John’s Point and its lighthouse,
The Cow and the Calf.
There away, another spot blinks
Cast out from the Isle of Man,
Towards Newcastle’s yellow lit streets and shore.
Tips of the Mourne Mountains capped with low cloud.

Sweetmoon
A silver beam
Carried the shore’s length
Glittering upon each wave.
There above, a brightly lit planet
Shows through the gathering clouds.

You are south and tho’ this beach looks south
It’s winds now but safe gusts for summer kite surfers.
You are far,
Far south.

I have your light and look for it
But although see planets
Rocks at sea
Lighthouses
I am still here shorebound.
For something as simple as you and I
Tonight I cannot see you

Bog Road (Gingerella)

When you go to the bottom of the well
In sadness scrabbling the deep ooze and mud
Scrambling around below.
The talk then is of the climb back up but
There are sometimes valuable things down there.
Peopled from times past
Reasons to go down
The echo of words spoken of those who went before.
Their history hopes and dreams now spent for themselves
But cast there not to be weighed down and hold fast the present
But given for us to find
A safe ballast
With twisted golden torc through free
To other lands.
Our future theirs
Their dreaming hands wrought twists
Living longer than flesh.
Dreaming remains
Golden summer or winter night
Livings loud delight.

A Belfast View and Ill Children (Gingerella)

Leaving the Adolescent mental health unit
Looking clear across the City to Napoleon’s nose
This is a country were we don’t make men anymore
Those yellow cranes are all but for show.
Crazy kids made crazy by their lack of a wire to follow
The vine choosing to hug the ground to
Grow in the dark places
Not having light to forge them.
What dark forces these children find to forge them.
What currents pass for air and light.
The darkness eats and they are consumed in its petrified dish.
No rare penicillin here no liberating thrum.
The manic joy of youngsters music and laughter dulled
Tracked looped flattened in a base bass beat
Squashed with nauseous smurfs.
Scared and scarred, dulled and witness to
More blast and sulphurous rush than any
Red rivet from the yard below.

You Told Me (Gingerella)

My errant love,
Gone to the bushes
To the village of the west.
It’d be there
That they have you now to their dry breast
It’s their arms that have you in time.

All broken with seething hatred
In the yard 7 long years ago
A cacophony voices in your words.
All the determination I loved you for
I watched as you gouged
Your sanity with vile purpose.
Wild eyed unfocused
Lighthouse spin skewed off its gymble.
The deep grinding of stones
Letting their sooth mortar into rough
Sand and eyes fears of lime.
Drug settled weary
Your light burns
It lights other sights now unseen.

Riding the Madrid Metro (Gingerella)

1.

I didn’t see the band get on.

The mum and dad

Both wearing Disney shirts and their kids tied to games machines,

The old woman I stood for, after trying to read the metro poetry,

Yes; I saw them.

But I didn’t see the band get on

I heard and stood across from the giggling girls talking in Portugese

I saw them..

But then the band put to play.

2.

The band of Indians

Peruvian?-They’d skipped the ponchos…

I hadn’t been prepared for the band getting on.

Hadn’t seen them put to play.

I had been thinking of you of course

Of our newly found love.

Of how to change this

Make that work what I should do

The details and such.

They put to sing in that dark hole of the heights.

3.

And the band got on and I knew of the depths

That she and I had fallen

Of the coffin nails driven deep into what was a marriage

Of my broken nails in my attempts to free us both.

Of her despair.

And they sang in that hole of the heights

Of joy and hardship

They knew of the yearning of the exiled

Of the long distance of a view.

4.

And I thought of you my new love.

And I remembered

That the winds will blow
And thought I don’t mind

For it is of you, not the details or such, that they sang.

As now I’ll be ready for the winds to rage

And for the screaming distance of a view.

I saw that the Portugese girls were laughing.

As before me they’d noticed I’d put to cry

Sweet salt water tears.

I could no longer hide when the band got on.

Hermaphrodite Hoodie (Gingerella)

Should I push or pull

When the weary raincoat of cloudy night has opened before Dawn’s door

There you’ll find hermaphrodite hoodie stirring in the nether region

Dawn turns only to say

“Stop muckin’ about”

“Aah”

Sighs hermaphrodite hoodie

“What I’d give for any port in a storm

Yes brandy and a little drop of port”

“Garr……” slurps Dawn (pint of heavy in hand)

“But your eyes are a sore sight

Stay awhile ye twisted stranger, try an rearrange, yer a bit of a dog in a mang…er”

“Mark me well Dawn! today I’ll play wit’ me ditties an’ yer man there dreams only of havin’ titties

I Cannot Wear Turn-ups (Gingerella)

Ginger Rimmed (Gingerella)

The Sea’s waves

Fat

Heavy with the Moon’s oily light

Moon glow seaside Bundoran

Ginger rimmed

Caked in winter’s corona of cloudy night

The town glows too

From above seen

The waves take on the pores

Of skin swept sea

All held firm this

Extra

Given

Night

Untitled (Gingerella)

The ginger wigs are a right laugh

The ginger quips right daft

Scurf and scurvy out there

Lorries smoking and tractors squirting slurry

Globally warming world in a hurry

Ask yourself sweet ginger boy

Are we apt to worry

My  arse

I only shifts after a curry

Other Stuff – Below are a selection of poems submitted by readers – we are happy to receive anything from anyone so feel free to submit something! Sad, happy, funny or just plain stupid we are keen to hear from you.

Why Does Memory Not Fade?

Stitch my wounds they have come undone

Rebind the ties that tether me to sanity

My heart bleeds useless sentiment

As I visit your memory

This breaking, raw, flailing pain

Swirls with unctuous ease

Around my mind

As to what if and perhaps

Youthful, stubborn pride

Earnest wishes of a mendicant fool

Return to me stolen years

Of the loss of you

Cold cold my mind’s eye now lies

No longer towards the sun and future untold

But to hoar frost breath of far behind

The summer’s rays fall cold upon my soul

Embers of their fires warm no part of me

I am frozen in essence and form

Bereft of all that I know to be true

If I had known what I know now

I would have died for the pursuit of you

No love will conquer your loss

No hope will instill peace in me

This septic, taunting pain endures

As brute reminder to my folly

Friend, tell me how to forget her

Because I cannot

I will not, shall not

My last breath shall shape your name

My last thought shall capture your smile

My last heartbeat will be broken

And when the worms that will dine on me rest

They shall spell your name

Rip and tear my flesh

I have no need of it now

Salt these opened sores

A foolish life I have made

But a life I know must be lived

And true

To all those things

I hold dear

You above all

I wish you well

As I depart dead hopes

Now decaying and pustulant

But like a child’s first unsteady steps

There will be a world of untrampled dreams

To set foot upon once more with undisguised glee

I love you

And should have told you

Fuck, I fucked up

But I must source peace

To tie me to sanity’s calm purpose

We recently received this untitled epic of Homerian proportion and sentiment from our musicologist Gingerella Rockerfella. Hope you like it Mate!

Untitled (Gingerella Rockerfella)

I never knew me dad that well

He often worked away

He left when I was eight years old

Me mum said he was gay

He left her for a another guy

I always thought it weird

A funny guy called Albert

With a big red flowing beard

Me dad he was a ginger

Though he didn’t have a beard

He had gingivitis

Something I’ve always feared

But left me with a legacy

To which this day I’m proud

When I look into the mirror

“I’m Ginger” I shout aloud

I don’t mean that I’m ginger

As in Ginger Beer

I think that’s Cockney rhyming slang

For some who is queer

Some people think that being Ginger

Can be something of a curse

But nothing beats the pleasure

Of making up crap verse

Ode To Gingers (Non Ginger Wannabe)