'Life is a gift'

like an exploding parcel.
The problem is
how to defuse it.

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.

Bewilderness

Clothed,
we are only clothes.

Take it from me:

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

"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 ?

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.

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.

Fewer humans, more humus.

We are very little
more than the sum
of our consumption.

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.

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.

Isn't it strange

how Happiness, like Luxury
has become Necessity ?

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.

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 ?

Mystery

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

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

It is too easy for men

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

Tantra and Narcissus*

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


* Or do I mean PUER ÆTERNUS ?

Aliens

even slightly more intelligent than we
would not be envious.

Guerrilla Gardening

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

Alas, very few of us

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

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.

O Nietzsche,

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

The Nice Guys

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

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.

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.

Scampi

Where are they now ?

Homage to Daniel Kharms

Oh, to to be as loved
as a statue !

Insignificant,

I try to write
significant poems
and fail doggedly.

Noisy, noisome

blowing-machines
strapped to men's backs:

now the middle classes
object to leaves!

'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.

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.

It's not hard to figure:

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