And so here’s to one
For the end of the road,
Words have been written,
Sentences steadily found sense,
Poems put together, pushed and pulled
On pages being published, hauled
And heralded, heard in hushed homes
Where hope is heartily housed and harboured,

Here’s to the unbelievers
The cynical thinkers of thought,
Leaning to maths in the absence of magic,
Scared to be seen perusing poetically
In their palaces of prejudicial pride,
In places where poetry is but a preoccupation
For pansies prancing about while decorating doilies
And fawning over follies, fads and followers of fashion,

Here’s to the ones
Who are missing out,
To those who dare to look away,
Ignore all that is spoken, reject all
That is written, miss the minutes of magic
Mixed with meaning and metre, meandering
Like madmen through a myriad of amused
And confessional men and women, all willing
To shed their skin, to drop their masks and reveal
The sometimes silly, sometimes scary, secrets beneath,

Here’s to the end of the road,
A month of calculating thought,
Converting concerns into so-called
Confessions, finding fact amid the fictions
Of life, figuring out the force within so as to find
The way to pen and paper, from thought to word,
From hand to eye to read, to lips, to mouth, words
For the mind to ruminate and meditate on the meaning,

Here’s to the completion
Of the composition, the composer
Can collapse, rest and recuperate,
Dream again, to look back and laugh,
Not dawdle in the depths of substance
But laugh at the lines he has lived through,
Lingered along, find light in the letting go, rhythm
In the rhyme, consume not oneself in the character
And caution and concern but release those creations
To live and love, to be heard and held without him and to be
Unburdened and unpunished if the rhythm didn’t always fit the rhyme.

All photographs and artwork by Damien B. Donnelly