You can buy his first book online at Amazon.com or for a free sample just e-mail [email protected] or contact Carol Burke at [email protected]
http://www.amazon.com/Sixteenth-Demon-Gavin-Duff/dp/14137522 25/sr=8-1/qid=1160471349/ref=sr_1_1/102-4350706-6447355?ie=U TF8&s=books
DIFFERENCES
by Gavin Duff
Again sitting at the bar
with beer often spilled
and dried hard on the polish
of the solid oak
life sustain.
as I see a tiny fly walk on this bar
I wonder how many poignant tears
have diluted the stale alcohol.
not my own.
public displays of sadness
are not for me
or anyone else I know.
but on this day
a poor fool from Donnybrook
sat next to me
and told a tale of love
a love he lost
but, in my opinion, never gained.
his girlfriend left him
for a close friend.
his unrecognisably Americanised accent
told every minuscule detail.
finally a tear fell
from this dumb fucker’s eye to the bar.
it was somewhat large
and landed on the tiny fly.
his weak legs
could not break him free
and so he drowned.
to me, this was the real tragedy.
SUFFERING
by Gavin Duff
I knew they were Irish
but nothing registered at the time,
that glaring contradiction notwithstanding
and omissions among discontented eruption.
those boats buoyant on their new Nile
will wait for them to pass,
if only their refutation
could do what I ask.
logicians without reason are the privileged,
at least to them,
and the neutralism of their politics
accentuates the density, fickleness
and discrepancies of their behaviour.
what will I tell them,
when they ask me for a solution?
don’t look?
stay inside?
try to remain conscious?
try to suffer what I’m saying?
anything I offer up
would be fire to a
consistently charred embryo.
what they’re asking me to need,
is everything they desire. You never know,
it just might take them higher,
much higher than that copasetic element
that they’ve mistakenly called consistent.
don’t suffer my harangue either.
INDEFINITE
by Gavin Duff
They’re diminishing all around me,
the unwanted, those bitter fuel-less individuals.
they want no more than me but don’t realise who’s got it.
in my tenure, it would be my first secret.
immeasurable, dislocated youth knocking down my door.
maybe I have it, perhaps we all have it.
knocking down a wall from the inside out.
from inside what?
they are fearful.
less anxiety,
trepidation, apprehension.
the indefinite is to them
their reason to die.
and after they die, it’s their reason to live.
HIDING
by Gavin Duff
On a train to work
this morning
I hid my head
behind a John Fante novel
free from impurity or decay
for just one moment.
Abnormal, spasmodic worry
led me to look
at the faces of those around me
commuters
husbands
wives
sons
daughters
all bright and early
for a lesson
they may never learn.
they are the
unknowingly frivolous
and unfathomable creatures
I hear so much about.
no incivility,
just tedium.
they talk amongst themselves
usually in pairs
about nothing,
nothing at all.
they know this
but have yet to tell
the one they see in the mirror.
unfortunately
I hated everything I could see
from that place
behind my book
but it’s all I had.
INFLUENCES
by Gavin Duff
Your bank balance will not matter
when boundaries know no bounds,
the length of uncharitable moments
adulation tied to a tree and left to die.
it is perpetual without a judge’s doubt
if not becoming steadily worse,
juxtaposed by worms, seemingly happy
not realising what their food has become.
they shall be poisoned by a substance
not unlike coppice,
metaphors going unnoticed now
hidden at the bottom of the final glass.
where will they turn when that fact is visible?
intoxication has blinded these fools
living to drink, now drinking to live,
filling the void with mendacity, not veracity.
upon meeting those who may impress,
prudence is thrown to the wind
and is savagely replaced by complacency,
and in turn the arrogant monster.
where has it been? hiding, no doubt.
keeping that ailing world to itself,
emerging now to face the wrath
of a soul mate doomed to be tied.
this wrath is like no other,
as unnecessary and yet important as it is,
and so trend and image now take precedence.
they are trespassing in the land of the free.
CARCASS
By Gavin Duff
There's nothing
and then
suddenly
I'm in a bar
where patrons emanate stink or heat
and I can't miss a beat
since the concrete outside
moulded my feet
into something more complete.
they're thankfully moulded
into something ready for this,
for the smoky carcass,
the idiotic edifice.
that carcass where
fools become heroes
and champions are reduced to zero
or slaves are domineering.
I swing a left at the bar
looking for the toilet
when a drinker stopped me and asked:
'Did you know I'm just a carcass?'
'You're more like the coffin,' I told him,
'but there's a carcass in there somewhere.'
EXCITEMENT
by Gavin Duff
Like a man
who once went crazy
while trying to
consider the significance
of anything.
Like a woman
who once found
all that she needed
at the end
of an amorphous book.
Like a child
who found his footing
just as he helped
another child
to his feet.
Like a country
with no signature war
looking to fight
for its eminence
despite our realisations.
Like a world
like no other
accompanying each verse above
but
telling us nothing.
This has been a wasted exercise.
DANCING
by Gavin Duff
A dancer was once asked,
after a one hour routine,
to sum up in two sentences
what she was trying to say
with that demonstration.
her reply was one I'll always remember.
'If I could sum it up like that
then I wouldn't have
danced for an hour.'
a week later,
I heard a writer being interviewed
on the radio and he was asked
what he thought
of poets who, while rare, have little use
for decorative language.
'I hate it. Poems should be about embellishment,
beautiful use of language'
As he spoke, I went to the kitchen
to get a drink of water
and thought of the night before.
I was in a night club
but was too troubled to dance
because it always made me self conscious
and a little embarrassed.
IGNORANCE
by Gavin DUff
I heard two elderly people taking today,
a man and a woman.
'Did you hear we're now
the richest country in Europe?'� she asked.
'No I didn't hear that, is that right?
I wouldn't have thought that,'� was his reply.
'Yeah it's true, I didn't think so either.'
'I think that as a country
we're really still only learning.'
'What?'
'I said I think we're still only just learning.'
'WHAT?'
she had trouble hearing that part.
PROTEST
by Gavin Duff
Let's be completely truthful,
right here and right now.
we've all broken promises
or paid sham homage
to things we detest
but I shall not protest
too much.
everybody claims to have seen
their own way forward,
that unachievable way onward
through eyes looking up
or those that climb from the cup
that you or I can't live without.
I speak from a privileged point,
hoping only to make one.
grab a man and shake one
until that perimeter falls down
and somewhere a loosened ball gown
clings to the shoulders of a prodigy
and leads us to definitive escapology.
I have a confession to make
about a rule that I dared to break.
for just a second, maybe more:
I thought I was better than it all.
I'm not.
I'm the one you'll find clambering
for air when it all goes away
and I chose to
wait underwater
and die on the ground
for my own disrepute.
don't make that same mistake.
don't let it be
that you're caught, pants down and shitting,
when your grass is too long
to see the lawnmower sitting
next to the tree.
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