How did your writing career progress?
One of the first things which happened was Pamela Brown asked me to read a book, “Of Mice and Men” by Steinbeck. I read the book over a weekend and I asked her the next time I saw her, was she trying to make a fool out of me because one of the characters has a mental illness, Lenny, and I thought she was associating me with that character because I associated myself with that character.
But she didn’t know anything about my history, and you see I associated with that character because I thought there was something wrong with me.
That’s what I always say to people when they first meet me. I tell them that there’s something wrong with me, because within half an hour, they think that too. I make jokes about everything. That is how we dealt with things in jail.
Getting involved in Creative Writing was life changing for me and working with Prison arts Foundation was brilliant. When I got out of jail, people would ask me what I thought about jail and I would tell them it was fantastic. It was the best two years of my life.
A life changing experience?
As I said, I never felt freer and I was writing all the time. I was very observant as a child so I was able to use that to write poetry. I started to win loads of awards for my poetry. One of my poems
My Home Town
Wee streets of cobbles
So dark and so grey
Street lamps all busted
From riots an’ affray
Old dolls with trolleys
Rushed off their feet
Searching for bargains
To make tight ends meet
A big pot of stew<
On a cold winter’s night
Slopped into big bowls
For familyies just right
The heel of a loaf
To soak up the juice
Pass me the HP
A dinner-time truce
The old days in Belfast
I remember so well
We were beat to the ground
And dragged up through hell
We grew up with nothing
No materialistic things
But in Belfast in them days
We did live like kings
There was a great sense of community during The Troubles and that poem reflects that.
How were the writing classes conducted in prison?
Basically you would get pages and you would just write. I started off writing about my emotions Good ones, bad ones, things I didn’t like about prison, things I did like about prison, and it was a coping mechanism for me. I would write a couple of things, poems, poems that didn’t rhyme, things like that. But then I found a way that I could write poemsand I could remember them.
I think some of that came from my wife who was a singer and I was always listening to her counting herself in and that is where maybe, in the back of my head, is where my poetry comes from.
Kellio (After Coolio – Gangster’s Paradise)
I grew up in Belfast
In the shadow of death
Hell fires all around me
Sucking my breath
I look at my head
And whadia’ I see
A psycho-path – a sociopath
And me make three
We laugh in da moment
At that moment in time
‘Cos rules doesn’t matter here
Livin’ a crime
The hate for the 5-O
The filth and the swine
Dopamine distortions
Of normailities fine
A’m foaming at the mouth
Like a rabid dog
A petrol bomb in one hand
Getting ready to lob
It soars into the sky
And it’s leaving a trail
A wave of destruction
That’s the final nail
Anger, rage and suffering
Eating our lives
We grew up fast with nothin’
Sharpening knives
By the time that I was ten
I had a gun up to my head
Told the British Army
Just to shoot me dead
I raised my arms up to God
Let out a venomous scream
Can someone fucken wake me
From my post traumatic dream
It was almost as if poetry set all my trauma free, released all my demons. I just started writing and it just got easier and easier and freer and freer.
