Meat-eaters

who are repelled
by bullfights
have never been to
a slaughterhouse.

Civilisation

1914

While Danish children
were reading
Hans Christian Andersen
German children
were reading
the Brothers Grimm...

The wide blue-grey deep.

Liberation of having
nothing to hope for.

'With his tail between his legs'

is not animals' affliction
but man's.

Isn't it sad ?

The human curse:
we take something good,
demean, destroy it;
we take something bad
and make it worse.

Capitalist shit :

new today
obsolete tomorrow

from the Rubâi'yât of Omar Khayyâm

---------------------------------------------------------(only twits twitter)

Strange people

- who would rather give
to institutions
than to people...

One never forgets

how to ride a bicycle.
But it is too easy to forget
how to weep.

Life

is a death-camp
of distraction.

The function of culture

is not to enlighten,
but to particularise

thus ensuring
that few realise
how the grinding systems work.

Evolution

was also
a free market
until we decided
that we were
Masters of the Universe

of greed

The unspeakable truth

about civilisation
is that commerce
makes victims
of us all.

Before photography

we remembered
people's faces.
Now we remember
only graven images.

The motto of Capitalism.

We are the only species

whose members
cannot size up each other
on sight or smell.

Is this intelligence ?

Unpleasant words

make unpleasant people:

- eradicate
...abnormal
...traitor
...exterminate
...paternity
...troubleshoot
...money
...right
...patriotism
...acquire

and a thousand others.

To the grand collections

of the grandiose
Victoria and Albert Museum
in London, Queen Victoria
donated only a Raphael cartoon.

But more recently,
that august institution acquired
a single nether piece
of that Queen's
underwear.

Life is like

Tripes à la mode de Caen*.
If you're lucky, you love it.
If not, you have to decide to
take what you're given,
pretend that it is something else,
or get rid of it discreetly.

*Cold pickled tripe in disgusting jelly

The world around me

speaks
but I hear only
human noise.

The art best cultivated

is the art of waiting
for the art of being still

or for the strength of clay
that can resist the potter's will.

(Homage to Omar Khayyám)

The 'lily'

of the Song of Solomon
was the Lotus, symbol of purity
and immortality (genus Nelumbo).
Its nearest living relative
is, suprisingly, the plane-tree.
A red-flowered lotus has recently
been germinated from a seed
3,000 years old, found in an
archaeological dig near Tokyo.

Ten Reasons why the British* are the Living Dead of Europe:

1. they live in a bubble of obsession with the two World Wars

2. they are in love with their grotesque ideas of Germany and Germans (and keep publishing books about Hitler, Nazism and the Third Reich - but not about Mussolini, Stalin, Franco etc.)

3. they hate the European Union because it was the post-war peace-child of Germany, Benelux and France, founded - without England's permission - to guarantee no more wars in Europe

4. they are still in the mind-set of the Hundred Years War and the Napoleonic Wars
against France, wallowing in a myth of an 'Island Race', though they are of Franco-Germanic origin with a touch of Celt even less than the Irish and rather less than the French.

5. they refuse to believe that their genocidal empire was evil in any way

6. they share a language with the USA and, since the withering of its empire, are always trying desperately to share America's power

7. they do not know how to enjoy themselves pleasantly abroad

8. together with the Irish, they have become the most discourteous, most off-hand, unwelcoming and peremptory people in the Northern Hemisphere

9. they regard all other languages and literatures as inferior

10. they think that morality resides in lucrative hypocrisy, which is why the French have for long described them as 'perfidious'.

*They invented the weasel-word 'British' along with the pompous 'United Kingdom',
and, not suprisingly, have an Identity Problem nearly as great as that of the Northern Irish.

Yesterday

the last 'British' soldier-survivor of World War One
was given a splendid funeral. Thousands lined
the route to the grave, and they appear on the front page
of today's newspapers.
Hundreds of thousands died in World War One:
cannon-fodder, only some of them 'British'
(including Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Manx).

The 'British' never get to hear about the French, whose countryside
was utterly destroyed, and a whole generation of whose males
were wiped out from Metz to Biarritz and Marseille to Dunkerque.

The crippling war-reparations that Germany
had to pay France in the 1920s went, largely, to fill in the trenches
and the craters, bury bits of corpses,
and to re-establish the local populations and
their farms, their livestock, and their copses.
Now you would almost imagine rural Picardy
had always been serene and lush.

The 'British' do not want to hear about the French who defended them
(and France) in World War One,
nor about the million Russians who died in World War Two
and kept the Germans from invading England.
Both France and Russia suffered terribly in both World Wars,
but it is the 'British' who keep droning on about heroes and courage
in two hecatombs for which they were
in great part responsible.
There were also Turks and Austrians and Czechs, Hungarians,
Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians and Lesser Subjects of the Evil British Empire
including many Irish and some Africans - and, last, but certainly
not least, envied Americans (many of them black).

Then there were the thinkers, the conscientious objectors, those
who refused to be deceived into patriotism, who were shot
as traitors because they rightly thought the war was wrong.

Who bothers to mention the tens of thousands of handsome horses
who were killed all over Europe ?

Coming up to date:
we have heard little about the tens of thousands of Iraqis
shot or otherwise murdered after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq
under false pretences - which didn't fool the French or anyone else.
We hear almost nothing about the thousands of Afghans
shot and blown up in yet another British Military Adventure.

And it is still criminal in the British Isles to help
a helpless friend who wants to die.

Urban passers-by

notice hardly anything
that passes by.
This is being civilised.

For that carton of yogurt you've just thrown away

cattle had to be bred
for a few thousand years
of war and rapine

and the cows inseminated
and fed chemical supplements
and their calves removed
while the mothers grieved
and moaned for many days
and were milked by incredible machine
until they were too old
and were 'recycled'.

the milk was taken by a tanker
to a factory, and checked
and separated from its cream
and superheated and processed
and put into silly plastic cartons by machine
and packed into boxes and sent out
to supermarkets where you bought a pack
of six and forgot about them in the fridge.

This 'Natural Product' went first into a dumpster
and then a dumping vehicle
and then a landfill Gehenna...
Our species is a monster.

Saints and Traitors

The difference between a traitor and a saint
is that a traitor is considered to belong
beforehand
while a saint belongs afterwards.

There is very little difference
between a traitor and a trader.

Because happiness is not

a feeling
but a state,
those few that are happy
may not be aware of it.

Dogs do not deceive.

We beat them,
treat them as living furniture.
Some eat them.
We, who live by malice
aforethought, think
they are inferior.

We think that beating
is superior behaviour.

(posted on the Feast Day of
St.Basil-Fool-for-Christ)

God, the Divine Criminal,

who runs a gulag in the sky
where there are no turds,

and justifies the criminality of Man,
is a distant being, composed of words.

But the Devil has a tendency
to live next-door.
Stupidity is a condition
that makes friends with fear.