'Human Progress'
is just the cruel succession of new manifestations of stupidity.

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LIFE ITSELF A REFUGEE

Big
mess outside
big
mess inside:
the quail
dashes back
and forth
across the road
to its squashed
mate.

In the cave
of my brain
I pray
to the wall
and the rocks
and the rain:
cover us

all.

 

COLOURS

First, every tree and beast was burned.
Then the worship of the guns and the
boiling of the blood-smeared
boots for soup. Then the thrashing
of the stars. The Angel has mourned
and wept for six millennia,
yet the dragon-flames of Hell rise
higher than the hairy, leaping
Keepers of the Beard.

Wolves are the Brothers
of Beyond, and on my tiny ledge
I am frozen in and out
at the soulless world's edge

where blue passes for sincerity.

I am terrified of white.
Stainless
and murderous
it chops hearts
and minds; and the moon is bone:
skull image of starvation birth-
whimpering to the blood
drenched earth.

In that ubiquity of bleakness
I move with aching stealth
as the shadow of the shadow of a wolf
among mummies wound by a vast webby mire
of spat-out words.

Red is the spilt blood of burning resistance
and purple broods on its corrupting wealth.
The truest dissidence is generosity.

Black is deep truth.
Flies are the sun's kisses.
If we kiss flies
that celebrate the beggar's eyes
we'll find compassion, not on his lips
but in his powdered bones.
Beggars are the only human
heroes - the only wise:
unhumbled by their own eclipse.

Grey is the silent witness of stones.

Brown is beauty, dung, earth
in harmony with the green of Manless Harmony
and yellow is sunrise-eagerness
though each dawn the human mind is dark
with something more than night
(only the heartless can love humanity).

Orange is the sunset-resignation
of the dragon's breath.

But white is frightening
freezing and sterile
eating with stainless democratic dragon-teeth
like cancer
through everything

everything.

 

FOR THEY ARE

Short straws in my long beard
The urine to be drunk on rising
Holes in the moneybag
Tombstone-lichens
The hopelessness of hospitals
Depraved experiments
Screaming rust on the cages
of laboratory animals
Limbs mashed by landmines
The oppressive presence of absence
The despair of asylums
Dead fleas from the Angel
Vomit on in-trays
Frightened albinos
Decaying slaughterhouse-concrete
Maggots on bones
The drowned smells of psychiatrists
And the smegma of the teaching wolf

 

Solar eclipse:

it is rare that a sister
blocks a brother's light.

 

PARADIS DE LA GRIMACE

For Jesus paraded
into death, or allowed himself
to be paraded, or allowed himself
to be so important
as to be reported
as having been paraded.

And after leprous Lazarus
we should take note
that dogs in their eloquent humility
and divine biliminality cope better than we do
with the world that we
and Jesus and his advertisers have degraded.

 

THE WORLD'S BEAUTY IS DEFORMED

'I feel for' women who
for a little fumbling of unfelt affection
endure the violence.
Three of the most charming
human beings I have known
were butchers.

 

BOMBAY CAFÉ

NOTICE

SORRY
NO TALKING TO CASHIER
NO SMOKING
NO FIGHTING
NO CREDIT
NO OUTSIDE FOOD
NO SITTING LONG
NO TALKING LOUD
NO SPITTING
NO BARGAINING
NO WATER TO OUTSIDERS
NO CHANGE
NO TELEPHONE
NO MATCH STICKS
NO DISCUSSING GAMBLING
NO NEWSPAPER
NO COMBING
NO BEEF
NO LEG ON CHAIR
NO HARD LIQUOR ALLOWED
NO ADDRESS ENQUIRY

no kidding�

 

Meat on a plate:

is life itself the tragedy
- or only human evolution ?

 

"HUMANITY"

Correction:
For "soul" read "sold".

 

DAISIES ON THE GRASS

Three out of every four Americolacans
(93% in the Bibble Belt)
believe in Angels.
Angels are kinda mystic.
They drink heavenly Pepsi
And are sexless but not genderless
and make believers Spiritual
and almost Artistic

But who am I to jeer,
who am Borderline (low-end) Autistic ?

 

the joy of suicide

For I will die anyway
Better to die sooner in chosen
conditions rather than later
most probably in pain
in hospital powerless
with tubes and no animal connection
no tenderness, no cuddles
and no music to help you detach
from a world half as full of music
as of din and blare and moan.

Fifty-five thousand American soldiers
were killed in Viet Nam. A hundred
thousand killed themselves
after returning home.

 

Frantic beneath a waning moon

life is only a phase.

STALE GRANDEUR OF ANNIHILATION

For I am awake among the overfed
sleepers of Hell: for truth is the stair
descending to despair
and rising thence to more abysmal truth.
For just because I'm dying doesn't mean
I'm dead. And where
are the killers of the pain of consciousness ?

For beauty dies where comfort lies.

For I am exhausted by the fight.
Why am I struggling to compose the poems
that nobody else
seems to have the guts or perception to write ?

 

DREAM OF DICTATORSHIP
�Es la vida una corrida - o una mala poesía?

DECREE:
That the Plazas
de Toros should be
kept religiously
empty, unstained
by blood or women's underwear.
Bulls, like true poets and flamenco
musicians, are born
and degraded, not trained.

 

FOR TRUTH IS NOT BEYOND EXPRESSION
- ONLY BEYOND ACCEPTANCE

and as a truth becomes acceptable
it turns into a lie
to stifle the world's screams.
We are as we are
in our greedy cruelty
because we have hacked
love from reason's belly
and chopped it into dreams.

 

GREAT TECHNOLOGY -
PITY ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO USE IT

Let's clone Jesus from the DNA
secreted in the Turin Shroud.
Clone the Prophet from his beard.
Clone the Buddha from his tooth at Kandy.

Clonings like that won't be allowed:
They'd rather clone policemen,
civil servants, yesmen,
top executives and revered
athletes. No Kafka. No Khayyám. No Gandhi.
And certainly no Chief Red Cloud.

 

THIS IS THE SUICIDE HELPLINE

If you want help to commit suicide now: press �.

If you want to plan your suicide in advance
and elegantly: press �.

If you wish to be sent our Info-Pack on setting fire to yourself outside a bio-lab, embassy or abattoir:
press �.

If you want to help someone commit suicide: press �.

If you want to encourage as many people as possible
painlessly and quietly to kill themselves to avoid
medicalisation and lingering, increasing powerlessness in
hospitals, into which everyone else is herded like sheep
- in other words, if you want to spread the word
about true freedom of choice: press �.

If you want to write positively
about suicide
please contribute to
the Dissident Editions website.

NOT A GUILLOTINE, ALAS, THE DRASTIC
BLEAK PORTCULLIS DROPS THROUGH
MY HEART

Camus declared that
the basic metaphysical problem
is the question of suicide.

All the insoluble problems of humanity
result from having failed
to answer that correctly.

Among the good reasons for killing oneself
is the sad awareness of the impossibility
of killing everyone else.

 

Remaining perfect,

my dog failed to see
two butterflies on his bone.

 

TWO TANKA

Street-furniture
everywhere, but no signposts
direct you to the abattoir,
all the brave animals...
...and the world
overrun by cruel cowards.

*

Our comfort: measure
of our disrespect for many
creatures, many things.
In my beautiful garden
the feeling: How much longer ?

 

THE CAR OF JAGERNATHI
(or THE TOTALITARIANISM OF CONSUMER-CAPITALISM)

"Money can only circulate freely in the realm
of continual disappointment." - Hakim Bey

The Sufi Malamatis
led sinful lives
so they could do good and worship God
without expectation of heavenly reward.

But we lead sinful lives
because the only other options
are social or actual suicide.

The worst that we do
to each other is nothing compared
with what we do to mammals, fish and birds.

Outliving evolution
we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tyranny
of our concocted words.

This Chinese bear, captured while a cub, will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket while a dirty metal tube inserted by "superior" animals directly into its liver drips "magic" bear-bile like rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...
But hundreds of thousands of animals suffer just as much mindless cruelty in American laboratories. In the "democratic" USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published. "Free speech" on animal welfare is regarded as criminal by the American r�gime.

"UPRIGHT MAN SEEKS DIVINITY
THROUGH INFLICTING PAIN"
(Derek Walcott)

A people's virtue once was poetry.
Now it is credit-rich banality
and false celebration of mere celebrity.
In that ubiquity of garish bleakness
I move as the shadow of the shadow of a wolf
among mummies wound by the vast webby mire
of words, in which there is no cranny
of culture that I honestly
can crawl into. I have never found
a human to admire.

 

TO ADAM, A NEWBORN CHILD

I will not wish you wealth
but immunity to the doctors
the teachers and parents
that all pose a serious
problem for your spiritual health.

Heroism

is terrorism
of the self
by the self
for the self.

 

MEMORIAL HYMN
TO DIOGENES OF SINOPE

Dogs are our souls.
Consciousness is mere complexity
of joined-up holes -
a rotten shroud
of overweening cruelty.
Dogs are our beaten,
starving, tortured,
pampered souls.

 

THINKING WITHOUT LANGUAGE

All water is holy.
Animals are too clever
for words.

MANKIND, THE ROTTEN IDOL

Because we love to do and hate to be
we hate "as if" and live in want of
everything to be as we desire.
So we shall leave
nothing except the breakdown we have made
through wanting the pathetic order that
our chaotic minds run riot to achieve.

 

LETTING GO

Less menacing and ugly when collapsed
they should have left the World Trade Center
to be graced by whatsoever germinated there
instead of erecting something even uglier.

 

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE IS,
OF COURSE, THE SERPENT

The stupidest beast
inventing a god of blame
expelled itself from the Garden
of Eden,
which it is now succeeding
in turning to Hell
for all the uncursed creatures.

Self-portrait in the Garden of Eden

ABSOLUTE ENLIGHTENMENT

The best way to
let go
is to
go

 

back to part one

 

What I teach is suffering, said the Buddha -
but he was not Enlightened enough to leave it at that.
Nor am I.

 

 

part three