Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

Against Confession I’m yet to write a real drunken sonnet spill my hot guts onto a tidy square, frayed at the edges, lines dripping like rare neck cutlets, flame-seared, fresh from the skillet to be devoured by some emo-gannets without spilling a drop on their couture, and barely filled they’d doubtless order more— some brains [...]

the gaps, the silence Pity the poor ape that stares upwards from the crust of his round gravity well to view the universe expanding outwards, the silent toll of its own heat-death knell, and seeks to find another mind behind it, a mind that happens to be quite like ours; a finger snap from which [...]

Saturday Morning The solemn silence of the pharmacy: haemorrhoid cream sits snug in pristine tubes next to tastefully designed tubs of lube. And though it’s not exactly privacy, the silence offers up its clemency— the counter doubles as confession booth for wronged lovers who only seek to sooth the itching price of their intimacy. But [...]

Werewolf of London But remember this Dr Glendun, the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best. -Dr Yogami (Werewolf of London, 1935) On conquering the heights of that stark peak, in search of the mariphasa flower that only blooms during the moonlit hours, I was attacked by some carpet-faced freak. And though [...]

The Smile   The smile I want to stamp into the ground is older than the triumph of ninety-seven, it’s older than its name, body, even older than the gratifying sound of promises to nail it this time round and not repeat the mistakes of heathen predecessors. But this clean-shaven boat peers from store fronts [...]

DJ The morning DJ’s gag. O tawdry quip that doesn’t raise a smirk across the city before the regurgitated ditty— the auto-tuned bulimic that the paps pursue for their quota of nipple slips, when China White spews out its casualties, the battle of the B-List deities to be the smile that frames tomorrow’s chips. And [...]

Belated apologies for the lack of recent new content. Marriage, honeymoon, a return to Wimbledon, Latitude and laziness have conspired to keep me from my dedicated shedful of followers. However, that is about to change. For the whole month of September, I am going to be your sonnet hack. That’s right, I will be posting [...]

I had the honour of hanging out with Todd Moore for a couple of days when he came over to London a few years back. All I really knew of Todd Moore was from the terse Dillinger vignettes that appeared regularly in Tim Wells’s Rising magazine. The poems seemed to scan the contents of a moment, much [...]

I might have never finished my degree in Fine Art ( live the cliché!) all those years back, but I’ve got that bit closer to being exhibited by the Tate than my fellow ponces. That’s right, yours truly has written the Poem of the Month on the Tate’s magazine website. The poem is based on [...]

The first chimp isn’t feeling too good, the virus crawls his cluttered veins. All he can do is grab his aching sides tear at the attacking army beneath his skin. The cage is small but spotlessly clean if there is a piece of dirt in this lab it’s either him or the other ape in [...]