Callum J. McCready is an Irish writer based out of Belfast. When not working by day in retail and night he moonlights as a writer.
Although his interests lie in various mediums such as filmmaking, photography, music and sound engineering, he is, at heart, a writer and poet first and foremost.
In his leisure time, he enjoys exercising, gardening, watching movies, listening to records, reading, and spending time with his family and friends.
All Out Of Sorts
twenty to two on a Saturday night.
while everyone’s hitting the town,
I’m wondering, “what the fuck am I doing with myself?”
There was a celebration of some kind, I can’t recall,
so I sat for three or four hours surrounded by family,
not heading to work, pretending I’ve got better things to do.
instead I sit here grouchily, passing it off as a head cold,
getting pissed at little things like having to wait to eat,
the noise, the music, the heat of the room, the smell of nail polish,
my Dad taking the fork I’d picked out specifically for it’s size and weight,
leaving me to choose between two either too small or too light for my liking,
I can’t decide which, and the tap in the upstairs bathroom that
no matter how many times I fiddle with it keeps on running,
much like my interior monologues, inferior dialogues…
I got too dependent on alcohol to deal with social situations:
lock your insecurities behind a veil of insobriety.
People were infinitely more tolerable when I was drunk.
I used to think I became a better version of myself under the influence;
more confident, adventurous, extravagant, elegant, brilliant,
but I wasn’t fooling anyone, much less myself…
I set a high bar, lofty benchmark, only to crash back down,
– this is reality –
and part of me worries I’m going to do the same thing again,
skip into infinity ad nausea, from here to eternity.
For all my talk, I’ll never cross the finish line, follow through.
New Year, New You? Play. Stop. Rewind. Play. Stop. Rewind,
a never-ending cycle of coulda, shoulda, wouldas.
It’s not always like this, but right now I’m all out of sorts.
– winds of change blow through my winter nights, but I’ve my doubts.
Despite forward motion, I fear I’ll roll backwards, start
from the bottom once more my Sisyphean climb towards
a peak always within sight but forever out of reach, –
Is it destiny, casting myself in the role of struggling artist, spending more time
on mental masturbation than wrestling with shadows,
constructing the framework upon which
to build a life?
shivering and shaking, close to tears,
thinking of inadequacy, expression,
the deep, dark recesses of the heart,
I worry it’s my fate to fail –
“Now, one more time with feeling…”
I’m using adjustment without bad habits to mask the fact
I worry I’ll be no closer than where I was before;
not a state of transition but that of stasis,
repeating myself endlessly,
a permanence frozen in iced clay,
marble stone, a ceramic statue,
a Golem without a Code.
They say there’s nothing to be stressed about so you bottle it up,
put on a brave face, crack a few jokes and keep on going like
your troubles are no one else’s business,
that you’re not going to let them get to you,
how you’ll walk the path you’ve carved for yourself:
never look back.
But you’ll be keeping an eye out, stealing
a glance in the mirror to see who’s watching over your shoulder,
talking behind your back, and then it comes crashing down all over again…
How many times does one collapse before they don’t pick themselves up,
can’t, just lay out and do nothing, let the world pass them by
while they remain behind to gather dust in the desert?
It’s much easier to give up, surrender to exterior influence,
circumstance, than to walk, make the effort of
taking matters into one’s own hands.
But that’s tonight, and this night isn’t like any other.
You can never tell where the light will shine come the morn,
but when it does you wake up and start afresh,
so who’s to say what tomorrow brings?
(01:40-02:40 – Sun, 12th February 2017)
Going All Dark
when you overthink, brood to the point you’re almost overwhelmed by
a wave threatening to break over your head as it bangs off the rocks,
the best thing to do is get some fresh air, take a walk.
I’ve a tendency to mull things over in extended periods of solitude.
I like being in my own company, but there’s times when I wind up
going all dark
and it feels like there’s something inside that wants to escape
and I have to pierce a hole in order to ease the pressure.
all is well, you’re having a great day, and then something happens,
someone does or says one thing which serves as the trigger to
a teardrop explosion; it takes control, requires everything
within your power to stop yourself from boiling over.
Sometimes you just want to let it out,
warts and all, like the one on my right wrist.
Bergman had one on his face: I have mine.
Release is not the problem but rather how you channel it.
A clean slate, empty page, blank canvas, open space.
Unlimited potential for artists, achitects, gardeners, harvesters,
the reavers and weavers of dreams.
towards balance,
equilibrium,
euphoria,
we march…
would we know how it is if we never felt the pain along the way?
Performance
writing with this silver nib pen reminds me of Boris in Goldeneye,
spinning it round his hand compulsively while he works,
Alan Cumming’s click! click!,
gifted to me the other night.
That was when I was pretending to be a poet,
“a fringe artist” as she called it.
Tonight I’m supposed to be a security guard.
That’s part of my complex.
I’ve always found it easier being someone else.
It’s when I try to be myself that things go to shit.
In a way we’re all pretending,
lying, kidding ourselves that
it’s better than the real thing.
The noise outside, the lives and the light:
are we awake or asleep, dreaming,
alive or dead?
Is it all part of a scheme,
one and the same?
Are we guided by the want to be good or
ulterior motives, selfish means and desires?
Concerned with honesty, truth, self-assured,
but still false, scared –
“all I know is that I know nothing”
– claiming observant objectivity, yet
I feel too much, take it home with me.
though I’d planned on taking the day off,
I got a fleeting flicker of madness, glimmer,
to show up out of spite and rub it in their faces.
But there again I was play-acting,
running the risk of sanity’s tightrope
against my better self, just to prove a point.
Merged, blended, intermingling,
I’m going with the feeling.
It’s better that way.
I no longer want the tension I used to require.
I want sincerity.
These walls are claustrophobic, smothering.
Maybe that’s why I’ve left the door open.
Though the air is cool, chilly,
at least it’s something.
My body’s responses remind me
that at least my physiognomy isn’t lying.
The boiler churns over in the background.
We’ve all
had a role,title at
some stage:
child, son, daughter, mother, father, spouse, love(r), ambulance driver, postal worker, civil servant, police officer, youth leader, business owner, drunk, bum, thief, con, murderer, junky;
roles defined by that tacit and famously tenuous thing known as
society,
a self-fulfilling prophecy certified, ratified by
You
, Your acceptance and perpetuation of same-said archetype.
I want to throw away labels.
Why do we need identifiers when we can simply
be?
I want to be somebody,
someone else,
myself.
But then again,
that could be another part of the performance…
a look…
despite a
manic day,
busy week of
all manner of things, years of
gestation, transformation, a lifetime of ups and downs, bullshit, everything, that’s the thing I took away,
a look…
as I talked about
this, that and the other, she leaned forward,
her head on her hand, left,
face partially obscured, middle and index fingers softly resting on
her lips,
resisting the bite,
gaze strong, steady, unbroken,
yet in
the visage amidst
light, dappled freckles, behind glasses,
in
the chestnut fawn eyes
I could detect
wheels turning, machinations moving,
a shimmering dance,
the sheen of a sea, shining ripples
floating in moonlight, current following course, unreadable,
yet
clear
all the same…
The Galway Review 