Bad poetry

is much celebrated -
for example:
snug as a gun...
curt cuts...
the squat pen...

Admiration

In the 'age' of blogs and Twitter
I salute the secret diarist
who burns his diary
instead of wood or oil or coal,
and cheer on the journey without goal.

The world is a bullock,

dismembered in a sterile abattoir
by sterilised and sterilising minds
which breed behind vision-proof blinds.

The world is a camel.

and we are about to place
the last straw on its back.

The civilised human brain

might well be called a mess.
It's a wonder that the planet
is not in more distress.

On watching a BBC documentary about cannabis.

The chief argument against the consumption of cannabis
is that it dulls aspiration, ambition, ego and establishment/achievement of goals.
In other words:  like dreams, it helps to put us in contact with our souls.

A Rhyme

Dictators strangle dissent.
Religions poison the mind.
There isn't much hope for humankind.

The Bad News.

We now understand that a nation may kill
and horribly maim its citizens
in all sorts of appalling ways,
but not by a  'chemical weapon' -
for example, an organophosphorus compound
such as is used widely in the 'agricultural industry'.

The Good News.
The first country to destroy all its 'chemical weapons'
(and amongst the first to declare them) under the terms
of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention
was Albania -
the little maverick nation
of what was called The Eastern Bloc.

Albania's lethal-gas canisters before destruction.

The USA has still not completed
the destruction of its considerable stock*.


*Nor has it renounced the use of Napalm.

I have a dream

(by which I mean 'desire', not a psychopompic message)
that people will give up equating 'Dream' with personal ambition
and that men will stop abusing and humiliating women.

I would like to write in Rap

but I lack the fluidity
I lack the rapidity
the super-fluidity
and -ficiality
the distance from reality
the free association
the macho fixation.
Sure, I'm male, so I'm wrathful
but my anger is too thoughtful
to be acceptable,
'cause I'm a wussy intellectual
and long resigned to that.
I would like to write in Rap
- but not testosteronal crap.

The Future

is a fantasy
that can feed
the sickness of the present.
And so we breed.

Coasting Along

I avoid the high roads.
I take the side roads,
the narrow, winding side roads,
off which are leafy lanes and standing-stones,
blackberries, wild garlic, giant puffballs -
even watercress (though rarely waterfalls).
There's little stress on side roads.
I avoid the high roads.

Classic Displacement-activity.

In the face of
ever-increasing homelessness
France and Britain legalise
Same-sex Marriage.

The New Devotion

"Try to make an effort,
my friends said.
They talked as if sexual activity was a sport,
and we should all keep in practice.
They seemed to think that we are pleasure-mechanisms
which we must keep oiled and running.
They elevated orgasm to the status of oracle.
They advised me to 'have sex' whether pleasant or not
- and I might in the end experience The Miracle."

(paraphrased from a radio interview with
Sophie Fontanel)

I love money,

said the Queen of the British Commonwealth.
It makes me feel so young.

The Exorcist

A self-styled Spirit-chaser was arrested in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province (China)
after he charged a young woman 20,000 yüan (over 3,000 US dollars)
to banish "the ghosts in her vagina" with his penis.

A Xin, a spice-shop employee, consulted Mr Huang
after hearing that he could help her to attract her employer, with whom she was infatuated.

The two agreed to meet in a hotel room,
where Huang asked her to remove her clothes and lie on the bed for an examination.

Police arrested Huang Jianjun on August 1, 2013 after A Xin called the police,
according to the Southern Metropolitan Daily News.

Mr Huang had told her that ghosts in her vagina
were preventing her boss from falling in love with her -
spirits which he could catch and neutralise - but only with his penis.
This she allowed him to do.
Mr Huang explained that he had "sacrificed his virginity" for the exorcism.

He later told 'authorities' 
that he had long since lost the ability to have an erection, due to diabetes.

Destruction

Dictators strangle dissent.
Religions poison the mind.
We're frequently encouraged
to be cruel, to be kind.

People who believe in Heaven

tend to advocate the Energetic Work Ethic.
So, will they spend Eternity
improving The Celestial Realm ?

Those few who believe
that Heaven is a place of blissful idleness,
could make Life on Earth a little better
by doing as little as possible.

For general well-being

and many a medical need -
Tincture of Weed.

Power

does not keep company with Humour,
but Envy is Ambition's friend.

Perhaps

the most spiritual liberty
a person can enjoy is
the freedom from wanting
the approval of others - an attitude
which, of course, depends on
freedom from oppressive family
and the fear of solitude.

In the Residential Care-home for the Aged

 

 "They brought me here
for committing
mind-crime against
their mind-set."

'The Truth shall set you Free'

Since its foundation in 1910 by unhinged conspiracy theorists
encouraged by the Daily Mail, MI5 has not caught a single 'traitor' or 'terrorist',
though we all know that some of its 'operatives' were spies.

Following the rise of the Anti-Terror Industry, anyone can now be detained
merely for being suspected by an unhinged conspiracy theorist
or journalist.

read more

From the Eristic Mystic

Those who know
cannot say
and those who speak
do not know.
Language
is mere display.
Those who find
have ceased to seek.

The desire to be consistent

is a kind of thought-fascism -
very like monotheism.

"Slow

has become a dirty word -
a byword for lazy and unproductive",
say proponents of The Slow Movement.

The logo of LUM*, my
Lazy and Unproductive Movement
is










* formerly Apathetics and Anomalous Anonymous

Literally, suicide

Now that the Oxford English Dictionary
allows literal
to mean metaphorical

let worship
mean warship
to all but the blind and deaf.

Past...present...future...

One life is more than enough

for me and billions
of other animals.
So Heaven
could only be a zombie curse.
And  if some sort of
re-incarnation farce
has to be played out,
I'd like to be a dying virus
up a centaur's
or an amphisbæna's arse.

And God said:

Let them eat cake.
And so the more pleasureless
our over-consumption gets,
the more successful do big companies
and corporations become.

'Science',

like the Roman Empire,
was not built "on the shoulders of giants",
but on slavery, invasion, appropriation,
annexation, colonisation
and extermination.

When we first discovered the world-wide web

- way back -
we thought that it would be an enormous
and liberating 'power for good'.
Now we know that it is an enormous
opportunity for harassment, bullying, blackmail,
profiteering, extortion
and the dissemination of hatred and misinformation.
As human beings become ever more powerful
nastiness and greed increasingly outweigh altruism.

Most people

most of the time
are eager refugees
from Reason.

'Progress'

Another animal for conservationists to worry about.

 

The OLINGUITO, recently found lurking in the Andean cloud-forests
of Ecuador and Colombia.

'Semi-skimmed'

describes very thin milk
which does nothing to slim
rather fat people.

It might also describe
education systems.

Before Tourism

Felicity Hunters
sallied forth in coaches
from the cramped and smelly
City of London*
to Epping Forest,
which the aldermen
still preserve.

*The 'square mile' of the 'Financial District'.

Monotheism :

a one-size-fits-all religion
which admirably suits
one-size-fits-all mentalities.

A Little Theory of Nothing

might be much more generous
than a Grand Theory of Everything.

The problem with intelligence

is that thoughtfulness
is suspect.

Post-cataract Cartoon

Behaviour

is the nearest we ever get
to transparent communication.

After reading a blog by Jindra

I have come up with
a new definition of civilisation:
Artificial social organisation 
which turns packs into herds.

I have just joined

Count Dracula's
Social Networking Site:
DEATHBOOK -
where what you see
is what you get.

Not even Viagra helped.

"I just washed my willy
and couldn't do a thing with it."

Good Deed of the Day

I don't keep a tally
of my gratuitous good deeds.
I let them increase
like do-gooding weeds.
Today I rescued two bees and a fly.
I wonder why, I wonder why ?
Maybe they were wishing to die...

The First Cataract

operation:

I went into hospital at one p.m.
and came out at three,
after efficient, friendly treatment
and everything completely free,
including two kinds of drops I have to
put in four times a day.

Now the world is strangely blue
and very clear, and bright
through the eye which has the new
implanted lens.  Remarkably,
all but one of the senior staff
were the pleasant brown shade
of my cataract  -
the surgeon a very handsome,
young and somewhat haughty
Anglo-Pakistani.
All the lower grades
were pale and local,
which says something about
the Northern Irish gene-pool
and demography.

Why I am vegetarian

Animals are my
brothers and sisters
(some could be daddies)
which is easy to say
as an only, single-parent child.

Food for Thought

A silly question

If entropy
is the opposite of
infinity,
does the multiverse
wear out
eventually ?

In our advanced society,

so liberal and so enlightened,
sex is more commodified than ever,
and boys (with almost hairless pubes)
are sent out of sex-education classes
when it is time to tell girls
about their blood and tubes.

A Deep One

Life is the left-overs
of the future.

What Zarathustra said to William Blake

The opium of the people

used to be religion
in the post-Christian countries.
Now it is sport,
tight-lipped and joyless,
also with dress-codes,
and brain-battering music.

Void and Vainglory

I can think of nothing more vainglorious
than wanting to be remembered after death
by anyone (even a beloved dog), for anything.
When you're gladly ashamed to be human you
have neither self-doubt nor what
is called amour-propre, self-esteem;
and when you're dead, you're dead
and how you're thought of is (like yourself)
neither here nor there.

- Nevertheless, I like and present this poem:

My gift to you will be a void, she said.
But it will be so subtle that you’ll be aware of it
only after many years have passed,
when you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be a gratifying closure,
but it will be an intimation of both joy and absence.
And maybe then you will remember me,
if only momentarily.

- Roberto Bolaño, trans. Anthony Weir.

An infection of thoughts

The other day I listened to a radio-presenter's outrage
at the number of suicides (called 'self-inflicted deaths')
in what used to be called lunatic asylums 
 (i.e. refuges for those affected by the moon).

On hearing this I felt like sending off an e-mail to tell
him that anyone would try to kill himself in such a place
(when I visited a friend in one it felt like a descent
into one of the outer circles of Hell) -
and that if there are to be 'Rights of Man' (to be sure,
an insanely arrogant idea) the most important
should be the right to end your life how and when you want,
even if you're locked up and fed with pharmaceuticals.

But the next day, my neighbour told me that, were it not
for having wife and kids, he would commit grievous bodily harm
in order to get back into prison, where he felt safe and secure.

'Educated' people

don't often dispute the Theory of Evolution
by Natural Selection - yet fail to recognise
that diseases are a natural, evolutionary way
of keeping the Promethean human population
at a relatively-undestructive level.
To reduce it to antinomian religious terms: diseases
are from 'God', medicine from 'the Devil' !

Woman's Hour

on BBC radio 4 this morning
had a recording of a twenty-minute
vasectomy operation (edited by half).
It was good to listen.  But vasectomies
are performed only on married men
with children!  Even worse -
the current trend towards serial monogamy
has led to the perfection of reversal surgery.

A Geography Lesson

Every Belgian knows
that Luxembourg is a French-speaking
province of Belgium
adjoining Luxemb[o]urg, a very small
Grand Duchy
at least twice as rich as Ireland,
about whose music, exiles and madmen
we know nothing.

From much-scorned quadrilingual
'little' Switzerland (maybe a hundred
times as rich as Ireland ?) came
Klee, Hodler, Vallotton, Dürrenmatt,
Frisch, Cendrars, Amiet, Hesse,
the Giacomettis, Tinguely, Pestalozzi,
Calvin, Paracelsus, Arp,
'Le Corbusier'...and Heidi -
but of quadrilingual Luxembourg
even I know nothing
except that it is a tax-haven
and once part of 'Benelux'.