(Vi et animo, the past, 1967)

From the west, crossing the Pacific to become a citizen of the United States of America, Joseph Stalin's daughter sought the very place where blacks had had enough. Newark, Detroit and Cleveland were in flames. The citizenry, which had always given knee jerk consent to its leaders in matters of war was, at this point, now unconvinced. Did Vietnam have relevance to anything but Vietnam itself? Enough youths had taken to the streets to force a choice. An older more trusting population had to decide whether the cost, war on its own young, was any longer justified regardless of what the truth might be.

Change everywhere - as always - pulsed. North, DeGaulle publicly urged Quebec to free itself of Canada. South, in an arena almost synonymous with change, if not flat out turmoil, Che Guevara was now dead. A change in change? East, Israel lashed out in open warfare at an Arab military coalition.

Chaos. North, south, east west, what did you expect? Statues? Even the stone icons of once immortal gods have lost their limbs, oh, yeah those too. But up close, change, as we perceive it, is just the constant flow of time relative to a perceived stability, heritage. Heritage, legacy, birthright, heirship, ancestry. Roots. Stability.

But heritage in a place like Ulster, Britain's personal ass wipe for the last 800 years? Where native language and names were suppressed? Where history as a subject was forbidden? You can also ban taking a piss, but where does that go? Populations flow in waves over and around wading encroachers who erect No Trespass signs in someone else's tide. The bobbing rank and file know their past. It's their blood. They bleed history. That is the outpouring. In that flood of legacy, poets are the buoys ringing a way home.

But just when did bards get so damned prissy? Shit. They once led the charge and marked out hallowed ground. It was they who whipped rivers of opportunity into raging froth. They foresaw the coming complacency and time kicked their great great great grandsons in the balls - to wake them up before they were born or borne away into someone else's past. For that, you need time travelers, artists. You need real poets, not word weenies driven only to exult horticulture nor shallow self indulgent verse druggies rambling unintelligibly. Poets, real poets, are not needed to embellish the incense of flowers but rather to incense the weeds, we, the disapproved, the embattled. Poets pollenate duration with contention. Poets frieze time and time is conflict.

Not too too far from here, Carrickfergus Castle on the craggy carrick, rock jutting out on the north shore of Belfast Lough, stands as a testimony to embattlement. The best defended castle of Ulster, as it were, a Norman stronghold, passed hands as if it were a water bucket in a fire line. Lackland siege took it, Edward Bruce hit it hard, William III got his hands on it and from here launched his campaign of 1690. It even fell into the hands of the French at one time. From either of the two towers of Carrickfergus you could have witnessed the American naval upstart John Paul Jones lashing out at the HMS Drake. Thus it is with castles and arms, they need bodies. Therein is the flaw of permanence, the stitch which pulls then runs, and so doing runs anywhere yielding to an infinity of possible destinies. There is no permanence. Arrogance is a belief in permanence. Ignorance is the blood of arrogance.

He was a big man, a very big man in improbable working attire, cross leather laced heavy boots, a coarse flannel work shirt, high rolled sleeves, front buttoned only in the bottom half exposing a glimpse of an impossibly muscled chest, a big tool belt hanging heavily over his woolen kilt. He had calves like trees. His powerful head turned turret-like on his steely body as his eyes paused on a large framed poster tacked on the cluttered wall situated behind the desk officer. Above all the fugitive notices, it read, in prominent letters, " A Protestant State for a Protestant People!"

Ian swung his large long tool box, which he had clutched in his hanging left hand, crashing onto the officer's desk, who jolted backward in his chair with a screech of dragging wood clearly startled at the massive man standing before him, and unnerved as this monster fixed vacant eyes on the wall poster behind him. The kilted giant rumbled, "Oh that's swell. But what do we do with the others?"

The officer, shook a second, as other men in work clothes and large tool chests were filing in, recaptured his aloof bearing and smiled, "Kill'em or let'em rot here."  He began pushing at the tool box. "So. What can I do for you - and get that dirty - receptacle - off my desk. You have business here?" Here, was an unnamed holding house, one of many so called temporary facilities which were in fact older than anybody alive. This was a jail, a jail for those who had no charges against them. It works better to leave such places without official names and off the regular listings. How else can you just let uncharged pesky people just rot?

The big man in kilt made an impassive face and a vague hand gesture, "We're here for the changes."

This particular building was nearly all stone. "What changes? Please, get that thing off my desk. Now! What changes?" Why were carpenters here? Can't people get anything right?

"Repairs. They are due."

"You mean that stupid memo? Look at this place. You! You, and these.. these.. mmm.. others, I didn't approve any repairs. You could perhaps stud my horses, but I'd need to check your breeding papers first," the officer's voice was haughty, self assured and thoroughly, condescending. He insisted that he hadn't officiated any request for carpentry work and therefore there would be none, implying additionally that the man before him was annoying in his merely being present, that he never could be anything but annoying, and that further explanation was not an obligation of his position nor code of conduct.

Things had already gone way too far. Some carpenter. At a glance, a Protestant of the lower classes, all decked out in tools, but the attire looking more like a warrior, especially if you read faces and demeanor. Nowadays, very few people can read coats of arms, crests, mottos, standards, pinsels, let alone hunting and war tartans. This official had his share of government issue tinsel on his own uniform which drew from various protocols of identification. But, probably, the only symbols to which he attended were the numbers on his paycheck. He didn't see a serious message spelled out in heraldry on that dread of a man standing before him. And body language? Those who do not care about the feelings or needs of others do not attend to demeanor. Why bother? Body language was not his language. His was a language of telling. Listening was an unused appendage. He spoke only in an aloof language of cool dismissal from a seat of authority. Authority, in turn, was whatever he authored for the carriage of his whims, which he took to be synonymous with the will of a majority. Majority was a highly selective count of those who did count.

So, who actually counts? A guy the size of a rhino stands before you and you brush him off as if he does not count? Do you see the problem here? Not everybody can bow. Not everybody can cope with frustration. This carpenter had spent four years while correspondences were slighted, brushed aside, or blinked away. Four years for what? Not even a trapping of legal mediation, review, factual presentation or appeal - process - just new exits to leave. And now the leash was broken, a heartbroken Da was spiritually dead. No, the carpenter wasn't here to fix woodwork. He was here to repair the fouled teeth of a clockwork that refused to turn.

Our haughty officer did not see himself as he was seen, a defect, an impediment to movement, to be removed. In practiced arrogance, he didn't look up when he just issued flipping wrist gestures over his head, that spoke, go away. Gesture or words, what should a man in his position have said to the tawny muscled laborer standing before him girdled in a belt sagging with heavy objects? I don't know. But, this wasn't it. A hammer driven through his condescending skull was his only notice of error.

There were others in that facility. In various parts of in this reworked almost medieval stone building, SS types, local militia zealot followers of Ian Paisley, not too unlike Klu Klux Klaners in the States. They were supplied in a steady stream from the ranks of the regional UCDC, UDA, UPA, UPV, UVF, RUC, Jesus, more juggling of letters than plain folk could absorb. At least the KKK sticks to a single name. The IRA is just the IRA. But these guys, armed to the teeth, with names sprouting like the heads of Hydra, were ever ready to parade spite and hate down any neighborhood street to undermine any attempt at conciliation lest the requirement of peace lead to one man one vote and a real census, which is all that was being asked. 

Men of storm trooper mentality, here under direction of the Ulster Police, were each in turn greeted with the cordiality of tempered steel. Arrogance is stiff but yields to an axe. One screaming jailer, minus a foot, was trying to plea that he had children. That was to no avail as the carpenter methodically delivered his axe through successively higher sections of anatomy. A last plea, "I have.." stilled to a swipe through his teeth exiting the back of his head.

This was no longer a carpenter of wood. History had vented the Hound of Ulster. Massive ropes of pulsing veins stood off his temples and proceeded as a tangle of vines down his neck to dive to then from his straining biceps to his forearms and on down writhing on the backs of his vibrating clenched hands. In an appalling wail that could melt armor, "YOU HAVE MY SISTER !"

Then that scream. A gash ripped through the fabric of reality into a vile nether world releasing an explosion of shrieking agony of damnation from hell itself. In this flood of sound doom, his violent red hair was straining on end, lapping like flame at the darkness above. Each wisp of red emanated lightening. Electric rage buzzed from a brow crested in individual droplets of blood. One eye rattled wildly in its socket, as the other clenched hardfistedly, turned inward to behold his own fury. Teeth, all of them fully exposed gnashing on phantoms. Vibrating tongue spewing a spittle of molten rock as an erupting war tremor that was paralysing. A primal Galeage scream was all it was and that was plenty, a word that meant justice yet could only mean, in these tones, death.

Two jailers died during in the span of terror of his tremor. "There is no raven at MY throat!" he quaked, slaughtering any antagonist before him. And then, when the silence came, when even the dripping of gore was no longer heard, "Find the poet. Give him this. Let him record history in the blood of justice!" Thus that sticky axe dripping ooze, was passed.

Gavin McGuinness, found in a heap in a stone cell, was unable to stand fully erect and could not face even modest light head on. The young poet barely rasped at the axe, with his eyes cradled in the fold of his elbow, "That's not my weapon of choice."

The hound softened and assisted the poet to his feet, "You may decide otherwise. Come Gavin. Come. Your wife is dying." A twisted band of string was still on his ring finger, as it still is, as hers was. Her need was the only thing that stemmed his swoon into darkness as he saw her so wasted away. Though his grip was insufficient for the axe, he clung to her like a sprung trap, with his head buried in her bosom. "Katherine, my Caitlyn stay. Stay," muffled though it was, echoed in the now silent hallway. Her reply, with all her strength gone, nearly unheard, "My only request, ..." she barely could draw a breath for a good bye, but managed, "...is don't become a bitter man."

She died a bit later, but those were her last words. The young poet just kept his face buried in his hands sobbing until the flaming raging hound placed his massive left hand on the poet's head, "You kept her spirit alive. There was no more you could have done. If only I had acted sooner.."

Gavin wept, "Without the scepter, there are no sooners... just shreds of evers. You are all there is of her. Will you release me of her wish? Ian. How can I keep it?"

Swelling, with his war tremor renewed as a wail into the stone echoic dark, the hound of fury raised his dextrous malignant fisted dirk high toward the sinister helve overhead, still wet of justice. From the axe, blood and chips of bone were scraped free, and wiped onto each shoulder of the kneeling poet. "As I am of her, I release you, in bond of her, to me! Your bitterness is mine. Your love is ours. Your justice is my justice. I spit on Catholics as I spit on Protestants. There are only the good and the bad. Brithem will belong to the good. Death to the rest." Then he screamed the scream that echoes until this day, contaminating every cold stone in Ulster, "There is a debt to be paid. This bill is not settled."

Incongruous soldiers in a dark stone hallway straddled a stream of gore with fists raised in solidarity. That was the seal. Thus were opposites wed.