"NOTHING IS AS DIFFICULT AS NOT DECEIVING YOURSELF"
- Wittgenstein

The animals are too good for us:
under the dead moon
we are beyond the Pale of evolution
and of revelation;
we go mad when we see the truth too soon.

 

 

GLOBAL WARMING

The larger the species
the smaller the numbers:
this was a natural law
until we came along.

According to that natural law
we are now at least ten thousand
times too numerous, devouring nature
in our addictive greed and through
our greedy cerebration
like there's no tomorrow.

Sorrow is my kind of celebration.

 

 

LOVE AND LONELINESS

Words are on the surface.
The more words there are
the more we can describe only the surface.
Depth is silent, wisdom profoundly silent
like the sap of trees.
Words buzz on the raging surface
of man's cacophonous experience
like poisoned bees.

We do not connect with the always-connecting animals,
nor can we connect with the things we worship.
The paltry best we can achieve in the panic of our words
is to connect with the idea of connectedness
imagining that we are parts returning to a whole.

Desire is the destruction of the world,
love another stratagem of control.

 

 

DOORS OF ESTRANGEMENT
(a song for the ghost of Jacques Brel)

When you're strange
the glamour
of the world is
always out of range.
You stammer.

People who are feared
are never free from fear,
go very soon insane.
All of us are losers
in a world hijacked by gain.

When you're strange
the douceur of the world
is always
out of range.

Our minds are dirty cages
crammed with beasts in pain.

When you're strange you bite
the barbed-wire of your brain.

 

 

Hair-dye
and lipstick:

one is a lie
the other a slick
cheap trick.

 

 

FUNDAMENTALS

There is an Islamic saying:
"When a dog barks, angels flee"
- which does not say much for angels
or their inventors.
Nor can one pray where a dog has been.

As Oscar (who never barks
and never licks anyone but himself) lies on
a beautiful Balouchi prayer-mat
waiting to go and run
among the sycamores and cedars,
I consider how comparatively tolerant I am
even to talk to carnivores and breeders.

 

 

THE WIDTH OF EMPTINESS

The Roman poet (Horace) said
a poet should tell the truth with wit and humour.

But nobody's really interested in truth

and with all that has been said and done
truth is not a lot of fun.

 

 

"...good people do a great deal of harm in this world."
- Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

 

 

The lone, stunted tree
on the long, dreary street
is not pathetic
- but glorious.

 

 

TO THE HYPOCRITE POLITICIANS

So why did you not call for
Three Minutes' Silence
for the raped of Rwanda
the butchered of the Congo
or the incinerated of VietNam ?

 

 

GETTING OLDER
(Life is such a deadening experience)
March 2004 - September 2006

The twilight of life
seeps like bad poems
through the cracks of our failure
the downfall and darkness that we
call culture, humanity - ruins of being
through which only lamentation can pass.
Grief is the window beyond all walking
and soon the talking will turn
to spittle
and cease
and all worldliness
and world-as-lie.

Writing my poor, bleak
poems which nobody reads
(not even I)
is every bit as vain as
worshipping an infantile
dream in the sky.

Death is possessiveness.
From the heights
of despairing there's no descent.
I can hardly inspire.
Each breath is a stupefied sigh.
The destructiveness of Man
is the banal frivolity of Why.

What I write is not so much mission
as witness that the beginning of terror
is not so much beauty
as mind.
And isolation - floating
with butterflies in the stomach
above the abyss of stupidity -
is not so much loneliness as loss
of what never was but cry...

 

 

GUAYCURÚ

No word for 'must' or 'have to'
No ownership
or punishment
and no incarceration
for any creature
nor art nor manufacture
which are blasphemy
as terrible as man's proliferation

And no name that does not change
and no name to a face
No kingdoms of regret
nor republics of sleep
nor ministries of sickness,
theft and lies and death

No shame in stifling a starving child
nor stopping an old man's breath.

Where 'human life is sacred' millions die in war and genocide
and the rich get richer
and the world becomes the wilderness
the hypocrites and warring rich call peace

and I am dream
and sex is just as
infantile as religion

and human soul is nothing but
the human wilderness within

(Human, all too human)

*

Life is just another word for pain,
and deadening.

*

 

ZAÏREASTER POEM

Three million people died in the recent
Congolese wars, but no-one around here
or indeed in most of the armed-to-the-teeth world
seems to know or to care
(just like Rwanda)

though they are outraged when I suggest
that nobody important was crucified in Judæa that week.
Jesus, immured by a disappointed Peter
became even more cadaverous
before he was taken out to be disposed of
as my neighbour would dearly love to dispose of me.

 

 

Language is our existential prison

Doctors will do all sorts of shocking things to a person
for glory and money or just for the hell of it or out of 'duty'
They will irradiate you, put electricity through your brain
give you terrible drugs, remove parts of you
and rip out the organs of animals
to put into you - but for no money will they rid you of words
not even by simple lobotomy.

Trapped in their horrible system
they'd rather confine you to their medical prisons
than help you escape the prison of words
whose walls are like waves through which none
can pass into wisdom.

[Optimism = infantilism, voluntary blindness born of words/language]

 

 

THE UNGRATEFUL LIVING

Either we are alone
in the Universe/our brains
or we are not.
Both situations are profound cause for profound thought

by the only stupid animal
the only celebrating animal.

Our rarest attribute is honesty.

All descended out of Africa
from a Hottentottish Eve
we are terribly inbred and, until our end,
there will be no end to our diseases.
We golden codgers who melt the world
are melted only by sentiment and loss.
Every human was - is - deadly,
even Gandhi, even Jesus.

For consciousness is more than we can bear
and all our games, drugs, gadgets are failed escapes.
Art, religion, money, war, marriage, laws, progress,
nationality are attempts to squash it
into something we can manage.

So we confabulate ourselves into moral
and cerebral virgins: barbed hymens guard our brains
to stop us understanding just what we are:
the only stupid animals
(always celebrating our stupidity)

who, with our machinations and machines
remake ourselves as robots of desire.

Being hyper-autonomous
I am acutely aware that I am not person but process
- and yet also an island accessible only at the highest tide.

The self-invented, self-enhancing soul is only self
is only consciousness: continual neural, virtual masturbation
- or perhaps a deadly virus
strangely untraceable in its location.

The Chinese Emperor
who built the Great Wall
had everything that was wrought or written before his reign
smashed upon his pavement or consumed by flame
so that he would be thought
the only source of civilisation.

Thomas Jefferson recommended to the State of Virginia that 'sodomitical women'
should have the cartilage of their noses pierced with half-inch holes
as punishment.

_________________________

The Eighth Deadly Sin: to be alive.

_________________________

 

GOD AND ETERNITY ARE FRACTIONS OF NOTHING
21st April 2003

The most dangerous animal
is an animal that's scared.
Civilisation makes sure that
most humans are mostly fearful -
which is why there is no such thing
as power for good.

The swallows arrived today.
Flitting, swooping, chittering,
each weighs no more than a letter
and, feeding, feeding, flies each year
from Ireland to South Africa - and back.

You'd think that
the only superstitious, the only
worshipping animal

would worship swallows
or Arctic terns who fly from pole to pole,
instead of a foreskin-collector in the sky -

would celebrate superhuman
swallows instead of 'human spirit',
'human courage', 'human heroism'
and other sickening, self-congratulating
humbug !

 

 

GLAD THAT I CAN NEVER KNOW
EVEN MY FATHER'S NAME

"The more conscious we are, the more mechanical we become."
- John Gray, in STRAW DOGS

We have no Own Beyond
(consciousness of consciousness is only words)
so death, and life outside our consciousness
are such a problem for us
(the only accusing, the only stupid animals -
the only contemptuous, therefore the only contemptible of beasts)
that we lie to ourselves all the time about everything.

 

A mythical soul is no substitute for a tail.

 

 

MORE JOTTINGS

 

Ephemerica rules the planet of the dead.

In French the words 'auteur' and 'hauteur' are indistinguishably pronounced.

Depressed people do not kill themselves - because they simply haven't the energy/motivation.

Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Hippocrates,
Æschylus, Demosthenes, Xenophon, Archimedes.
Pædophiles are now beardless.

 

Fuel prices go up in the forecourts
They are forging the weapons of spite
Brecht in Hell! - let it all start crumbling
- preferably tonight!

 

Blog

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OLD WORK IN PROGRESS - CUT AND RE-ASSEMBLED
AND NEITHER FINISHED NOR TRASHED
_______________________________________________

 

Though quietude � deux and sharing,
food and wine and music, plants and stones
are the best of pleasures,
solitude is the most
delicious, least of sorrows.

Uniquely, what Man puts into life
is Death - while seeing his 'soul' as sanctum
and not slaughterhouse.

Trapped in our private catastophes of comfort
we only seem to live:
comfort, even more than consciousness,
makes criminals of us all.

...hovering like pale moths between madness and sanity.
Madness is what fashion-doctors say it is;
sanity: what business makes us buy;
consciousness: the madness of not being
but wanting to be: new rot in new wood.
We are no more alive
than the machines that are our only progress.

The only problems are human - and
the human problem is the problem of scale.
The outer darkness is much more inviting
than the inner one. What people call
'the miracle of life' is really the malignance of existence,
a very expensive and consuming hotel.

Why should we need reasons for suicide
when life for those whose consciences are open
is the only Hell ?

 

 

"In cold blood" - the cold blood of war and punishment
and especially punishment of hot-blooded acts.

Artifice and ruin,
structures of deceit and self-deception,
are the processes of civilisation...and things decay
because the Universe is expanding. When it
eventually starts to collapse
time may run backwards - and will we resurrect
and return to wombs, to seed, to ponds
to everything reducing into nothing
absolute nothing
which is what we fear death might be ?

Religion's tissue is refusal to confront reality
- which places us lower than all other animals.
Religion (which is blasphemy) is just another
great fault in our horribly faulty design

The only problems are human - and
the human problem is the problem of scale.

 

 

THE DONKEY-MILL

Madness is what fashion-doctors say it is.
Sanity is what business makes us buy.
Life has become the madness of not being
but wanting to be: new rot in new wood.

Because sanity has made us suppress
the primordial in us
and wipe out as much of the natural
as our mad technology is able to, I lie
like everyone else on the terrible edge of the clothed machine,
half-strangled by Ariadne's thread, watching the donkey
walk round and round, all day, every day for her whole life
to feed the arrogance and shamelessness
that come when the primordial goes.

Donkeys have trodden mills for thousands of years.
There are no memorials for the millions of horses
that died in the First World War - for the propagation
of madness. We are no more alive
than the machines that are our only progress,
and we even think we are more free
than corn milled by the donkey in her misery.