Each dawn the human mind is dark

with something more than night.

____________________________

"No-one can be called happy who is still alive."
- Solon of Athens

____________________________

BEYOND THE PALE

Beyond-the-Pale
does not do similes nor metaphors
nor family
nor birthdays, nor Christmas
nor bars, nor restaurants,
and very little sex;
does not have television
nor washing-machine;
does not do hygiene
nor publishers
and has never been employed -

he's someone the banal avoid.

THE MEMOIRS OF SISYPHUS

Pity poor poetry
compromised by shoddy words.

Music can soar sublime
on pure and fresh invention.

Paint can transport the eye and mind
into new ways of seeing.

But poetry is weighed down
not just by meaning but by
the narrow limits of our paraplegic
understanding.

Pity poor poetry,
the disabled art.

FROM THE PLANET OF THE ZOMBIS

The Inuit have no words for army, weed or wilderness
And English, which has no words for
ennui, saudade, Weltschmerz or zabvenniy,
is dumping wholesomeness.
Behind the vacant faces
of the employed and unemployed
are not so much beings as demanding
tangles of unending pasta-brains
pushing the whole of Nature into a shrinking ghetto
and down compulsively-disinfected drains
with cage-trolleys offered by the greedy
gauleiters of obesity and sprawl.
Shopping is murder - and a kind of suicide by shelf.
We think we are the pinnacle of Evolution,
above Nature - but animals
do not despise themselves.

Original Sin is Self.

PAINLESS

is the word pain
and meaningless the word
meaning.

The ultimate and supreme
invention is
the polythene bag
such an elegant, easy
painless
and obtainable
means
of escaping words.

VARIATIONS
on 'Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen'

Waking
Weeping
Aching
Sleeping
Buying
Eating
Vying
Seeking
Giving
Grieving
Living
Leaving

BIG BANG

In the Beginning
God burst like a Balloon
Showering the World
With dirty shreds
Of indestructible Hypocrisy.

EVER, EVER, EVER MORE VICTIMS
for Dr Robert M Sapolsky, vivisector

The baboon
Desperately holding the pig's heart
Going septic
Which "scientists" have plumbed in
To his neck
Cannot cry
My God!
My God,
Why hast thou forsaken me ?

'western values'

TALKING TO ALBERTO CAEIRO

Life is infection of matter
molecular fever
a painful collection of scatter.

If I - a clot of clabber and bones -
were stupid enough to desire to
"have my life over again"
I should want to be born a shepherd
not of sheep
nor even of wolves
but of stones.

BONE TO BONE
homage to Vasko Popa

Apart from everyone
I listen to the crows
And admire the blood-red
Japanese Quince flowers in April

The long-tailed dancer
With Cyrillic teeth is laughing
While I practise howling

Which is poetry

'BLOOD IS THE BELLY OF LOGIC'
in memoriam Ted Hughes

Farming is more swords
than earth-savaging, earth-exhausting ploughshares:
exile from Eden,
starvation and infection,
hacking and sacking of the growing green,
overpopulation and empire,
power and glory,
restlessness and greed and vivisection,
savage fear of what is animal,
guilt and comfort and uneasy self-satisfaction.

SUCCULENT CHILD

Owned by the State
Herded by parents
and teachers
and examiners
and doctors
and police
and social workers
and other children
and almost everyone
into the auction-mart of marriage
and the abattoir of employment...

6th AUGUST

After Hiroshima
all beauty is unbearable.
Light is the condensation
of darkness.

THE HAPPY PESSIMIST

I love to hear that man's works have been destroyed
by earthquake, flood or hurricane
and claimed back by the teeming void.
All man's works are wrung from pain
- and all his secrets are the same.

A GOOD TIME IS NOT AS GOOD AS NO TIME
November 2000

Culture is crime
Is cancer
of the soul
A crying hole in its covered-over darkness
Is the manifold and fast-decreasing
means of coping with
the guilt of human consciousness
Is the voice of my eyes
before the eyes of your voice.

Because time is the food of time
(so many forms of time)
death is the most modest
mode of transport.

When time becomes too tight
it's time to die
and enter timelessness.

Every city is malign.

PROGRESS...

...is progression of madness.
In fighting death
we extinguish life.

GeNOME

Humans are too clever
to understand that their intelligence
is their stupidity
and Nature's mistake and misery.

A POEM ABOUT NOTHING

Before acceptance -
illusion

After acceptance -
burial

My dog and I
are awake together
both
dreaming
of
bones.

COMPASSION

Pity the pig who has never seen light
Pity the food that she eats
Pity the Christians, Buddhists and Jews
and the people and dogs that they've beaten
and killed in secret and in the streets
Pity the dolphins in tuna-nets
Pity the tuna, too,
and the 93 million new babies a year

and the pitiless, affluent few.

THE POET ALIEN

Down to the plain of prose
I fell from the sphere beyond poetry
where the light and the dark were equal
and nothing in rows.

DAYS

are for getting through
and then
forgetting.

THE TERRIBLE PARADE

Every minute of every day
for nine years
they bombed The Plain of Jars
without even declaring war.
And still, every minute of every day
terrible atrocities are wrought
not only by Americans.
Every time I turn on a tap
or my computer,
every time I light the fire
or cook my dinner,
with my every breath
a piece of world dies.

CONSCIOUSNESS, THE COMMON MADNESS

In the Virtual Gulag
we are always - even in our wars, carnivals
moonshots and museums - always mourning
consciousness, being human,
our capture by the sheer grotesqueness
of Normality. Only deserts will last,
and time, the prison as inescapable as the word
preventing everything from happening at once,
is God,
is Love,
is Self,
is Pain.

THE FUTILITY OF TRYING
TO COMMUNICATE THE FUTILITY
OF COMMUNICATION

True poetry is to prose
not as dancing is to walking, but
as going on a pilgrimage is to
running for a bus.
There isn't much of it around.

Truth is not a dancer, but a leper
at the gate beyond the honey, the money,
the glamour.
Truth is a stammer, not a song.
The world and all things wonderful
go wrong.

.

THE PROBLEM OF SUICIDE

is that by the time
it is absolutely necessary
you are absolutely incapable.

PORTRAIT OF St AGATHA WITH CREDIT-CARD
UPON WHICH RESTS ONE OF HER AMPUTATED
BLUE-VEINED BREASTS

Passing between The Slaves of Glory
Tabernacle and the vast, last fast-food
outlet, still considering
the irredeemability of Man,
I, who only twice brought stinking beggars home
and have aspired to kiss the sores
of dogs, felt the packaged-stupid
God put his product in my mouth

And in that little
delivered-moment of God's fun
I recognised the dark side of the moon
to be humanity,
and consciousness to be
the dark side of the sun.

CHRISTMAS AND EASTER POEM

The world's report is blemish
upon the blemish that calls itself
"The World"
not tyranny of consciousness
rotting before it's ripe.
If the "Holy Innocents" had lived
most would have composed another
ugly mob. Some would have kept bees.
If Jesus had not been stoned to death
(or throttled by his disappointed followers,
or even crucified)
he might have saved the world by planting trees.

POETRY READING

Just another little organ
of the Great Conspiracy:
poetry as pathetic part
of the entertainment industry
keeping us from questioning
our words, ourselves, our species
- life itself.
Is Life worth living ? No -
not as long as people say
it must be so.

Full moon above the council tip:

Rubbish displays intelligence as trash.

A POEM DEDICATED TO THE VAST TRANSNATIONAL
MEGA-MEDICAL-PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

Through language we lose
our innocence,
our animal integrity.
Through knowledge
we become ever madder and rougher,
unworthy to kiss the quiet
intestines of quadrupeds.

After Descartes
'scientists' nailed dogs to walls
to show that beasts could not suffer.

THE PERFECTION OF RUINS

Normality:
at the same time an easy trick,
a crime and an incurable disease:
Knowing how the world works
makes you sick.

Borage flowers
once floated in the wine
we drank to douse
the falseness�
Now Honesty and Thyme
and Borage plants have multiplied
amongst the ruins of my house.

To be proud to be a human
is to be a stupid devil.

The older the colder
the wiser the sadder
the fewer the words
the bleaker the level

as we find out that we can't move
from the bottom of the ladder.

SIX VERY SHORT POEMS

Man in a shower:
his only reality
the removal of reality.

Polluted stream: the liberation
of having nothing to hope for.

Relentless blue skies;
the smug sameness of hundreds of haiku.

Sex-change operation -
but no surgery to alter my species.

Fantastic Offer -
Western Values
(integrity not included).

Dawn in Liverpool:
between the two cathedrals
Hope Street is empty.

AS WOLVES ARE SQUEEZED IN
DWINDLING WILDERNESS THE
WEREWOLF AGE GAINS
HORRIBLE MOMENTUM
in memory of Vasko Popa
(1922-1991)

For wolves who, like us, are caressed
by the ocean before they are born,
to live is all threat and hunger and flight
and reduction.
They don't expect
to know what is happening, don't
require explanations from demonic
fractals of consciousness, just know
that the world is shrinkingly
full of danger and guns
and hatred and traps.

Thus wolves know everything.

The quintessential English

word to end all:
TROUBLESHOOTING

IF YOU WANT
TO BE HAPPY, STOP
WANTING

On my way to the light-switch
I fell down and whined:
O Kali, O Shiva, O doctor! I want
to get rid of my mind.
Here's money
for the abortion-solution -
'nor can there be work so great'.
Let the unwanted implant detach
and float away down my gut
down a sewer, through the tide
with all the other disgusting
human pollution.

PLEASE REPORT TO RECEPTION

Expensive pot-plants in hospital
and'healthcare' foyers
die from neglect.
Some of us are docile enough to go
to those places willingly.

DEAD TREES IN A GRAVEYARD

For mind hurts.
And people are only as good
As the trees they have planted.
Mind hurts and comfort destroys
and each newborn baby demands
a few hundred trees to be cut now
and again and again.
And so depression:
unprepared awareness
of the truth that is not beauty,
the unfillable void,
the truth you have been made unprepared for,
that you will want to be
talked back from,
drugged out of,
electroconvulsed away from.

For what is the truth ?
Felling and selling,
drilling and killing;
dead trees in a graveyard;
things and rotting fantasies
and people worshipping fantasies and things.
For truth is knowing
that to be human is only to crave
congratulation for being human.
For truth is the terrible
window looking out from the debility
of shame at being human.
For depression is the truth beyond
enlightenment: rational inconsolability.

FOR THE DOG THAT I WORSHIP
HEAVEN MIGHT BE A SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Those who invented God
had no more compassion
than those who claim to love him.
The more universal
and omnipotent the god
the meaner the mind that worships.

A mind that worships itself
is merely entranced.
The mind that worships a flea
is pretty advanced.

THE INVENTOR OF SLAVERY
"I am always sad, and I always know why."
- JEAN GENET
quoted by Mohamed Choukri

Because all gods are now bred in gulags
wisdom is the slaughterhouse,
and knowledge is the scrambled
brains of screaming pigs.
Thus,
gasping in the air of mindful cruelty
in which we all are illiberally hurled,
I fight for breath
to curse the hatefulness of being
human (all too human)
and want my lungs to stop

- for worse things than mere death
await me and the whole wide world.

THE 108 DELUSIONS
OF WORLDLY DESIRE

After power
there is only boredom
like the long worms
that crawl
out of every bodily orifice -
the cockhole
or the corner of an eye.

Canine and capitalism:

the best in my life costs the least.

The only God is Dog and there
are tragically many.

The snow falling
tells me to stop thinking.

__________________________________________

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 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 have degraded.

THE WORLD'S BEAUTY IS DEFORMED

I understand 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 Americans
(93% in the Bible 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.

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.

"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 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 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.

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.

ABSOLUTE ENLIGHTENMENT

The best way to
let go
is to
go

_________________

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

'Hay que tomar la muerte como si fuera aspirina.'
Douglas Day (from Journey of the Wolf)

'SEUL LE SILENCE EST GRAND;
TOUT LE RESTE EST FAIBLESSE' - Alfred de Vigny

Much preferring
music to meat
I live mostly in well-fed silence.

(Le silence est bon: tout le reste est détresse.)

SOUL IS WHAT YOU CALL MY PAIN

Humans are almost everywhere.
Most other animals and criminals
are very rare.
Mice are very brave.

CLONTYGORA
'The King's Ring', South Armagh
Homage to Mateja Matevski

The forests have shrunk back to the forest
holed up with the howl
of the last wolf -
the sound of time dying.

The seas have drained back to Sargasso
soup-thick with their dead:
the stench of time threshing.

And some of the old stones dragged and stood up
at the flinty beginning of hatred
by the river that once was
still stand, only half-wrecked,
their fissures expressionless.

DATE WITH DEATH
with acknowledgment to Gazjon Kotoni

Tonight I'm going on a date.
We are meeting up at eight.
A drink, and then I'll walk her home -
I won't keep her out too late.

TELEVISION

It's not that images are powerful
but that consciousness -
already cursed by narrative - is weak:
everybody watches, mimics.
No-one sees.

We are all distorted
unreadable reflections of each other.

In this globalisation
hypocrisy like prurience
is a vast equaliser
making us all moral latrines
horribly disguised as clinics.

THE LAST OASIS

Let's all bow down again and worship
The Great Satan
the Satan of competitiveness and sentimentality
the Satan of property and celebrity
the Satan of morality and electricity
the greedy Satan
who certainly would not dream of offering
even the King of Kings
even the smallest kingdom or republic of this world
because He is making this world
His desert kingdom
and His arsehole the only oasis.

FEELING TERRIBLE

After ejaculation:
the rapid re-uptake of a
minimal release of Serotonin.

ANTI-POEM: WORK IN PROGRESS

Obviously, song came before speech
and moans came before song.
Whales sing refrains and antiphons,
compose sonatas.

Darwin thought that certain fish designed their own eyes;
researchers report that the planet's remaining fish not only
like but can also recognise
the less-commercial kinds of human music.

[Perhaps a line here ending with 'status' ...]
[Perhaps a line here ending with 'God' ...]
I both fear and pity people who think they are better than cod.

ZION IS THE WILDERNESS
I am a witness for the Angel of Calamity

Here in the rain and the sunshine
constantly fighting the walls
I am choked by the dust
surrounded by rubble
rich rubble of comfort
and dust of expensive ideas.

We screw the planet to get rich
And all we do is victimise and bitch...

Uprooted
I see no roots
only grubs
and greenness and earth
and the sky blue and grey
and Cerberus howling from transplanted jackal-heads
and Charon taken hostage in a nuclear submarine
and the primroses on my mother's grave
sprayed with the churchwarden's weedkiller.

I curse the grub eating the world
that will never be other than grub;
I curse the numbsickness spores
of Normality
down in the dry well
of the tower of the world's tomb.

And the Dog's tail wags in the grim grey gloom.

ESTRANHA FORMA DE VIDA
THE PEACOCK AND THE CORPSE

the only illogical
creature thought
that it invented
logic

continually congratulating itself

in its terrible hotel
sleeping and scratching
amongst reflections in distorting
dirty mirrors

the intimacy of sex is as nothing
compared with the privacy of orgasm
(though the two are usually confused)
- is as imaginary
as the truth of emotion.

KNOWLEDGE COMES IN BOTTLES,
WISDOM IN A BROKEN CUP

This is the story
Of Good and Evil:
Man is God
and Life's the Devil.

FROM THE NON-PRESIDENT OF THE NON-SOCIETY
FOR THE RIGHT OF BABIES NOT TO BE

The only problems are human - and
the human problem is not so much
the problem of consciousness
(which, attempting to erase
its own intrinsic misery,
makes criminals of us all
through work and sex and history,
language, story, family
and the illusion of achievement)
- but the problem of scale.

Among so many billion toxic fogs
of consciousness I have been slowly suffocating.
Honest witness is beyond-the-Pale.
Truth is written only in dust
and spoken only by dogs.
The paradigm of all desire
is lust.

*

I have consulted Harmal and the Prophets' Sage,
the Visionary Mushroom, Nipple-Cap and LSD
- and all have told me Reason is the only means
of knowing about reality
and unreality.

It hurts - but only a fragment of what hurts
is due to reason.

*

All skins and no centre,
we self-modifying master-onions strip
the skins from everything except ourselves,
and in the Limbo between beast
and hallucination
we have no faces
just screens of desire and terrible ties
no souls
just tissues of lies.
We are no more alive
than the machines that are our only progress.
What people call
'the miracle of life' is really the
unnecessary evil of existence.

The worst thing:
to have been born.
The best thing:
to die alone
no more forlorn
but witness for the Angel of Calamity.

Artifice and ruin,
structures of deceit and self-deception...

As I sit in my beautiful, neighbourless garden
regretting my conception
I'm trying to write new poetry,
learning slowly to be nobody,
hoping to be nothing
but witness for the Angel of Calamity...

THE SUCCESSFUL ARE ONLY SUCCESSFUL AT
BEING SUCCESSFUL

CITIES ARE THE CANCERS OF THE WORLD

Listen to the whispers
that wriggle through our cars.
Watch the shifty shadows
telling us of wars.
Adam was a golem
Emotions are the devil
Money is the axle
of the juggernaut of evil.

CHALLENGING EMILY DICKINSON

1. "Because I would not stop for Death
Death kindly stopped for me..."

Nature's red in tooth and claw
But we are black of heart.
There's more "soul" in a jackal's paw
than all our works of art.

So I will kindly stop for Death
and do the gracious thing.
And with the gift of my last breath
transform to sweet
nothing.

2. GOODNESS ALSO CAUSES PAIN

I have eased three lives from aching -
who can stop a heart from breaking ?
Each day is taking and forsaking -
night restores bleak strength again -
bread and wine are earth's unmaking -
everything we do is vain.

REMEMBERING EDITH PIAF

Raped into life, regretting
every day I've lived - do I regret
the way I've lived ? Always apart, aghast
and gullible, longing for a past
I never had, hoping that, somehow, I might wake
up one morning not regretting that I awoke,
that, somehow, peace of mind might dawn,
I now think living peace will come
only through dementia or lobotomy.

Fathers are criminals
foisting yet more suffering upon a planet
which is a miracle of pain.

To be born is to be defeated. So I dream:
"Here is the pill of happiness.
Here is the pill of death. Choose one."
Only the wise will choose the latter
knowing that soma-happiness will degenerate
most likely into geriatric helplessness.

But wisdom is the life of animals -
that caged bear, for example, which cannot even squirm,
or move while suffering
unimaginable agony as her joyless gaolers
extract her gall, day in, day out, like rubber from a tree.
For us it only manifests itself in death
dispensed by us so drivenly.

A pity beyond all telling is hid
in every egg and sperm.

THE SAD TRUTH

We are truly ourselves
in not being ourselves.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PEDDLE TRUTH

Evil also lurks inside the innocence
we cunningly invent in this meaningless
and insignificant mistake of universe -
within whose labyrinths of tragedy,
mean victories and disappointments,
machines talk only to machines.

To search for truth and holiness
among the artefacts and institutions that replace us
- as for a soul in the slaughterhouse of mind -
is quite ridiculous - yet to do otherwise
is the blasphemy of millions - is to agree
with the devils that we are gods.
Better to be ridiculous than blasphemous.
The people that I most respect are trees.

DEATH IS WHAT THE DAWN IS CALLED

(Memory is the mask of ignorance).

Perfection (it seems to me)
is the single-cell creature.
(So far have we fallen from Grace!)
The rest is just Nature doodling compulsively
to fill in time.

SAVIOURS NEVER COME IN THREES,
NEVER COME AT ALL

It is difficult: despising the arrogant
without being arrogant oneself -
the conundrum of humility (about which
only the rich or ambitious talk), or, at least,
the conundrum of humility without resentment:
the happy wisdom.
It is easier to despise the rich, the powerful,
the USA, slaves of consumption or religion or 'democracy',
and all the other poor-in-spirit.

According to one deep philosophy, "The least of creatures..."
(such as an amœba or a cancered cell) "...contains the Universe."
But we whose consciousness is blasphemy
reduce the universe by arrogance
to something worse than nothing.

Thus the only possible poetry is praise and sorrow for all
that we devalue (written with disappearing ink); the few with poetry
truly in their hearts are mute. The world is full
of silently-screaming tabernacles.
Our world is a bewildering film in which the world
is trapped. Who can honestly believe in miracles ?

THE SCHEME OF THINGS
for Dalan Lusaj

Cracked are the mirrors of my belonging
Streaked with tears the windows of my seeing
Broken the pavements of my being:
Cracks are the scheme of things.

MORONIC, TESTOSTERONIC

The Prime Minister who talked
of locking up London's beggars
decided to liberate Iraq -
and so make there
many thousands dead,
imprisoned and mendicant.

FLYING OVER EUROPE

Above us the blue.
Beneath us an old, old map.
I cannot see the borders or the armies
only rivers and forests.
The machine we are in
(eating sandwiches which taste of Treblinka and Gulag)
wipes through the mildew
wipes through the blight
of history. Those millions
of terrible events might not have happened.
But they are still happening now
out of sight, day and night.
Good news is something misreported.

ON THE OWNERSHIP OF RAINBOWS

The almost-full moon is almost
motionless in the sky
while jerking like a puppet in the sea.
And always, anywhere,
anyone could be
anyone, was anyone
is nobody;

and the monstrous somebodies are now
everywhere
murderously claiming and disputing
ownership of mountains,
deserts, oceans and the air.

DAILY SUICIDE
after the Albanian of Bardhyl Londo (1948- )

We kill ourselves every day
At grubby tables in the café
At the polluted racks of newspapers
In corrupt circles and sordid intrigues
We slowly kill ourselves
And of course we don't realise it.

Eventually the moment comes:
to take out the revolver -
but you can't pull the trigger
because you are already
a long time dead,
and it is well known that
the dead can't kill themselves.

The idea of Heaven is nice for children.

The concept and system of Private Property
was brought north of the Alps by the Romans.

Cuddles cannot help me forget
or cope with consciousness.

ALPHABETICAL

A is for atom, which has many parts.
B is for bomb, so dear to men's hearts.
C is for cock, what you do to a rifle.
D is for doom, which is only a trifle.

E is for end which we're all of us living.
F is for future - it's quite unforgiving.
G is for Google, search-engine of choice.
H is for hoodlums, who once were sweet boys.

I is for me who should not be here
J is for Jihad against all things queer.
K is for Kali in Heaven Above.
L is for Limbo the circle of love.
M is for monster - what Man has become.
N is for nation and nasty and numb.

O is for ogle - what I do to dogs.
P is for progress that's lost in the cogs.
Q is for quiet: the peace of the dead.
R is for raucous: the thoughts in my head.
S is for steel destroying the world.
T is for triumph with banners unfurled.

U is for umbrage, so easily taken.
V is for virtue by value forsaken.
W doesn't scan - I'll leave it out.
X is for xenophobe: a mere lout.
Y is for yours, from terrible mines.
Z is for zillion - far less than Man's crimes...

ERECH/URUK, IRAQ

We're told that writing was invented here:
lists of weapons, foodstuffs, kings, kinsmen,
laws and penalties.
Here lived the first Man-God, Gilgamesh.
Here children beg for ballpoint pens.

Here there is no fence around the ruins,
no turnstile, booklet, shop or guide.
Here there are no tourists, toilets, postcards
or Keep Off notices.

Here is the first city.
Here urban evil started
to gyre its tentacles across a world
which now it strangles.
Here was the New York and Washington
of seven thousand years ago -

the best of man is his ruins.

Not far away is Hamurabbi's Babylon
whose ruins were so recently reconquered
by American Marines,
and turned into a huge base
with helipad and roads wide enough
for trucks, the shards of pottery
and threshing-floors
covered with hardcore and gravel
dug up from elsewhere.

The best of man is his ruins.

MAGNETIC
a refrigerator poem composed from a kit
which does not have capital letters or punctuation

never sacred liquid naked as fresh worship
could touch cup kiss flame or cover hand
and long for gift of love & light
for air
fire
god

dark voices drink from blood-whispers
soak almost
then burn slow
and die devoured by nectar
I too blush in sweeter hunger
am eye
aroma
ocean
candle
dinner
sod

some lovely river singing once
where any lip must beg for secret skin
every deep dark glistening moon
thus trust & tantalize
my ear like hairy wine before
pale wild morning blows
perfumed self not soul

for I would always taste time missed withal
my mind a broken soft explorer
haunts this live red star of ache
clutches the bitter torrent of
some surrounding universe

HAIKU

A teeming ant's nest -
mind, examining itself,
finds only matter.

A CHOCOLATE FIRE-GUARD

Art is not concerned with Understanding
but with its concealment
beyond the cold reality of our behaviour
void of understanding until death.

Every morning I wake up to words.

If only words would let us leave their sweet, corrupting prison
where the living bury and eat the living, and no-one dies,
we might emerge from deep behind the walls
truer than all or any of the poems in the world
beyond parade and panoply of wanton wonders.

Our destiny is not our destination.

From birth apart,
hooting bleakly through the fog
that drapes a world of fraudulence,
the true poet writes only for his unwitting dog
because he knows he has no audience.

BEING MODERN

I have no nationality
but not-being
and not being without.

BEING HUMAN

The kite is freer, bolder
than I am, even when held on its string,
and (like everyone) I am always
just a string-holder.

TO MY MOTHER

What I miss is not you but the mostly
closed-off paths of mutual communication by which
some spirit might have succoured us...

If you are anywhere now
you are everywhere - but you are only in my head:
a few frames of film revised
and jammed in the gate of a consciousness
which will itself so soon be dead.

Eternal love is love mutually unrealised.

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

[In 1916, at a low point in the middle of the First World War (The Battle of the Somme), a 'terrorist treason' was perpetrated in the Second City of the British Empire: a handful of well-armed fanatics occupied the General Post Office in the centre of Dublin as part of a general insurrection which did not materialise. The leaders were executed. Ireland's national poet, W.B. Yeats, later wrote an elegy to this 'terrorist outrage', called Easter 1916, which included the famous - and meretricious - lines:
"All changed, changed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born."
- raising the important questions: How can beauty be terrible or terror be beautiful ?
As a result of the Easter Rising, and independence (and a civil war) 5 years later, nothing much changed for the Irish poor for almost 50 years, except increased abuse by the (essentially English middle-class though self-servingly anti-British) Catholic Church in the vacuum of authority that the English had left.]

The twin verticals on the Dollar-$ymbol
borrowed from coinage of the Spanish Empire
represent the Pillars of Hercules,
now called Gibraltar (a tiny British part of Spain)
and Ceuta (a tiny Spanish part of Morocco), west
of which only heroes could sail
to the eternal bowers
of the Isles of the Blest.

But O, those Davidian heroes!
Those Goliathic towers!

'"Alone" - the Emperor of words...'    - Alma Mahler

'Wherever you look, there is an end to your troubles. Do you see that precipice ? That way you can drop to freedom. Do you see that sea, that river, that well ? Liberty sits in their depths. Do you see that tree - stunted, blighted and barren ? Release hangs from its branches. Do you see your throat, your gullet, your heart ? They are all escape-routes from servitude. Are the exits I show you too difficult, requiring too much courage and strength ? Do you ask what is the straight road to freedom ? Any vein in your body.'    - Seneca

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Time is kind
to very few
until the end
when time is
infinitely generous.

NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT

98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees.
We have polluted 98% of the world.
Dogs are bored 98% of the time.
Nearly 98% of life is mechanical.
More than 98% of us are lost in the plot.
And parrots think,
and parrots mope.

O praise
the 98% of thinking animals with the integrity
not to pray or hope.

WARSHIPS AND WORSHIP

The mind
is both tool and tool-user.

Hope is both crime
and the mother of crime.

The infantile God is utterly discredited
by his First Commandment*.

300,000 oak-tree years
sank with one ship-of-the-line.

*After writing this poem I read Marina Warner's comment on the First Commandment:
«Now that I have returned to the Decalogue for the first time since childhood,
the voice of the deity strikes my ear as that of a petulant and charmless tyrant
who is covering up his own ineffectual promises with bluster,
the kind of humourless boss who is given to loud renditions of My Way
at the annual office party.»

WAKE

Philosophy's a corpse
continually washed and combed
wordblind, megalithic
I prise open its eyelids

to receive the light
of the dark dog-star.

That which is written is hollow:

illegibility
of knowing,
everything repeated
an hundredfold -

we climb in
but never climb out.

THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUICIDES

Let us dress up
in hairy brown blankets
disguised as god's testicles,
bump into people, crush them

for

A POEM THAT IS NOT A VIPER
IS A BATTERY-TURKEY

for

beneath the mountains of bone
among the skeletons of trees
upon the sickly seas
of not understanding understanding
Progress is death's pseudonym

and

This Liberty you vaunt
is sold with terrible compulsions

This Peace that you manipulate
drips out of dreadful mutilations

This Civilisation that you serve
is wanton devastation
All your Heavens and Utopias of luxury
bleak and full of angry comfort

We are raped and raping
Hope is the crime and mother of crime

We are always on the way, and never arrive
Some infinites are very small
Happiness is an imaginary number
and a by-product
(with what evolutionary worth, I wonder ?)

LET US DRESS UP

in hairy black blankets
masquerading as god's testicles
and bump into people and crush them

for

destruction
was the birth of civilisation
and in destruction of destruction
it slowly dies, ever more demanding

The only true achievement
is renunciation

and not understanding
is also understanding

FOR LULJETA LLESHANAKU

The only true reward's Oblivion -
'Spirituality' is just sexual mysticism
for the poor in spontaneity and spirit,
the cruelly-effete
who suck out each other's tiny, naked truth
and dress it in deceit.

WHILE THE DOG'S CLAWS SCRATCH UPON THE HERMIT'S DOOR
11-11-2003

All power is abuse of what is not itself
and all power is abused.

At the cenotaphs
the holders and the representatives of power,
the generals, the admirals, the air-vice-marshals
pretend to mourn
the powerless that their predecessors murdered
by proxy as dictators also do
through words like Glory and Defence
and Fatherland and Honour
and Democracy
and Western Way-of-life - which we've now reduced to lifestyle.

Masters of claptrap, they call
mass-murder sacrifice

but horses are the inevitably-unsung heroes
the unremembered victims
before replacement by the tank

and the Holy Grail is in the basement of a bank.

MAYBE THE MAGGOTS

Heads full of dreams
too many heads
only one dream

in the world now poised between
Hell and Hollywood
genocide and overpopulation

words and politics and war
there is no memory
only expectation

for what begins with power ends in mysticism.

We are the devil of our creation
and only the maggots
can grant us salvation.

ELEGY FOR THE LAST WHITE RHINOCEROS
which, having thrived for 15 million years was wiped out in two generations

Let weddings be marked by funeral rites
and divorces celebrated by banquets jointly created by both divorcees
and let parents be for 10 years renewable like passports
and let tocsins be tolled at every birth
and let all students write out a hundred times that truth
is the tightrope between a true sense of self
and a full awareness of one's own not inconsiderable
contribution to the wasting of the earth.

A HISTORY OF WAR

Spit in the soup
Ejaculate over the meat
Piss into the wine
Weep into the dessert
Vomit on the table
Bleed into the dirty straw.

NAMES AND NUMBERS GAMES

A man who kills five people
is called a psychopath, a serial killer

A man who kills ten people and himself
is called a terrorist

A man who has a hundred people killed
is called an entrepreneur

A man who has a thousand people killed
is called a politician

A man who has ten thousand people killed
is called a Minister of Justice

A man who kills a hundred thousand animals
is just doing his job.

A BRIEF REFLECTION ON DEATH AND CHRISTMAS

How do I know I'm not dead
when I am surrounded
by beings who have nothing but other beings'
programs in their heads
and rusty old drives
and don't seem really to have entered
the world they are wrecking ?
Only those who refuse to have anything
to do with Christmas are
in control of their lives.

SEROTONIN

Where are the feelwords
to stop the depravity
the destruction
of the stuttering world
'transfounded by nothingness' ?

Our nullity
made up of senseless, insensible words...

(I am private coagula
always detachable)

(I am trying to wash my thesaurian heart with my words)

(the meanings
mean nothing)

(the only harmless thing I can do is to die...)

Shit is the colour of Paradise !

Planting small trees on the fine
half-sunk sewage-barge of my consciousness,
how I (private coagula
always detachable)
love the swirling wet leaves of October !
How I love my lostness in good wine !

That light which is dancing on water
like a sad toothless bear before the only god
(of nothing but crimes) is desperate not to drown
and be a victim of the moon and tides...

(Inside the light is where the shadow hides...)

1% of what was beautiful remains
and 1% of us enjoy it for a little of our time
thinking this is all there ever was or could have been...

Death is just the end of self-deception.

Miroslav Holub's dog knows that
we are no more than the rocks that we smash

(and each of us was once a single cell...)

So - planting these trees on the fine
wrecked sewage-barge of my consciousness,
how I love the the dark ground
and the clinging wet leaves of December !
Oh, Serotonin! How I love being found
and transfounded
by dhrupad and food and good wine !

CHARON
"The living wash in vain." - Samuel Beckett

I (a nation of one)
smile at the sad passports
(they are all false),
the suspicious stains,
(the curious and terrible genitals)
the litter-strewn mud,
(the bear's pancreas)
the smiling blood,
the baboon's head screaming from a bullock's shoulders,
dead dogs, dead bluebottles, dead viruses, dead causes
(dead animals who thought they were not animals).

Only the dead know better.
Only the slime is demure.
Only the night is young - so briefly.
(Not even bereavement is pure.)

CAPITALISM: MAKING THE CREEPY GLORIOUS
"Suicide's the only human altruism."

Because we invented reason we think we are rational.
Because we can wipe out so many life-forms
by mere wilderness of mind we assume we are superior.
Because we invented the future we imagine we have immortal souls.
Because we are the only lying and treacherous species
we invented loyalty
and love, suspension of disbelief.
Because we are terrified of our reason
we invented mathematics and games, stories, poetry and hope
and perfectibility and torture
and terrible, mindless, industrial slaughter.

ARMAGEDDON, AFTER ALL, IS A FAIRLY SMALL HILL

Just an ordinary day: ordinary people
work and do other usual things
in the landscape of screams.
The cleaners, the clergy,
child prostitutes, bookbinders, loss-adjusters,
judges...the rapists, the teachers,
mechanics, chiropodists, vivisectionists,
politicans, the police, the swindlers,
the imams, the accountants, the advertising-agency janitors,
the slaughterers of battery-chickens,
loblolly-men,
spies and shit-shifters, computer-programmers,
together (with many more) compose
the landscape of screams
as a jigsaw of horrible fragments of false dreams.

And why would the creator not despise us
as we despise dogs
our very own unnatural selection ?

REAL MEN

don't shave Real men
rarely wash Real men
don't have wives, jobs or religion
Real men kiss and kill their own meat
Real men never pray
or lock their houses Real men
don't have houses Real men
cook real well
Real men like muck
Real men don't fuck

WHO GATHERS KNOWLEDGE
GATHERS PAIN (Book of Ecclesiastes)

The twist, the torque in our brains
that caused language
caused badness and sadness and madness
unique among beasts.
Take away the words (and much of the pain goes)
We are almost only words (and have nothing else to say)
Too many words in the world (and not enough truth)
The busyness and the acquisitive words (remembering...dismembering)

What can I say about words
whose naked emperor is solitude ?
No gods, no magic helpers (and words are only work)
Why do we prefer stories to insight ?

Religion (just the mirror of arrogance)
Philosophy (fake analysis of arrogance)
Knowledge (mere myth)
(wisdom is silence)
Thought (only words endlessly permutating
spawning their busyness)
Because we invented reason we think we are rational.

Madness is the price of language.

Can we not reduce the words that pass for awareness
(that tell us we are swimming in our sinking) ?
Reduce them to very small poems (less smug than haiku)
Or just to breathings
Or just to looks ?

Let there be no more words !
Let there be no more books !

HOW TO BE NOBODY IN AN AGE OF CELEBRITY
for Suchoon Mo

I met a man who claimed
to like my poetry.
I tore it up.

DAY

(To my Doctor - and my Dog.)

I spend each day
recovering from the dread
disappointment of waking up
from addled sleep.
At night, exhausted
I creep back to bed.

Along with Schrödinger's cat
I am a hole
inside a hole
staring out at a fog.
O to have the connectedness of a dog!

LE STYLE - C'EST L'HOMME

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz. - Theodor Adorno

Conclusion escapes me
slinking away like someone who witnessed
a Mafia murder

and ending up nowhere:
the mined no-man's-land of ideas
where lights swallow the moon
like Viagra.

My shadow: a one-dimensional
even-more-substanceless me
a peninsula
not of regret
but of grief.

Freedom is meaningless
when you're dead
because you are freer
than freedom.

SERMON ON THE MOUND OF GARBAGE
(after Suchoon Mo)

Dearly-beloved!
Ye who are seekers after truth
Hasten unto the internet and the library
Ye who are seeking reality
Put on sunglasses
And ye who seek nothing -
The kingdom shall come
Like another turd
And those who know
And care can go
And spread the word.

ONE MAN AND HIS DOG
(after and for Suchoon Mo)

A man digs
and a dog.

The dog is burying a bone.
The man is digging his grave.

The dog is happy.
The man is not.

The dog is shot.

ASPERGER MEETS ALZHEIMER

Every army is edible -
just fry or boil or bake.
In the Bar des Abattoirs
we talk about Fast Food
and churches, the mindless
wondrousness and relentless
logical absurdity of nature,
and pubic-genital tattoos.
I, le chien manqué, never lie
and never lock my house.
Nearing my demise,
the dirty emptiness of life behind me,
the pure nothingness of death in front,
the inexpensive Bar des Abattoirs
is my chosen nursing-home.

I don't know what age
I am, am of -
I share nothing with women or men
and dislike cities, loathe pubs.
Thinking of death and the error
of being human, I am the bearer
of unwelcome wisdom,
an angry ghost among the shrubs.

God's name is Frankenstein.
We are his monsters.

ANHEDONIA

We are so ugly
that we ruin the world
in our own image.

How can I put up with optimism ?

PITY OUR INTELLIGENCE

brain
worn down like soap
by rain
of thoughts -

how to cope
with the next pain
of thinking -

inquisition and chains
of consciousness -

good can only be stillborn
can only be still
only be still
only be -

be only
don't do
but live between thoughts

and die within the universal pain -

there is no such thing as nothing

in memory of a holy
GUIDE-DOG FOR THE OVER-CONSCIOUS

('He was only a god.')

Among vast galaxies of flaming suns

one small...great...god is dead

We two are falling though the terrifying
emptiness of Space

of loss

which is the only poetry.

Joy is shallow,
Sadness is profound
And love a tiny hollow
In the trampled ground.

Living the sadness,
the sad banality of suffering,
our last sad pleasure is the countdown to death:

This is the last delicious salad, the last dessert,
the last book, the last sleep, the last breakfast,
the last radio programme, the last shit, and now the last ride
in a car for the final
finest sharing act of suicide.

"If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering,
then we are the most maladapted species on the planet."

- Schopenhauer

_____________________

Das Bewusstsein unserer Sterblichkeit macht unser Dasein erst menschlich.

- Max Frisch

The Romans had no word for suicide,
only 'the rational ending of the self'.

"With time, I have learned not to look for anything in life
but the ecstasy offered by Oblivion."
Isabelle Eberhardt, quoted by Sven Lindqvist in Desert Divers.

TIME AND DOG

Time flies
Time heals
The poor in spirit
The meek shall inherit
Time lies
Heavy
Time lies
All the time
Time feels
Nothing
We lie
All the time
We feel
Only feeling

Nothing feeling
Nothing doing
Apart
Apart
Throw discretion to
Gone to the dog
Give him a bad name
And hang him
Nearer my Dog to thee
Pure in heart
Timeless humility

THE NEAREST TO JOY

The nearest to joy
I have known
since I was a boy
on my own
in an attic of junk
was seeing the joy
in my teacher, my dog
as he gnawed at a bone
or romped in a field
or played tug-of-war with a brush.