mark ryan
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kill 'em with kindness
To err is human…
Forgiveness can be the most impossible. How many wrongs can twist inside a heart to make it a victim? How many grudges must we carry, pulling us down like gravity? A life led in ordinariness attracts its fair share of hurt and trauma. But to dwell in the oil, will only make the soul dark and heavy.
To forgive then, is what we must do. Here lie letters sent to those who can be forgiven, composed in all honesty. But it’s the forgetting which is the trickier part of healing. With a splattering of poetry to wash the wounds clean, these words hang like olive leaves on tough branches, soaked in blood from the scars that are still healing. Forgiving though, of course, makes us divine.
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everyday miracles
Every day there are miracles, before us the wonder of life dances in our eyes. The light filters through the grey, illuminating such beautiful visions. What diamonds do we pick up from our own path, which blessings are to be plucked from the vine of life?
Everyday Miracles is a collection of poetry exploring the light, divine abundance that populates our waking day. Happiness is a construct of joy, miracles, light, and hope. As we ascend the tree of life to the crown, where all radiance emanates, we can dwell on those things that make life worth living, and we can appreciate the climb.
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everyday nightmares
Every day we are confronted by the nightmares that seep into our lives. Horror wears many cloaks, stealing the light and casting such long shadows. It slowly becomes more difficult to stumble through, weighed down by guilt, pain, and love.
Everyday Nightmares is a collection of poetry exploring the darker, more melancholic aspects of our lives. Within these painful markers, there is also the Suicider’s tale, strung through to narrate what happens in the great beyond. A collection which touches the void and brings the dark inside.
seasons of a wandering heart
Seasons change like memories. Swelling on a yearly cosmic tide.
Never free from change, we move like blood coursing through a body, pumped by a heart under the pressures of life and circumstance.
Discover this photopoetry collection while you drift, snapshots in time across the seasons that wander into your eyeline. From Spring to Winter, course your path across the yearly interval and meet visitors such as love, pain, wonder and friendship.
Wander, and wonder with eyes and heart wide open.
A Collaborative work with June Okochi.
dislocated
Horror comes in many forms. It can creep at the door, surprise us in a truth or dwell within our very bones. To escape and flee is a natural instinct. But what if the horror never disappears?
Dislocated is a collection of 28 short stories which cover the need to escape, and the horror of remaining. Tales such as ‘Folkroot’, where something dark is lurking in the hotel pond. Or ‘Nemesis’, which takes us to another world where still a darkness dwells. This collection shows you the road to freedom, but warns you with a cold hand, that you may not travel alone.
nothing but i am
She left the earth how she wanted, walking into the ocean as the stars above sparkled in their preciousness. She hoped to join them, to transform into something that burned with a power a million miles away from here. Her departure may be one of sadness, but it was by her own choosing. It was her own way to transform.
‘Nothing but I am’ follows the life of Eleanor, as read through her journal in her final days on the planet. It washes over her hopes and dreams, loves and despairs at the hands of fate and the disturbance of states that begin to corrode her life. Her death imprints itself on a police officer trying to unpick meaning in her demise as she goes through her words and thoughts left in her journal.
black snow
The snow rarely falls, and the coldness rarely touches the bones. Yet this is the wish of one who lives on the equator, longing for the white dusting. When it comes, it can be black or white. Light or dark. Little snowflakes created by circumstance. Too long has a black snow fallen, for once the real frozen landscape is coming.
Real snow is about to descend.
alchemy
Failures washed over his workbench, dripping down his life. His quest to find the secret of changing lead into gold had consumed and shaken his soul. Yet he had merely strayed from the path he was meant to travel, clouded by the misty haze of obsession. When a little book comes into his life, it realigns his fate and lets the alchemy truly begin.
‘Alchemy’ is a story about a man’s evolution at the end of his life and how his preciousness is valued, not in the gold he makes; but the changes that he conjures. Strewn around poems that lead from dreams to magic, and prayers to happiness; the story navigates from despair to adjustment in surreal and magical landscapes.
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leviathan: of the soul
Lurking deep within all of us, even those familiar to the stormy seas, dwells the leviathan. The monster in the soul which takes hold when the sun is so easily burnt out. It is the bringer of the darkness, the chaos and the nightmares. Threatening your little raft of life that is cast out into the world.
Journey here onto the sea of poetry and short stories that explore the waves of emotions, horror and sadness. But keep an eye on the horizon for that little splinter of hope that breaks from the sky.
‘Leviathan: Of the soul’ is a poetry and short story collection covering topics of death, mental illness, suicide and redemption. Hold on against its onslaught.
the gospel of no one
Hidden under the base of a statue of Mother Mary, the current priest of St. Sebastian’s church discovers a small tightly bound book, the contents of which explain the demise of the previous Father, Father Nikolas and the confessions of those who frequented the church throughout his time there. A journey through pain, doubt and forgiveness; the book opens the eyes and hearts, asking everyone for their own confession.
‘The Gospel of no one’ is a hybrid novel mixing fiction and poetry, orbiting religious imagery and spirituality. Hope mixed with the horror of being only human.
impermanence of things
Nothing truly lasts forever. We dance on the fingertips of the ephemeral looking back to our footsteps in the sand. Along this journey, we encounter fables of construction in our mind and stories we wish to tell.
A collection of short stories that take you back in time, statically to the present and forward deep within your own heart. From the sadness surrounding The Astronaut to the evil that dwells at Anaxbly House in Souls in the Wind; we come full circle to the beautifully damaged understanding of Imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, where acceptance of imperfection is the liberation we all desire.
Twenty one short stories make up this composed and compressed novel, all beautifully damaged.
echoes in space
North of the North Pole, you see the Pisces rising. Breaking the horizon like the eye of God. Meaningless words uttered in constellation, bringing us closer to the end. The black hole within all of us, threatening to devour and place us somewhere else in time. Travel into this corroding galaxy with poems and insights of birth, life and death.
A final spatial opus while the galaxies drip down and slip out of view. Echoes in Space is a collection of poetry designed to take you out of this gravity’s pull and allow your imagination to voyage around the stars, touching on the spiritual, the familiar and the most alien of emotions.
keep it together
The summer of 1977, in the middle of a heat wave; the estranged children of the eccentric Van-Blacks all gather at the infamous Nova-Manor to discuss recent family developments over Fourth of July weekend. Their father is dying, & now wishes to build some bridges with his children before he shuffles off the mortal coil. Things begin to take an unusual twist with the arrival of Miss T., a Jamaican fortune teller who sweeps in under an air of mystery to perform a séance.
Secrets and truths slowly unravel, helped along by the butler Mr Perkins, who knows more about the past then perhaps he should. Ghosts, storms & mysteries in the attic all explode over the holiday weekend along with the fireworks. With a body on their hands & new truths revealed, they are all forced to question whether they can live with the knowledge that someone they love is a capable of murder. Independence comes at a price, & not everything is what it seems as they try to keep it together.
graffitied heart
A well-travelled heart sees it all, from street to street and wall to wall.
Soaking in life’s wonderment, from euphoric highs to the deep laments.
This heart is stained, bruised and scarred. Still beating, just graffitied; and bursting to show you what it has seen.
Graffitied Heart is a little book of rhymes and poems, going through the alphabet of existence. And, as with all lives, they can be humorous, horrifying and heartening. A compendium of complexities for your enjoyment.
drifting in & out of sleep
Trying to remember where it all began, when I first started to feel this way. Is this real, or am I still asleep? The hypnagogic state of uncertainty. Knowing the unfamiliar through the transitional magnitude of moments. Come with me, follow the path through snow covered lands into churches of splendour that play out a life steeped in love and lonely anger. Stay a while, and leave me where you find me; lying in bed and thinking of you, as I drift in and out of sleep…
Charting the spiral and ascension into something beyond, Drifting in and out of sleep is a mix of stories and poems which bleed into one another over space, time and mortality. Starting in the snow covered forests of unknowing-ness, it traces the steps that mirror life; through emotional dependence, God, love and coming to the ever reaching self-absorption of space.
free books
(click the cover to download the file)
a substitute for god: religion & film
This study looks at the relationship religion has with film, looking closely at selective motion pictures; ‘The Passion of the Christ’, ‘The Exorcist’, ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, ‘Agnes of God’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. Incorporating attitudes with audience reception and interpretation, along with the cultural importance and relevance in contemporary film.
hope is irresistible
Here is a little book of hope, a little slice of light to help your potato grab the illumination it needs to thrive and grow.
ghosts by proxy
This collection of poems tackles human emotions that range from the fantastic to the absurd, telescoped in to one rendering through life and love, and all that is in between.
as a featured author
the hawthorne project
The neighborhood of west Hawthorne Drive in quiet Greenfield Wisconsin is filled with dark stories and darker rumors. There's the haunting by a faceless creature. They've all seen it. They've all experienced its presence. On the one hand, it seems to desire the life of mortals, on the other, it befriends a small boy. It both mocks and assists. Runs away and stands face-to-faceless face. But in the days leading up to Halloween, events take a more sinister turn, including strange visitations, an eerie violet haze in the sky, attempting murder, breaking-and-entering, and multiple police check-ins... until not one of the residents can deny: something or someone is here to stay.
creation and the cosmos
Discover nature’s revelation transformed into poetry, rhyme, digital photographic art, painting, photography, and more. Throughout these pages, thirty-two artists and writers from all over the world express their emotions and thoughts as seen through the wide-open eyes of nature. From stars and moon, birds in flight, the raging storm, a deer’s quiet passing, the salty depths of the sea, rolling hills and towering mountains: there is art in all creation.
static dreams vol I & II
Shadows twist over our night terrors, bringing with them more tales of haunted pasts, hidden futures, broken promises, and the blood necessary to hold it all together. Where a plot of land seeks to have its grisly appetite sated in return for rich rewards. Where a faceless man stands watching helplessly as the lives of those around him slip past through the years, ever-repeating, always connected yet separate. And where a pair of boys come face to face with the dark secrets of their sleepy seaside town, their own initiation rite now unavoidable. Light the candles and say your prayers, this night may just smother you.
the poet's symphony
Tune in to just a few lines from a song and one can easily be pulled back into a single moment in time, memories rising unbidden. New moments to be discovered, music weaves through our lives tying them all together. Lovingly composed by thirty-one artists and writers from around the world, The Poets Symphony delivers the seduction of music in the form of poetry, lyrics, rhyme, digital art, photography and more. From inspiration to nostalgic memory, love affairs to the musician himself, place the needle on the record and allow the music of life to flow through your soul.