Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Saturday 31 December 2011

'The false humility of hell

is an unending, burning shame
at the inescapable stigma of our sins.'
- Thomas Merton, one-time resident of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

But true humility in this life
starts with the shame of being human,
not the crime of being Christian.
- Anthony Weir, currently resident in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

Friday 30 December 2011

What if,

after death, we got exactly what we expected ?
Would we all be in our bubbles of bliss,
the religious in their antiseptic,
unforested heaven,
the wonderers perpetually wondering,
the thoughtless forever thoughtless,
and I, fulfilled by no existence at all,
the shadow of entropy ?

Thursday 29 December 2011

Training Humans: Hints for Dogs

Remember that humans think they are pack-animals
though they are obviously herd-animals like sheep:
what the leaders do, all will do.
Give them small rewards for obedience.
Get them spayed as soon as your vet advises.
Never let them get into bed with you.
Never let them go through a door before you.
Never feed them before you have eaten.
And never, never leave them unsupervised
with children.

Wednesday 28 December 2011

So obvious that it shouldn't need saying

Education is education,
And bits of paper are bits of paper.
And rarely the twain do meet.

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Some good titles for Richard Dawkins

The Humanity Delusion
The Progress Delusion
The Intelligence Delusion
The Wealth Delusion
The Science Delusion
[add your own suggestions...]

Monday 26 December 2011

скопeц

Memo from a skopyets to Ludwig
Wittgenstein

It is not enough to be silent
about what we know nothing about,
better to be silent about being silent
in the cacophany of consciousness.

Saturday 24 December 2011

Greed will always rule.

Needless to say,
the Landgrabbers of Israël
are crowding out
the shepherds of Bethlehem.
What do 'The Faithful' care,
with only hypocrisy to share ?

Most churches

and indeed most religions
turn out to be
the Church of Me.

The ego-less
are also sinless.

Friday 23 December 2011

It's amazing

how we fall for smiles
even though they have
so often
been picked up from the floor
and rinsed like false teeth.

Often men mount women
from behind
so as not to have to face them,
or kiss them...
around them
a withered wreath.

Thursday 22 December 2011

Wednesday 21 December 2011

Raison d'être - the cutting edge

Doctors 'Play God'
on our behalf - mainly to benefit
the rich and Welfare State-indulged.

While human populations soar and devour,
how medical and other earthly powers
propose to save the planet from the ailment
that is us, will never be divulged.

Tuesday 20 December 2011

Science

Before we sought other knowledge
we first should have embarked on
knowledge of ourselves:
quiet studies 'in the field'.

Alas, it will come too late, long after
the arcana of particle physics, genetics
and brain chemistry are
only partially revealed.

Monday 19 December 2011

Sunday 18 December 2011

So now the Americans have left

the country that they trashed
and depopulated
and patched up with old tape...
while in another country that they trashed
and depopulated even more,
over a million victims
of Agent Orange
suffering, survive.

"All that Man is, all mere complexities..."

Having denatured ourselves
we have devoted our brief and tragic
time upon the planet
to denaturing in one way or another
every other creature.

[The quotation is from Yeats' BYZANTIUM:
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.]

Saturday 17 December 2011

Bad poetry

sounds quite good
when read aloud
especially upon a stage.
But good poetry
is best apprehended
slowly on the page.

Friday 16 December 2011

I suspect

that the Americanisation
of 'homosexual' behaviour
has caused more damage
than its criminalisation.

['Americanisation' = commercialisation, reification, polarisation.]

Thursday 15 December 2011

"History is bunk."

The 'bunk' of history
is ideology: the sound
of axes being ground...


It was Henry Ford I who said
'History is Bunk'.

Wednesday 14 December 2011

There are too many words on the wireless

and too many pictures on telly
and so many people, and so few trees
that our minds have turned to jelly.

[WIRELESS : a quaint old word for Radio.]

Tuesday 13 December 2011

The precious rich

bestow yet more prizes now
for poetry - or rather
for poetic preciousness.
There are even precious
Poets-in-Residence.
Ah, the poets' bathetic desire to please -
will they ever get off their knees ?

Sunday 11 December 2011

Culture

is a structure
designed to keep us conforming
and prevent us from thinking.
The more elaborate the culture,
the more difficult it is
(even for a sage)
to think beyond the cage.

Saturday 10 December 2011

Schopenhauer :




















No man does no harm
.
I have absorbed him
as an egg absorbs a sperm.

Friday 9 December 2011

Thursday 8 December 2011

The 'communists' were right

about capitalist societies.
The capitalists were right
about the 'communist' societies.
The Protestants are right
about the corruption of the
Catholic Church.
The toads are right about the frogs.
The hills are right about the bogs.
The Jehovah's Witnesses are right
about many things -
except life after death -

and those whom I have met
are generous to dogs.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

Gloss on a poem by Paul Celan

Whether time walks or flows or oozes
or even exists is difficult to say -
maybe it stumbles, strikes as we do
through our perception of it...

Time is much slower for flies
who will go on almost forever.
Maybe we surge from the womb
cracking its shells open like nuts
and then lose the kernels -
so there are seven billion different times,
different mandalas, mandorlas which never
return to the shattered shells
that are culture and consciousness.
Yet - in a nutshell - I can miraculously live
with my dying: along with the billions,
I never existed. It is long past the time
for me to sink into timelessless
gorged by and governed by flies.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Aloof,

alone within us lies
the irresponsive silence
of smothered grief,
wherein our disregard
of life within the rotting leaf.

for Paul and Jindra

Monday 5 December 2011

Rag-tree












click photo to enlarge


How strange that money's made
from rags and trees
and not from gold
or skulls or peas
or skins - or mould.

Sunday 4 December 2011

How delicious to be seventy,

solitary, smelly,
without microwave,
cellphone or telly,
without ever having
been a debtor!
I enjoy eleven hours
a day in bed.
Life just gets better.

Saturday 3 December 2011

The immutable stupidity of humans

lies in our unshakeable belief that
it is better to do anything
than to do nothing.

Friday 2 December 2011

The most pitiable people

of our despicable species
are the Natural Outsiders who want
to become Unnatural Insiders -
and the Insiders who patronise
and demoralise them.

In the labyrinth of aspiration
victims cannot wait
to become perpetrators.

Thursday 1 December 2011

After

birth by misadventure
the primly rosy path of progress
to magisterial, unimaginable entropy.

Meanwhile, as our toe-nails grow,
the Atlantic Ocean slowly widens.

Tuesday 29 November 2011

The Permanent Members

of the UN Security Council
are those who flood the world
with guns and bombs,
do deals with terrible dictators,
and continue to
manufacture WMD:
the grim hasteners of entropy.

Sunday 27 November 2011

Take it from me:

It is easier to give up smoking
than shoplifting.
But shoplifting
(like financial fraud)
is also work.

Saturday 26 November 2011

"The Fall of Man" :

Was it when
Adam and Eve
mentioned property-rights
and gave God the first
of many horrible frights
and he had to tell them to leave ?

Friday 25 November 2011

Only a few of us are left

who know the difference between
rifle and riffle
tend and attend
many and multiple
expect and anticipate
alternative and alternate
imply and infer
centre and epicentre
(there are two epicentres to an ellipse)
- meanwhile less has cast fewer
into permanent eclipse.

Thursday 24 November 2011

It is cheaper to buy a slave today

than it was at the height
of the Atlantic slave trade.

Over 27,000,000 slaves are now
an essential part of the Global Economy
[according to a report in 'The Observer'],
and
there are 37,000 'Street Children' in Kabul.

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Tuesday 22 November 2011

A quotation

from 'Hans Fallada', alias Rudolf Ditzen -
who is not to be confused with György Faludy:


'Humans get used to any situation,
and I regret to say that
they get used most rapidly to degradation.'

Gloss on a poem by György Faludy

Don't learn by heart these words of mine
Words are syllables gone mad. Opine
also is a word, and self
is an unsupported shelf,
and life is totally absurd
which is just another word.

Monday 21 November 2011

Yet another Gloss on Emily D.

Mind is not wider
than the sky!
Both are immeasurable...

and I,
as fragile
as a Great Auk's bone,
feel less stable
than a stone.

Sunday 20 November 2011

Saturday 19 November 2011

I remember

when black Labrador dogs
were called Nigger.
In 1940s Belfast I saw no
people of any colour different
from untouchably pale.
(Even now, there are very few.)
But there were picture-books
at Sunday School.

Dogs have always filled me with delight.
I have always disliked being white.

Friday 18 November 2011

One of my readers sent me this

link...

It deserves even wider circulation.

On DNA Testing-kits.

Children are property.
If not, why the obsession
with paternity ?
Why the unnatural,
irrational demand
for merely sexual fidelity ?

Thursday 17 November 2011

Mystery

is history.
But dirt is always with us.
Poems are not even dirt.

Wednesday 16 November 2011

A Big God

is the inevitable idea
of those pathetic people -
winners as well as losers -
who demand a purpose to life -
and consequently have no sense of the ridiculous.

Religious Syncretism

Tuesday 15 November 2011

It is too easy for men

in the death-camp of their distraction
to mistake violence and virulence
for virility.

Monday 14 November 2011

Tantra and Narcissus*

The only 'spiritual' sex is with yourself.
But remember to keep away from mirrors.


* Or do I mean PUER ÆTERNUS ?

Saturday 12 November 2011

Guerrilla Gardening

Why can we not be individualists
AND
contribute generously
to the environment
and the community ?

Friday 11 November 2011

Alas, very few of us

are human beings.
Now we are nearly seven billion
human functions,
merely restless doings.

Thursday 10 November 2011

If there were such a state

as (more-or-less lasting) 'happiness'
it would have little to do with
mere or even communal hedonism,
but be based on Epicurus' thoughts
and be dubbed
Effervescent Pessimism.


EPICURUS (third line added by blogger) :
The wealth required by nature is limited and easy to obtain;
but the wealth required by vanity is infinite -
and costs the earth.

Wednesday 9 November 2011

O Nietzsche,

you were wrong.
It was not Jehovah
the God of More
who died, but
(catastrophe!)
Dionysus long before.

Tuesday 8 November 2011

The Nice Guys

They hadn't the slightest interest
in the Golden Fleece,
but avoided certain neighbourhoods
at night
for fear of the police.

Monday 7 November 2011

It's in our nature...

The more possible that utopias become
the more likely it is
that distopias will result.

Word-order

can also make a big difference
to meaning. Consider the term
hunter-gatherers, given
by meat-obsessed Europeans
to people who were, rather,
gatherer-hunters.

Sunday 6 November 2011

The whole world

is become property,
saith the preacher.

Whereas religion appropriated
the numinous,
and property is vanity,
and we are the property
of kingdoms and republics,
so all, all, indeed, is vanity,
even poverty.

Friday 4 November 2011

Noisy, noisome

blowing-machines
strapped to men's backs:

now the middle classes
object to leaves!

Thursday 3 November 2011

'The Fall'

- was it when
Adam and Eve
mentioned property-rights
and gave a tired God the first
of many horrible frights -
so he had to ask them to leave ?

[Haiku]

An autumn leaf falls -
very likely the Big Bang
all over again.

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Modern woman

'As she entered the kitchen, Eve (who wanted to be called Athene
since nobody would address her as Melpomené
)
saw the three things most threatening to her consciousness :
food, babies and fat old people...'

Re-blogged* from jindra-myblog.blogspot

What is so good about growing old
is that it's a welcome change from being young.

*Of course, being me, I have altered it!

The systematic sabotage of children's lives

Perhaps the extremist American
view of the nation-state is correct.
It forces children of even the most needy

to waste their eager years in school
learning nothing useful, nothing relevant
beyond that they must be functions of Society,
the jellyfish State which fails
to control the powerful, rich and greedy.

Tuesday 1 November 2011

It's not hard to figure:

Jean-Paul Sartre
(amongst other bad philosophers)
was a mass-murderer
by proxy.

Monday 31 October 2011

People who mourn the loss

of wildlife and wilderness
should stop mowing their lawns.

In Spain, even traffic-cops are unbalanced bullies.










< click the Fasces to read the story






The Falangist spirit lives on!

Fascism is ugliest at its lowest level.
A pope can be bought with style and elegance
- but the bullying of nobodies
is highly unæsthetic.


Sunday 30 October 2011

Saturday 29 October 2011

MaxiMini

In a culture which provides the maximum
for living self-contained and self-fullfilled
there is a frightening amount of loneliness,
a minimum of savoir-vivre.

True luxury

comes from within.

Monday 24 October 2011

Only fifty years

after my first and only girlfriend
dumped me, have I allowed myself
to realise that she was perhaps
less than wonderful.

Sunday 23 October 2011

A sensible Jungian

explanation of the interest
in zombies amongst 'the young'
is the inexpressible awareness
that most of us are the living dead.

Saturday 22 October 2011

Intelligence

is as unscientific
a word, and in any case
as unmeasurable
as happiness
- or love
- or God.

Friday 21 October 2011

The reason why

the wise are not
well thought of

is that thinking
is thought by many
to be a mental illness.

Thursday 20 October 2011

The American Way of Life

Eighteen Bengal tigers
(an extremely threatened species)
who were let out by a loony
who owned a "wild-life" park
were shot in Ohio yesterday
because Americans like to kill
first and answer questions later.

America also has twice the rate of child abuse
(physical, sexual and emotional) of the runner-up
country, and of all the states it is no surprise
to learn that annexed Texas is the worst.

Americans think it's funky
to maim and kill - and so
I needn't mention all the other escaped animals
from emaciated lions to a little lonely monkey.


(PS The loony shot himself -
a not-uncommon American Way of Dying.)

Even a rainbow

appears as a rich man's smirk
to the starving.

Wednesday 19 October 2011

Conflating Emily Dickinson

"Knock with tremor—
These are Cæsars—
Should they be at Home
Flee as if you trod unthinking
On the Foot of Doom—"
O flee the Gaudy Bright—
"A Toad can die of Light..."

Tuesday 18 October 2011

'Knowledge is irreversible,'








نوال السعداوى


said Nawal al-Saadawi
on the BBC this morning.

(If only!)

What thoughtless optimism!
What ignorance of history!

Monday 17 October 2011

Sunday 16 October 2011

Abstract Nouns

Whatever 'mental health' may be
it's certain that there's much insanity
uniquely in our species.
And whether 'society' exists or not,
there's no such thing as 'humanity'.

Saturday 15 October 2011

If

there is such a thing as
'Simple Happiness',

beyond the oppression of aspiration
and the bleakness of prosperity

it is the absence of misery
hiding in a little crack
in the wall of false reality.

Friday 14 October 2011

The safest medical procedure

is masturbation.
Though a small percentage of men
have not survived it,
there are no recorded cases
of female fatalities.

Thursday 13 October 2011

Capitalism ensures

that, as a species,
we live on credit
that can never be repaid.
Sacred cows
inevitably butchered,
holy rivers
horribly polluted:

humans soon become extinct
through Total Trade.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

No, John, no!

The truth does not set us free.
It diminishes our inflated egos -
that we keep pumping up with every breath
- and in any case we're terrified
of the only freedom: not negative existence
but the positive release of death.

Tuesday 11 October 2011

How ironic

that Christianity
- which claims to conquer death -
destroyed the idea of
'a good death'.
Logically, all Christians' death
should be liberatingly good.

Now we die in hospitals
drugged chunks of rotting wood.

Monday 10 October 2011

Possession of a dangerous weapon

Language was our first possession.
In language are both our having and our being.
Language remains our most powerful
weapon against the world - and ourselves.

Sunday 9 October 2011

Dogs also pray to Dog

















click for more

It is good
to make people
feel bad
because we humans all
are bad -
though not all-bad.


(with more thanks to my friend Jindra)

Saturday 8 October 2011

The Subtle Art of Translation

'Die Dichtung, meine Damen und Herren :
diese Unendlichsprechung von lauter
Sterblichkeit und Umsonst !'
- Paul Celan

Poetry, ladies and gentlemen:

- what an externalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain. (Waldrop)

- this endless speaking of nothing but mortality and gratuitousness. (Lyon)

- this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose! (Joris)

- this speaking endlessly of mere mortality and uselessness! (Felstiner)

- an expression of infinitude, an expression of vain death and of mere Nothing. (Blanchot)

- just endless and vain twittering about mortality. (Weir)


Don't poets just love wittering on about
the futility of of poetry ?

It doesn't even make us feel less futile.


(with thanks to Almina Kaselis)

Friday 7 October 2011

Prostitutes,

like actors,
are paid half
for performing,
and half
for absenting themselves
to safety
soon after
the repeatable finale.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

We know

only our own
worst nightmares
- if even them -
not those of others.

My brain twists into knots
coping with other people's
ordinary thoughts.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

I couldn't resist 'borrowing' this from my friend Jindřich.
















click picture to enlarge

Majorities

are now Vast or Overwhelming.
The Vast Majority of folk
would not believe that a distinguished
uro-genital surgeon
would collect his male patients' anal and scrotal hair
as a necessary contribution
to the construction of his unexhibited artworks.

The Overwhelming Majority of people think
that we're the acme of evolution.

Monday 3 October 2011

The Snake

in the Garden of Ease
was an Aspiration.
If humans ever had
such unlikely things as souls,
they mutated into locks and keys.

Sunday 2 October 2011

In spite of the Gospels

The True and Only Son
of Christianity is
Capitalism,
which is Monopolism
pretending to
'Democracy'
(whatever that might be).

Saturday 1 October 2011

The 'work ethic'

is not a morality,
but a prescription for
totalitarian wage-slavery.

Friday 30 September 2011

If I were offered the choice

of possessing a soul
or a tail,
I would devote
the rest of my life
to the practice
of wagging.

Thursday 29 September 2011

War

is more than capitalism's
collateral damage
- it is its power-source.

Tuesday 27 September 2011

Monday 26 September 2011

Two Definitions

EDGY: the men are unpleasant,
violent - and swear a lot.

FEISTY: the women are unpleasant,
slightly less violent, and swear a lot.

Saturday 24 September 2011

Friday 23 September 2011

The individual

is one who is held in the balance
between pleasure and productivity
- and found wanting.

Thursday 22 September 2011

Wednesday 21 September 2011

All you need to know

about the Human Spirit
is that war has proved to be
its truest expression.

Tuesday 20 September 2011

Monday 19 September 2011

The planet groans

at the millions and millions of man-hours,
animals, vegetables and minerals wasted
on the making of the gew-gaws
which engulf us - including mobile phones.

Sunday 18 September 2011

It's not sexual

encounters
that are soul-destroying
(however bleak they may be)
but waiting for them to show up
- or not.

Saturday 17 September 2011

Is it slavery to the superlative

or a paranoid fear of 'failure'
which transfixes Americans ?

Today I heard one say
on the radio that he was
"the world's greatest under-achiever"!

Thursday 15 September 2011

Wednesday 14 September 2011

The Future

is a not-so-distant shore.
We know, of course, nothing
about what we expend
so much energy to ignore.

Tuesday 13 September 2011

On the seventieth anniversary *

of my untimely birth I reflect on
those poor "White Trash",
ghetto "Negroes", homeless Hispanics,
Filipina slaves, and others of the
Necessary Underclass
who died in squalor, pain and misery
on the eleventh of September
in the two thousand and first year
of the "Christian Era" (or Papal Caliphate)
- and whose deaths were hardly noticed by
a heartless, mechanistic
jingoistic nation-state.

(* today)

Monday 12 September 2011

Maybe it's not so strange

that
THE MORALITY OF GOVERNMENT
is not an academic subject.

I wonder

if that stupendous attack
on the antennæ of capitalism
was the equivalent for the American Empire
of the Spartacus Revolt in Roman times ?

(just an idle thought...)

Sunday 11 September 2011

On the 10th Anniversary of Nurtured American Victimhood

The Anniversary Card industry's great opportunity.

Yes, you had it coming.
But 'it' did not come from the Laotians,
nor the Native American victims of your genocide.

Laos is the most heavily bombed country ever,
and, 35 years after the Vietnam war ended,
an average of one person every two days
is killed by late-exploding American bombs
- 'collateral damage'.

Laos did not declare war on the USA.
America did not deign to declare war on Laos.
It just bombed, and bombed, and bombed,
and bombed, the Plain of Jars -
in the name of Freedom, Christian (or American) values.
The USA declared a War on Terror - with Terror.
It is estimated that it will take another 100 years
before all the unexploded American ordnance
is removed - or explodes - in Laos.

Capitalism thrives on war, military industries
and the threat of war.















You even claim to have "won WW2" for us in Europe,
failing to mention the deaths of just 20,000,000 Russians,
mostly on Russian soil.
No Americans were killed on American soil in WW2,
though a few died at Pearl Harbor, which was then in an American ‘territory’ or colony or ‘protectorate’ or whatever slimy word they used for missionaried-prudified-raped-annexed-and-commodified Hawaii.

And how 'freedom' has diminished in my lifetime!
(I was born in 1941.)
Children can no longer go off on their own
to climb trees or bivouac - or
compare and touch the interesting crevices
and dangly bits between their legs -
or run away for a day or two
as all kids want - and need - to do.

Yes, you had it - that just-a-little-bit -
coming - out of the blue.
And you celebrate it as a 'catastrophe' like the Serbs
celebrate 'their' Kosovo Polje,
'their' Plain of Crows - the birds that fed upon the stacks
of corpses not just of Serbs, but also of Albanians, Macedonians,
Hungarians, Croatians, Romanians and Vlachs.

Those who live by the sword should die by the sword.

Saturday 10 September 2011

Mao Ze-Dong's brilliant successors

realised they could not fight
capitalism with Marxist rhetoric,
or by arming African dictators -
so, to beat it they joined it
and became a Yellow-Peril Trojan Horse
which the Lords of Globalisation
greedily wheeled in -
thus slowly, cancerously
destroying capitalism from within.

Thursday 8 September 2011

"Making the desert bloom"

The river Jordan
(Crossing Prohibited
on Pain of Death)
flows into Israel -
diminished without a doubt.
Only an open
herbicidal sewer trickles out.

Wednesday 7 September 2011

"Why do you abhor pop-music so much ?"

she asked me.
"Because of its vapidity
its triteness,
its insincerity
its sentimentality,"
I explained.
"But those are what make it
universal!" came the exclamation.

"That merely reinforces my duty," I rejoined,
"to remove myself from fake universality
which is the embalming of banality."

Tuesday 6 September 2011

Chalk and Cheese

There is a difference between
an individual and a solipsist.

The former are becoming rare.

Monday 5 September 2011

The 20th century

began with
war, bottled water and
great empires.
The 21st century began with
war, bottled water and
genetic engineering.

The vast toll-road to Hell
is asphalted with economics,
a grotesquely mutant form
of mathematics.

Sunday 4 September 2011

Vegetarian"ism"

is certainly a religion
when not embraced
for mere reasons of health.
All religions are sectarian
and have holy scriptures.
But my sect, that of
the Vegetarian Frugalists,
has no sacred texts
to corrupt it,
and may be the least assertive,
least destructive
of religious sects.

Saturday 3 September 2011

Friday 2 September 2011

It is easy to sneer at Americans

for their arrogant ignorance -
but at least they do not have
the wilful provincialism of the English.

Thursday 1 September 2011

I am a Rock...

If, as 'Tennessee' Williams said,
happiness is insensitivity,
rocks are unbelievably happy.

Wednesday 31 August 2011

In my 'Science Fiction'

(or 'Utopic') novel,
human males will all be sterile

(I'm working on the virus now)

and will spend their time turning guns into sex-toys,
growing vegetables and cannabis,
and making love to each other.

Women in my novel will be doing
whatever they want
(except breeding) while also
overseeing our happy demise -
beyond property, beyond family,
beyond morality, beyond progress
- as pleasantly as possible,
especially for other species.

Tuesday 30 August 2011

'Loved Ones'

a recently invented phrase
(to put with 'on a daily basis')
sounds like a bad translation
from the German.
What's wrong with
'friends and family'
which we used to say, or,
more accurately,
'nearest and/or dearest' ?

Monday 29 August 2011

There may be one or two

leaders (not necessarily tribal war-lords)
who don't apply deodorant - nevertheless
the world is being made a hell
by people who don't like their smell.

Sunday 28 August 2011

The most important difference

between bonobos and us
is that they are not addicted
to aspiration and anxiety
- the evolutionary flaw
with which we are afflicted.

Saturday 27 August 2011

Rationality

A rat has much more reason
to fear a human being -
twenty times larger than itself
and carrying terrible diseases
- than a human has
to fear a rat.

Thursday 25 August 2011

Anders Behring Brevik

False outsiders
become unhappy fascists.
Real outsiders
remain happily alone.

Wednesday 24 August 2011

1971 / 2011




















I wrote in my diary
repeatedly
that I loved her
-then him - then him -
then him...dearly...
But now I don't know what
that kind of love is,
can't see the difference
between it and the radiant fog
of infatuation.

But I've never been merely
infatuated with a dog.

Monday 22 August 2011

Meat

is cellulose
flavoured with blood.
Look:
no rivers - just
trickles of mud.

Sunday 21 August 2011

Strange

that the Golden Age
of the English Novel
should happen just before
the Fall...

As for poetry,
I see only mine:
a loaded water-pistol
against
enarmoured ignorance.

Saturday 20 August 2011

Gangs

How many thousands
of kids are there
who feel safe
only outside their homes ?

Looters

When nothing matters
you can do anything.

Friday 19 August 2011

Ogres

can't be worse
than the worst humans.
As a child
I longed to know one.

The function of money

is to circulate, not to lie perniciously in banks.
The poor make money circulate.
The rich hoard it to make more money
which moves merely between financial institutions
and their dodgy minions -
though tiny sums are sometimes lent
as 'venture capital' and less tiny sums are
lent to governments
to buy more tanks.

People who talk to God

are said to be 'praying'
and treated with a curious
and spurious respect.
People who talk of God
talking to them
are said to be schizoid
if not schizophrenic
and made to take
dangerous drugs.

Thursday 18 August 2011

Wednesday 17 August 2011

In olden times

it wasn't rare for a wedding
to end in a brothel.

Now it is not at all uncommon
for a marriage to end in divorce.

Tuesday 16 August 2011

Remembering

is the impossible task
of re-assembling an
incomplete corpse.

Mere facts are not necessarily
the truth.

Sunday 14 August 2011

Nobody looted


Ye Olde Sagacity Shoppe
whose First Day Promotional
loss-leader in dump-bins ran:
What you get from school
is pus on the brain. Then
you ooze off into marriage
and quick decomposition.
All leaders are losers
who fuck your brains
to get Position.

This, of course, was addressed
not to the Compulsory Underclass
but to the bridling bourgeoisie.



Saturday 13 August 2011

Friday 12 August 2011

A product of capitalism

The sterilised milk of bovine misery
dumped in a sewer by human discontent.

Thursday 11 August 2011

Social Progress

The rich used to let the poor die
of disease, hunger and the wars
between the rich.
Now the rich want to keep the poor alive
to breed more poor.
Hence the profitable, world-wide
Overseas Aid Industry.

Tuesday 9 August 2011

All those years

at school mostly wasted
in acquiring ill-fitting
triviality : how we infantilise
our young!

Monday 8 August 2011

Larkin muses on Dickinson

Man hands on arrogance to man
and work - the toad - is what
we justify it with - "because we can".
A toad can die of light - indeed -
so let's illuminate our greed.

Saturday 6 August 2011

'The poor are always with us'

because the rich would not be rich
and powerful without the poor
and disempowered.

The poor must live within their means
even when they have no means.
The rich are rich on credit,
and always with us, too,
betting on the labour of the poor.

Friday 5 August 2011

Choosers and Beggars

Ever since I was able to exercise
the privilege of choice
in the death-camp of distraction
I've chosen what others would not
- which is why I am a well-fed
state-dependent beggar.

The dead are kept away from sight
not just because they rot.

Thursday 4 August 2011

Homo sapiens sapiens

as a species
could be what it wants
to be. And what it seems
to want is robotic slavery
- to robots.
Thus we invented
Heaven and Hell,
and chose Hell.
Thus we, who are moral hulks,
tell ourselves we're
in control - but are
merely frantic slaves of cults.

Wednesday 3 August 2011

Read just one book

and you may acquire insight.
Read ten thousand books
and you may remain
as stupid as anyone else.

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Sunday 31 July 2011

'Quality of Life'

sounds as dodgy as
'Human Dignity'.
And if 'Human Rights' were anything more
than a capricious construction of the bourgeoisie,
they would protect us at the very least against
everything that came after their invention.

Someone in Bessarabia

(now called Moldova)
visited my blog
for 50 seconds.

Friday 29 July 2011

Until 200 years ago

slavery was almost universally accepted.
How long before
we find wage-slavery barbaric ?

Thursday 28 July 2011

What a pity

that our most common
disability
should be our so proud and wilful
stupidity.

Wednesday 27 July 2011

Light -

such a depressing word:
light music, light entertainment,
light refreshments,
light
everlasting lite.

Tuesday 26 July 2011

I am a pacifist

When 'they' accuse suicides and attempted suicides
of cowardice, are 'they' admitting that human life
is some kind of war -
against nature? the world ? death ?
or suicide ?

Cowards always toe the line.

Monday 25 July 2011

Enantiodromia

In the country whose national myth
is that anyone can be a winner,
everyone looks like a loser.

Saturday 23 July 2011

Fifteen caskets

fifteen borrowed coffins formed the stage
at Montgomery, Alabama, after the first
successful Civil Rights march in 1965.
One of the principal performers had,
twenty years before, in Germany,
dug up bodies disposed of by the Nazis.

Friday 22 July 2011

I'm ready

to think the best
of people, but
I don't get even
their second-best.

It is time for me to stop listening and start imagining...

Love, loss, loneliness,

yearning – and frustration -
are the continuous products of
our Great Civilisation.

Thursday 21 July 2011

The Resilience of the Human Spirit

(which might also be called
lack of humility)
is the dark power behind
the Sixth Extinction.

Tuesday 19 July 2011

Disease

also suffers from diseases -
as life contracts romantic love.

Monday 18 July 2011

Can governments make us good ?

was one of the set questions
asked by Sophie de Grouchet, Marquise de Condorcet,
at one of her salons de conversation.
- Or do they merely enforce obedience ?

Newly-liberated Americans,
fearing that there was no such thing
as good government,
declared that the foundation
of government is fear,
but this did not answer Sophie's question.

Over 200 years later I think we can say
that governments can seem to make us better,
if not good, and they do this not through government
but through a new barbarity:
representative democracy,
which has insisted on the exclusion
and/or punishment
of those who transgress the totalitarian
rules of Christian charity.

Sunday 17 July 2011

"Women's bodies are now the bodies of hairless boys"

said Germaine Greer.

But depilation
seems appropriate
if you're as false as a woman
as the effeminate men
who demand it.

Saturday 16 July 2011

The Zoo of Dissidents

Swept them up
Locked them in
Charged admission
And when they all died out
we brought back bear-baiting
and the ducking-stool.

Friday 15 July 2011

in memoriam Philip Larkin

Now that tobacco smoking
is illegal in most places
(soon even in cars)
I have taken up cigars.
Now that homosexuality
is legal, it has lost its attraction.
Now that sexual abstinence
is considered freakish
I am enjoying it greatly.
Suicide is the last taboo:
I shall enjoy it, too.

Once is enough for anything.

Thursday 14 July 2011

Literature

is the attempt to build
with words a bridge
across the chasm that words create
- and thus is only language.

Wednesday 13 July 2011

The Medical-Industrial Complex

also ensures that the whole planet
becomes grist
to a system of systems
created for their own sakes
in the name of Human Rights.
Humanity and Healing.

In times gone by

the main meal for most
in France was
bread and soup.
Today, soup is one of the few
foods they don't eat bread with.

Tuesday 12 July 2011

Poets and Prostitutes

There are two kinds of poet-prostitute:
1. the whores who write poetry and are not many;
2. the poets who prostitute themselves
and are two a penny.

Modern medicine :

the industrialisation
of mercy.

Hippocrates would be appalled.

Monday 11 July 2011

Papal Bull

Benedicts I-XVI

Only the Vatican few
can lick the Papal Balls
with Indulgence.

Sunday 10 July 2011

Western Values

One in every three
American servicewomen
suffers sexual harassment
assault or rape.
They might well be safer
under the Taliban.

Saturday 9 July 2011

A message

to all dogs & men & women :

If the hand that feeds you
restricts you, ties you up,
imprisons you, keeps you on a lead -
BITE IT !

Attack on a stupid cliché

That which is
'in our DNA'
- the urge to reproduce, to strive -
'free will' can counteract...

...depending on how 'free'
and 'willing' people are
or want to be.

Friday 8 July 2011

Post-Socratic

Since Christianity and Islam
began to rule the religious roost
a new and maybe-deeper
philosophical question
should have taken root :
is the unexamined afterlife worth living ?

Thursday 7 July 2011

Quid pro quo

The more we automate our lives
the more like automata we become.

Wednesday 6 July 2011

The manager

had a smile
as thin as the rubber
on an over-used condom

and a face to match.

What has changed ?

Pope Boniface VIII
(who lived at the time of Dante)
was 'gay'
and atheist.

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Worship

is not irrational.
On the contrary.
But I would say
that the only rational object
of worship is entropy,
decay.

Monday 4 July 2011

The first step

on the sad road to wisdom
is an inability
to take yourself seriously.

For nothing is important -
and poetry is an impertinence.

Sunday 3 July 2011

If you are published

you are commodified.
This is the only accolade
in capitalist societies.
Big Deal.

Friday 1 July 2011

Post-trauma

My most beautiful part
is my navel.

My life
is exile from the womb
I should not have grown in
on a planet I weep for.
Every day is leisure
to put off dying -
because I'm seduced by the dribs
and drabs of merest pleasure.

Mad Science

A gerontologist
forecasts that soon
the fortunate (and their pets)
will be able
to live twice or even three
times as long as they do now,

watching the unfortunate
starve and strive like voyeurs
with binoculars at Belsen.

Thursday 30 June 2011

Shame brings humility

(which means on the ground).
I'm ashamed to be human.
Six feet under,
shame makes no sound:
life seems not wonder
but impertinence.

Wednesday 29 June 2011

Tuesday 28 June 2011

In memoriam Jacques Prévert

The father goes out cruising.
The children go to war.
The mother does her knitting
and a lot of internetting
with very heavy petting

and everything returns
to the status quo before.

Monday 27 June 2011

What happened at Arles ?














Who knows. It seems
after all that it was only
the lobe or the top of the ear
that was severed -
which sounds like an accident.
Maybe the unpleasant Gauguin
brandished a knife and got carried away
when both were drunk.
When both were drunk, maybe
the unpleasant Gauguin bet
the overwrought Vincent that he wouldn't
cut off his ear. Maybe they intended
to cut each other's hair when drunk,
and the unpleasant Gauguin
entirely by accident, or perhaps
out of spite for a much better painter
and much better person just snipped
the top off the ear of the man racked with guilt
and sorrow at living, the man not so easy
to live with - and driven. And perhaps it was the
unpleasant young Gauguin's idea
to have his tortured friend
make the famous delivery
just out of badness or devilment...
This may be calumny.

Sunday 26 June 2011

Saturday 25 June 2011

Every archæologist knows




















that matter lasts a very long time.
What a silly idea : that
ideas have more power
than things.

Friday 24 June 2011

'Love' and 'Sex'

The people I like most
(male, female, canine)
are not those I want
to do sex with.

So I understand why men
programmed against self-pleasuring
go to prostitutes,
and why prostitutes
can - by and large - cope with their clients.

All business is strange.

Thursday 23 June 2011

Does God wear clothes ?

Or is He simply robed in light
as dictators are robed in fame ?

The world has changed
from God's mad experiment
to Man's grisly video-game.

Tuesday 21 June 2011

Monday 20 June 2011

Saturday 18 June 2011

This could be where we all came from.














And will go back to.

It looks rather sexy to me.

Facts and opinions

Although most of us think
that facts are immutable
and opinions unchangeable,
the opposite is often the case.

Thursday 16 June 2011

Someone left

a tatty potted shrub
upon my future grave -
in the farthest, shadiest corner
of the graveyard, next to the back gate
which leads into the forest.
I don't know what to make of this gift,
but I passed it on.

Museums

and art-galleries
are just vulgar
shrines to property.
All our art
is not worth
a woolly mammoth's fart.

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Stupidity

is not the same as ignorance.
But my stupidity resides
in ignorance
of other people's ignorance.

Tuesday 14 June 2011

I dreamed I asked Diogenes

What is the most evil thing on earth ?

You mean, apart from human
sperm and Devil's Turds ?
he laughed.
My answer's obvious, ironic:
words.

Monday 13 June 2011

Progress : the Big Lie

It is foolish
to the point of imbecility
to believe that poverty
could be 'wiped out' in a world
that worships property.

And even if disease
could be 'conquered',
'eradicated' - what then ?
No room to move in fortress-states
and statelets, war and weapons everywhere,
and the very water a carcinogen.

Sunday 12 June 2011

Gleann Cholm Cille














Garraí an turais
Lios chaigh
Abar dubh
Umar ghlinne
Cloche na suile
Poll an chloig
Mainnear na mortlaidh

Tragic theatre

like religion,
makes far too much fuss
about human death.

Never be pleasant to police.

Give them an inch,
they take a mile -
and you to the nearest cell;
and from there you'll tramp
a few or many miles more
to the nearest concentration-camp.

Saturday 11 June 2011

'Poetry changes nothing'

for the better. Under dictatorships
poetry is important. But when they fall,
poetry loses its political purpose
and ends up in flimsy, glitzy poetry festivals
for the same smoke-and-mirrors lackeys
as the servants of dictators.

Friday 10 June 2011

Sébastien Roch Nicolas, commonly known as Chamfort

1741-1794
from his Thoughts and Maxims

"When you get to the bottom of things, the resulting removal of illusions brings death to the soul, that is to say a complete lack of interest in everything that affects and occupies others."

Once upon a time

'they' had wars which ended.

Rulers are infantile.

The ruled are infantilised.

Thursday 9 June 2011

If humans had emotional intelligence

it would have led us to give
space and pleasure
to animals and plants in the
Garden of Eden.
But emotional intelligence
is what we have spectacularly lacked
since we decided that the world
was merely our oyster
and that we (and our gods,
our inventions)
were the only class act.

One of the lesser crimes of supermarkets

(but an important one, nonetheless)
is the appropriation, the theft
of the word market - the meaning
of which is not 'a goods-hangar
for cargo-cult zombies'.

Wednesday 8 June 2011

Tuesday 7 June 2011

The prime of life :

inside the womb.

'When Tao is lost,

there is Te.
When Te is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the empty shell of faith and loyalty,
the beginning of confusion.'

And when ritual is lost
there is ugliness everywhere,
and all is illusion.

Sunday 5 June 2011

Though life has been very good to me

I'm not sure that it has been all that good
for me.

The summit of self-serving vulgarity ?

First there were the tasteless 'Gay Pride' Marches.
(Proud to be gay ? No way! I'm ashamed to be human.)

Now there are the taunting 'Slut Walks'.
(Though breasts have sometimes, through the cultures
and ages, been thought as unattractive as ballocks.)

Anyone may join my
Movement for Men to wear Burqas
and be beautifully naked beneath.

Saturday 4 June 2011

Assisted Death

"You'll hear people say,
'It's in the news again,
it's time to discuss this further.'
No it isn't. It's been discussed to death,"
said Jack Kevorkian, who died yesterday.
"There's nothing new to say about it.
It's a legitimate ethical medical practice,
as it was in ancient Rome and Greece."

And still there's no debate
on Infant Exposure,
which, like putting out other property
for folk to take away,
would be environmentally
very friendly.

Toxic Oxi

might help to solve the world's
hideous overpopulation problem
hideously.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/30/oxi-crack-cocaine-south-america

Thursday 2 June 2011

'Desert Island Words'

Imagine
you have suffered a stroke
and can remember
only eight unrelated words -

which eight unrelated words
would you choose ?

Man to man

Ejaculation
is to 'sex'
as 'sex'
is to 'love'.

Wednesday 1 June 2011

Fifty Years On

Amnesty International has helped
to free thousands of 'political' prisoners,
few non-'political' prisoners -
and no dogs.

Monday 30 May 2011

A gloss on R.W. Emerson

Congratulate yourself if
you have done something
strange and extravagant,
and splintered the crass
uniformity of a passive age.

Opinion polls suggest

that 'young people'
trust 'celebrities'
more than politicians -
but
would they ever prefer Diogenes
to the Oligarchs of Athens ?

Of course not.

Sunday 29 May 2011

What is it about testosterone

that makes men edgy when young
and grumpy when old -
though women have much greater cause
for complaint and misery through all the
trials of menstruation,
pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth,
child-rearing and menopause ?

Saturday 28 May 2011

Noblesse oblige

While she was scraping
my infected gums
my dentist mentioned
her dislike of slugs.
"I don't like them, either -
their tender sliminess,"
I said as I rinsed out the blood
in the bowl.
"But we should, at the very least,
be polite to animals."

Friday 27 May 2011

Have you noticed

how drab people are
in the rich, 'individualistic'
parts of the world ?
And how their different shades
of dull and beige
are tastelessly combined ?

This is because they're frightened
of waving and of standing out against the
drab normality they've drowned in.

Thursday 26 May 2011

More destructive

than the world dictatorship of money
are nation-states and
nationality.

Wednesday 25 May 2011

I see

through the eye of the skull
from the inside out
and the inside in
I see through the eye of the gull

to the world of those who look
from the outside out
and see nothing
but an unread book
and a trumped-up grin.

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Monday 23 May 2011

Progress Report

The religion which taught mutual respect
and the spiritual wisdom of humility
became the civilisation in which people
try constantly to control each other,
are quick to condemn and scoff -
and in which almost everyone
tries to rip almost everyone off.

Saturday 21 May 2011

Koan

Nothing is
as nothing does.

公案

A Koan is a paradox in the Buddhist intellectual tradition,
designed to help us think 'out of the rational box' and at an intuitional level, beyond words.

I suspect

that God did not wash His hands
before He made the Universe.
How perverse!

Thursday 19 May 2011

Computers

are probably a curse upon the young
but a stimulating comfort to the old.

General George Armstrong Custer,

one of America's most celebrated heroes,
an enthusiastic practitioner of rape,
greed for gold, and genocide,
was not just a real ladies' man,
but a real white man's
real white man.

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Happiness

If you're not selling,
you can keep it -
until we buy or crowd you out,
poison your wells,
or bomb you to bits.

'By each let this be heard...'

We rarely kill the thing we love;
more often we love
what tortures us.

Monday 16 May 2011

We are a dead-end species

because we constantly try to ensure
that species we compete or contend
with - or simply do not like -
come to a dead end.

In the city

watching the homeless
and the ungiving, unforgiving
employed, it occurred to me
that both are merely going
through the motions of living.

Sunday 15 May 2011

'Good sex'

is experienced
mostly by
the selfish -
mostly men.

Paradox

The only species which increases
its numbers dramatically
by eliminating child mortality
(but not world-wide)
is the only species to eliminate
millions of its members
through war and genocide.

Saturday 14 May 2011

მგელი - the wolf















is so admired that it is
a first- and family-name
world-wide: Wolf, Vuk, Úlfur,
Wilk[as], Varg, Vlk, Ujku, Lupu,
Lobo, Gurg, al-Dib, Farkas, گرگ
Otso, Vrk, Amarok, Blaidd, Susi,
MacIntyre, ተኲላ...
and so we've done our hellish best
to exterminate it.

Swahili, Amazigh, Lingala
(to name a few)
- but not Amharic -
seem to lack a wolf-word
- presumably
because so few wolves are left
in Africa.

Freedom

though cheapened
does not come cheap.
Those who pride themselves
on 'living in the real world'
sow much less than they reap.

Thursday 12 May 2011

Diogenes* observed

acutely
that culture turns the few
aware and incorruptible
humans into Dogs,
whom the hypocrites,
(who are no more than craven,
creepy mimics)
call Cynics.

* The only philosopher worthy of the name.

Eden ended

with the Ice Age.
(Go figure.)

Wednesday 11 May 2011

Rural South-west France

with just the sweetest, neatest
blinkers* on your eyes
would very nearly pass for
semi-Paradise.

* USA = blinders

Each one of us

is a pretender
that life's not marked
'Return to Sender'.

Tuesday 10 May 2011

The Bible is right

- at least in this respect :
at the beginning
of what we call time,
the first human invention
was crime.

The human zoo

In a culture in which depilating
women are (it seems)
repelled by hairy men,
what are hairy men to do
short of vicious hair-removal ?
They have no option but
look for other men who view
their like with strong approval...

Monday 9 May 2011

The capitalists decree :

that which is not capitalist
is anti-capitalist.
We have no option but to
let it be.

Sunday 8 May 2011

Who can tell

whether capitalism is threatened
more by contentment

than government
is by discontent ?

"Our silent ambassador to the stars."



"Each Voyager probe is famously equipped with a Golden Record, literally, a gold-coated copper phonograph record. It contains 118 photographs of Earth; 90 minutes of the world's greatest music; an audio essay entitled Sounds of Earth (featuring everything from burbling mud pots to barking dogs to a roaring Saturn 5 lift-off); greetings in 55 human languages and one whale language; the brain waves of a young woman in love; and salutations from the Secretary General of the United Nations. A team led by Carl Sagan assembled the record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilisations that might encounter the spacecraft.

"A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we've ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents have changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will speak for us," wrote Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in an introduction to a CD version of the record. Some people note that the chance of aliens finding the Golden Record is fantastically remote. The Voyager probes won't come within a few light years of another star for some 40,000 years. What are the odds of making contact under such circumstances? On the other hand, what are the odds of a race of primates evolving to sentience, developing spaceflight, and sending the sound of barking dogs into the cosmos ?

Not to mention trashing their planet out of sheer and stupid greed!

Thursday 5 May 2011

Obscured

by the religion of employment,

between work and leisure,
lies life.

Wednesday 4 May 2011

One of my fans












tells me that I remind him
of the Czech folk-tale character,
Děd Vševěd, the tattered
and Wise Old Man of the Woods.

I am very flattered.

The back of beyond :

no better place
to avoid the bond
and the race.

Let those who build houses
lament their destruction.

Tuesday 3 May 2011

Disturbing :

the rejoicing
at the death of Odysseus-Loki
bin Laden.
I don't remember
cheering crowds in New York
when Stalin died:
he killed at least
ten million Soviet citizens
and starved ten million more.

Chairman Mao 'liquidated'
more than ten million Chinese.
Pol-Pot, Mobutu, Papa Doc
and others did away with
impressive numbers, too -

few of them American.

And since Iraq was raped
several hundred thousand
lives were snuffed -

few of them American...

The human skull

is not so much a madhouse
as a mad courthouse.

Monday 2 May 2011

I cannot believe

that I am more
than a body of thoughts.

Most people seem to be
even less.

Sunday 1 May 2011

Lyrics for an unpopular pop-song

Always look on the bright side of doom.
You'll be warmed by hypothermia in the tomb.
We have turned this lovely planet into hell.
In everlasting 'darknesse let me dwell'.

Always look on the bright side of doom.
Some think that life is just a tiny room:
life on earth returning to one cell.
In everlasting 'darknesse let me dwell...'

Friday 29 April 2011

Sixty years of television

Sixty thousand years
of gazing into fires.

After more than sixty
thousand years
TV is the nearest we have got
to enlightenment

in a world choked with
property and fæces
and the burning bones
of extinguished species.

Thursday 28 April 2011

Enlightenment is...

cheerful disappointment.
Having always found
ideas more interesting
than people, I won't
be so very lonely
at the end.

Wednesday 27 April 2011

Neutrino




















The most common particle in this
particular universe
comes in different flavours,
one of them thought to be sterile
and some of the sterile right-handed.

On Earth, technology reigns

and one of the most adaptable parasites
lives and sleeps in our brains.












Toxoplasma gondii


Tuesday 26 April 2011

Make-believe

The Nazis thought that Jews and Roma were sub-human.
(Slavs were just inferior.)
The Israelis think that Arabs are sub-human.
Most humans think that anything non-human
is sub-human.

Sunday 24 April 2011

Saturday 23 April 2011

NoseBook

will change the lives of dogs
and transport them from
understimulating confinement
to the World Wide Sniff.

for Deena
and in memory of Yogi, Oscar, Shep, Elektra...

Friday 22 April 2011

"Forests of Crosses"

Out of a hundred thousand Roman
crucified bleeding in the sleet,
dehydrating in the sun,
it seems to me hideously unfair
to remember only one...

(...who wasn't roasted on a griddle,
waterboarded, skinned alive
burned at the stake;
didn't have electrodes on his genitals
nor his cock jammed in a toaster -
and didn't have to listen to loud
racist lectures on 'democracy'.)

Good Friday, 2011

Wednesday 20 April 2011

We imagine

that our civilisation embraces rationality -
a civilisation where religion interferes with science
and science claims no interest in morality!

(for Sam Harris)

Tuesday 19 April 2011

Monday 18 April 2011

Dogs should wear Burkas

















to hide ears and tongues
(to say nothing of hinder parts)
which could inflame a man
- or even a woman...
and perhaps even the Proud Creator
him/her/it/self.

There are no absolute minorities.

Even I - minority of one vegetarian
vasectomised neo-Diogenean
atheist-quietist, not yet, not quite
Aspergerous - am, like millions of others,
old, grumpy and white.

Sunday 17 April 2011

Too easy to counterfeit

How we love
what poisons us!

Now, if cyanide
or pentobarbital capsules
were universal currency...

Friday 15 April 2011

You cannot have democracy

and
political parties -
which inevitably produce
perpetual oligarchies...

You cannot have democracy
and
universal suffrage -
which is inevitably hi-jacked
by the gutter (or the state-controlled)
press, an essential element
of the oligarchy.

Since power - like love, happiness,
freedom and everything else -
is a commodity,

even oligarchies now live under the
irremovable dictatorship
of pseudo-democratic
consumerism.

Thursday 14 April 2011

Wednesday 13 April 2011

'Normality' is virulent

The more people there were
with "Asperger's Syndrome"
the better the world would be -
at the very least with less hypocrisy.

Tuesday 12 April 2011

African slaves

were forced to dance for their owners' pleasure
before they were crammed into the black holes
of slave-ship holds to wail, howl, vomit - and die.

Now, African dictators are urged to dance to
'democratic' tunes - for arrogant others
have decided that the end of autocracy
(though not exploitation) is nigh.

Monday 11 April 2011

How can there be 'human rights'

while children globally
are forced to
sacrifice their childhood
for long hours of lies,
irrelevancies, suffocation,
and competitive
mind-demolition that the
living dead-of-heart
call education ?

Sunday 10 April 2011

Moses and Monotheism

The people who concocted
the various
but achingly-similar
codes of civilised behaviour
were male, without humour,
and with no interest in æsthetics
or even beauty -

which is why moralities
are horribly, assymetrically
obsessed by conformity
and duty.

(for Jindřich)