Orphaned thought-fragments

jotted down during a disturbed but fecund night's sleep.

Nature abhors
a vacuum garden.

~

In the cathedral of autocracy
every sculpture conceals a device.

~

Violence not only
begets violence –
it also spawns silence.

~

When people mention
The Real World
you know that they and it are false.

~

Jesus is Identikit.
However you imagine him – he'll fit.

~

People prefer rumour to fact
because rumours have the glamour
of shared secrets.

~

The world is a series of news-reports.

~

Before the onslaught of factory-made mugs
with stuck-on handles,
Decent People had tea-sets.
My favourite featured hollyhocks.
We all have mind-sets
locked in china-cabinets
or like teaspoons lined up in a box.

~

Beyond their phones,
from clouds to lichen,
people seem to notice little
of the world around them.
Not even thunder.
I see them blunder past
the window of my kitchen.

_

Mostly, it seems that
sex is to respect
as house is to home.

~

Memory: fragments like mercury
in little drops and pools on consciousness.

It's finally true:

'The End is nigh.'

Or at least nigher than it might have been.

Marlon James, celebrated author,

(on BBC Radio 4's 'Bookclub') said:

"I have noticed when I read [about] sex
 even in detail, how people really seem
not to enjoy it."

So many millions touched only with violence.
They cannot imagine being
touched with kindness
rather than brutality.
Sex so frequently is a sordid Calvary.

Become one

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Or you can keep reading this blog.

Good Days.

Collecting the good days
should bring long-lasting pleasure
similar to collecting plants.

But days erase each other
and get lost in the deep
dark-webby cupboard
of my memory.

 

Voting:

when being passive

is dressed up to seem active.

Like praying.

Natural Queer History

Josh Davis, of the Natural History Museum in London
and author of A Little Gay Natural History, said:
“Around 1,500 species have been observed
showing homosexual behaviour
– but this is certainly an underestimate,
because it is seen in almost every branch
of the evolutionary tree – spiders, squids, rams,
penguins, geese, monkeys..."

Back to Front.

Electorates and political parties
are more concerned with immigration
which is eternal
than with relatively recent
climate change
and the inevitable

surge of homelessness and starvation.

Ebony

'The jet-black heartwood of the Central African forest ebony, Diospyros crassiflora (a relative of the Persimmon, Diospyros kaki) used to fashion piano keys, guitars, door knobs and pool cues, is threatened by illegal logging and conversion of forests into grazing land or palm oil and rubber plantations. 

'An initiative to transform the growth and harvesting of ebony in Cameroon is led by Taylor Guitars, supplier to – yes – Taylor Swift.

'In 2011, Taylor Guitars' co-founder Bob Taylor bought a dilapidated ebony mill in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé and refurbished it to supply wood for his instruments. 

Five years later, the company partnered with the Congo Basin Institute in Yaoundé to develop ebony tree nurseries and a community-based planting programme. 

The company also replants ebony and fruit trees that buffer Cameroon’s Dja reserve, a Unesco world heritage site.' 

Races.

There is always an arms race,
which is very different from
a foot race.  Excitement
makes the heart race. Rage
makes the blood surge
like a mill-race.

How do I slow the inane
racing of my brain ?
I have tried Cannabis, Psilocybe,
Ecstasy in vain...

Ten hours a day.

Bed.
I wake in it almost suicidal
and go back to it 14 hours later
quite chirpy and bright.
My dreams are chaotic and
interesting, rarely scary; 
and I don't at all mind getting up
five times to pee in the night.

Up.
I am outraged
that someone referred to me
at the market as that old man.

I'd rather be called an ammonite.

Fakeworld.

 

Find out here.

And beware the fake interview, too.

A Diogenean Thought.

Since human beings have
negative environmental impact
alongside infinitesimal
cosmic significance,
it is 'criminal' to save them
from their own catastrophe
or dissuade them from suicide.

We are less and less surprised.

Many boys were sadistically beaten
in Catholic-run Irish schools
until the end of the 20th century.
But only those who were groped, raped or forced
to suck cocks are considered to be victims.

Now, 'in a different part of the wood',

*  *  *

I was born allergic

to banality.  Hence my dislike
of garish lipstick (someone must have
- perhaps with stealth -
thrust their mouth at me in my
first year unaccounted for).
The ultimate banality (far beyond
comfortable complacency)
is hideous wealth. 

Two Cities.

Warsaw:
perhaps not quite Europe's most hideous architecture.

 

Oslo:
McDonald's, Burger King - and a protesting tram.

"I've got plenty of Nothing..."

I wonder what black people felt
on hearing this offensive song 
from the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,
at a time of vicious segregation 
(mostly) in the southern US, where lynchings
and punishments by murder were common,

and quite a few million in the Land of the Free
were dying of plenty of nothing.

Sex and Celebrity.

I have long known of the existence
of tear-bottles in antique society, 

but I have only recently discovered
that gladiator-sweat was widely
(and unsurprisingly) valued
as one a most powerful aphrodisiac.
(No mention has survived
of the rarer foreskin cheese.)

Could it have been collected in tiny bottles
for consumption by the super-rich ?
Or in handkerchieves ?
Or was it mixed with flour,
patted into raw mini-baps
for them to sniff
and lick and savour in erotic ease ?

Or was it sold (or even auctioned)
like modern wrestlers' jock-straps ?

Fateful.

Some may remember The Millennium Bug
and the digital-numerological panic
surrounding the year 2000.

It was also the year that the
(U.S.A. presidential) election defeat
of environmentalist Al Gore
turbo-charged already-irreversible
climate change, amongst other
oilygarchic and militaristic evils. 

2024 may bring a similar speeding-up
of our super-Wagnerian rush to Ragnarók.

It's not that

we are the only thuggish species
but that the worst of us are
so good at organisation
that we would organise the galaxy
into a black hole, if we only could.

Due partly to the Internet,

 English is the widest-spread lingua franca
there has ever been.  It is unfortunate
that it is a nuts-and-bolts, anti-abstract language
with little of the metaphysical subtlety
of Farsi or Pali. (Not to mention, thanks to Gutenberg
 + pronunciation-shift, a crazy orthography). 

But hey!
Things could be worse. The last lingua franca
was French, with much emotional subtlety
but little innovative plasticity,
or cut-and-paste opportunity
for verbal re-arrangement.

French could never come up with such
a brilliant word as 'infotainment'.

Regarding climate-change,

will the climate actually get worse
in Saudi and southern Arabia ?

'Social Media'

are Sowers of Discord.

People prefer oracles to experts:

an oracle cannot be wrong.
People pay less heed to 

poetry than to song.

Experts decreed that places like this

should house millions..

Today's good news from experts:

cooking with gas
(as I have done since 1970)
has shortened my life by two years.

Perpetual Pandemic.

There is one terrible disease
for which no cure will ever
be possible:
human greed.

 

Art and the Spider.

Maratus lobatus

by Maria Fernanda Cardosa

The Ethiopian proverb

'The stronger the coffee
the softer the shit'
is true indeed.

And also (rhymelessly)
the harder the hit
the lighter the head.

'The Light of the World'

 

attracts millions of moths.

(This was not a quip by Wilde about Holman Hunt's schmalzy painting, but I cannot be the first to have made it.
The window above, in the same vein, is in St Brendan's church, Bantry, SW Ireland, at least partly financed by the misery of its parishioners.)

Compare the above with Zanchi's depiction of Diogenes
ironically holding a lamp to find an honest man
or someone who was not a hypocrite.
The owl represents the power of the goddess Athenë
to see through human murk.

How many of these men

 are not rapists ?

The accused in the Gisèle Pelicot multi-rape trial in France.

Let today

be World Nobodies Day,

the Day of the Powerless

and Uncelebrity.

Ismail Kadarë,

not the best but the most
famous Albanian novelist,
recently deceased,
stated the obvious:

Dictatorships breed untruth,
selfishness, distrust,
fear and irrationality. 

He did not add that
the internet has done the same,
and very probably
makes new kinds of dictatorship
more likely.

Body Language.

 

by Jamal Shabazz

Cleaners of the world, unite!

You have nothing to lose
but our trash...our contempt,
and your derisive pay.

After inhaling Nitrous oxide,

Humphry Davy, chemist and inventor
of the miners' lamp, declared:

Nothing exists but thoughts.

"Not for Sale"

As Luis Buñuel declared many years ago,
there are already more than enough
museums and art galleries in the world
to worship property in,
without having another Guggenheim
take over Urdaibai,
an 'Environmentally Protected Area'
of North-western Spain.

Save Nature from the Art Industry

Most hide behind a mask

Many hide behind a one-way window

Billions can manage only by using
both means of blotting out reality.

On the radio I heard

a depression-sufferer complain
about not wanting to do more
than just exist. How depressing
that so many billions of us
do not consider just existing
as a blessing!

                   Put another way:
Existential misery
and plummetings of mood
derive at least partly
from our refusal
to be simply content
to merely be (and enjoy
good food).

 

Peruvian Immigrant gets Specimen

PASSPORT.

 

Typical and typically-enduring

mistranslation of Heraclitus:

You cannot step into the same river twice.  

Instead of:
You cannot step twice into the same flow of water.  

Especially under a bridge.

Was he homeless ?

Did he survive ?

 

Life Support.

At the end
what most of us –
     if conscious behind
     the tubes, the wires and the screen
– what most of us want
is a hug or a hand-squeeze,
or just a smile,
not a hook-up to another machine.

Today's photo.

Time is abstract of trauma.

Part for part: a kidney has been paid
for just part of his failed migration from Eritrea.

 

Skyscrapers

and, before them, banks
have been described, decried
as Cathedrals to Money,
Towers of Mammon.
But cathedrals and temples always
were the result of great endowment
by moral and spiritual famine.

Let us not bemoan

(the) loss of 'innocence',
but the lack (and fear) of intimacy
which has little to do with sex
(except tangentially)
and whose absence turns us into
reality-reducing wrecks.

The Age of Extinction

 

MEANWHILE...

Middle-class Meanness.

There was a lavatory (beyond the coalhouse)
in the gloomy back-yard
of our narrow, semi-detached victorian house :

for lower-status people,
the sort who came only to the back door.
It was probably not meant for men to piss in
unless they took their trousers down.

Although we had scratchy, unabsorbent
'medicated' toilet-roll
in our small bathroom-lavatory upstairs,

the outside installation
which I always thought was not too clean
had torn bits of The Radio Times
or The Northern Whig
(a rag as right-wing as The Daily Mail)

hanging from a loop of string
upon a rusty nail. 
As a child
it didn't cross my foggy mind that this was mean. 

It housed a yard-brush, a garden fork, a spade....
as well as spiders. earwigs and the occasional snail.

It was like this, with bench seat
and circular hole, (and a front panel)
but the walls were distempered yellow.

"In the International Arena,"
the same meanness
of Europe and NATO
in doling out proper assistance
in dribs and drabs
almost cost Europe's
outside lavatory (Ukraine)
its very existence.

Thylacine

is not a psychedelic substance
but the shy, nocturnal,
dog-like, marsupial, extinct
Tasmanian Tiger

which may soon
be 'resurrected'
– before the Trump of Doom.

last one, photographed in 1936.

From merely creating

disastrous monocultures
we have now become one.

Black Hole.

 

Messier-87

A tiny chunk of a neutron star,
the size of a sugar cube,
could weigh a billion tons. 

More challenging than
the mysteries of astrophysics
is the infinitesimal question of how
the animal minds that can approach
(and indeed photograph) them

can wage senseless, bloody
wars for ownership of bits
of the tiny, ultimately ownerless Earth.

The nearest that Nature

gets to Everlasting Life upon this planet
is the eternal, equal fight
between its two smallest, most basic critters:
bacteria and viral bacteria-eaters.

One day's headlines from one newspaper.

 

Why is it so rare ?
It is such wonderful
and justified revenge.
I love Lorena Bobbitt –
and the brave few others.

Unfortunately, it is
an extremely slow method
of population- and hence
of CO₂- reduction.

I'm quite sure that
over the millennia
quite a lot of men (millions, maybe ?)
have savaged women's breasts
and nipples...

Elektric Kundalini!
especially when accompanied by Rachmaninov.