A letter to the Government of Dreams

I am writing to the Principal Secretary of the Welfare
Department about the Decline in Quality
of my dreams. I have dreamt my dream-taxes
for nearly seventy years, and instead of my dreams
getting better, they have been getting worse.

Are sensible joined-up dreams beyond the
Oneirobureaucracy that is such a burden
on our shoulders ?
And why are my dreams without smell ?

It seems also that the dreamrubbish-collectors
have been on strike for a long time.
My dreams are now starting to smell.

I shall take my complaint to the International
Court of Dream-Rights, and am sending a copy
of this letter to Radio Somnium.

Yours faithfully,

The shape of things to come

'The Bourgeoisie'

is a great and proliferating mass of people who, if invited to a twelve-course banquet, eat (or try to eat) their stupid way right through - unaware that the 'dirty' plates and 'left-overs' go to the servants, and the servants' left-overs go to the beggars at the gates.

The 'bourgeoisie' are the eaters of time.

If I lived on a garbage tip

I would, of course,
not be vegetarian.

A man

in Japan

conducted his
symphony orchestra

without his
cancerous
windpipe
(or œsophagus),

and received
a standing ovation
which lasted 10 minutes.

Japan also has
an unknown number
perhaps a hundred
thousand hermits,
drop-outs, solitaries

who conduct their lives
minimally -
all in their private
penitentiaries.

Through the night

across the river
a guttering lamp

The most precious - and rarest - gifts are integrity and solitude.

What did Santa bring ?




















A hat-stand for your Astrakhan!

The obscenity of Christmas

My friend in Paris had for Christmas dinner:

"Stuffed goose
Salmon
Prawns
Crayfish
Leg of lamb
Pork sausage...
...and a little salad as a decoration."

Then there were two desserts, and of course there were several wines and brandies.
The French think of Gargantua as a rôle-model, not as a satire.
They make me think of Gadarene Swine...

At the same time, hundreds were crushed to death while receiving food-aid in north-west Pakistan.

Plastic Santa.

Invisible God.

The history of the twentieth century in four words :

Maldoror
Magadan
Mordor
Mogadon

Wisdom requires modesty,

patience, and lack of talent.
Talents, like breeding,
leave no room, no time
for wisdom.

But neither talented
nor untalented
have any wish for wisdom.

[Solstitial Haikai]

.
.
Full midwinter moon –
a new coalescence of
an ancient coldness ?

. . .

At winter solstice
I ate the last tiny bunch
of 'strawberry' grapes.

Message to a Buddhist Teacher

from an anti-teacher :

Occidentals are not even
thoughtful,
much less
mindful.

Expanding Descartes

I think -
therefore I am a strange
aberration within the strange
aberration of existence.

My expectations

of human beings
have declined as I've got older -
but still they disappoint me
as comfort makes them colder.

On the radio this morning

I listened to a
Professor of Crowd Dynamics.
What a smug lump of meat he was!

Mediæval people

would have been certain
that a perfume called
GUILTY
could have come only
from the Devil, and would
have acted accordingly.

from a letter by D.H. Lawrence

"If I had the smallest income,
I would be delighted to loaf forever."

We refuse

to change ourselves
so we change everything else.
This illiberality
is EGO :
the denial of reality.

Wouldn't Christianity be wonderful

if it had the innocence of the Jehovah's Witnesses,
the humble rationality of the Quakers,
and the celebratory ritual of the Russian Orthodox
or even of the wild Pentecostals ?

Freedom of Speech

for Liu Xiaobo
and Julian Assange

If I had been born
in China, I might
not be imprisoned
for the stuff I write

but just for being
a parasite.

In the toilet-bowl of time

shitbags with brains
and nowhere to go
high or low
(as far as I know).

I went to the city
I saw corruption
I saw destruction
nowhere to go
above or blow.

I returned to the mountain
I saw the sunset
I died at sunrise
nowhere to go
fast or slow

but the rat and the crow
and the cockroach
they know,
they know.

(for Eric Chaet)

To mediæval Christians

a significant sin
was acrobatics
deemed 'unnatural'.
Perhaps this symbolised
the Original Sin
of utterly-unnatural
mathematics.

Lucky numbers ?

The other day I heard
that astronomers now think
that there are three times
more stars in The Universe
than they thought last year.

On the next day I heard
an English academic boast
that his language had far
more words
(many of them French)
than French.

"Hello! I'm on a train."

On the train of human shame
moving shadows talk
of moving shadows
in the fog and smother
of 'Society' - which blinds
and binds us to each other.

Even I,

without the degeneracies of
central heating, running
hot water, television,
microwave, cellphone,
armchair, sofa
or washing-machine,

live better than a Roman Emperor.

At Emil Cioran's Birthplace

"Society is not diseased, but disaster." - E.C.

In the Empire of Aspiration,

celebrity and cash
the last and greatest emperor
is the Emperor of Trash.

Hypocrisy

has never been healthier,
now that it has
titanium knees.

The Low Fat Societies

skim the cream off
all the others
and the whole world.

Saying farewell to the dying

is especially fraught
when you never could say
hello - just fought.

After death

is everything
which we call
nothing.

The problem with 'science'

is that it is entirely logical
but far from entirely rational,

because conflict, not peace,
is the foundation of
civilisation.

They label you

élitist
if you dare to criticise
the cretinisation of
whole populations
brainwashed by mass-
education, and of course
the press, and especially TV
- not to forget the universities
of age-old stupidities.
Elitist I am proud to be.

Poetry Festival

Touring
young men
soon become
boring
old farts.

Death and healing

are not opposites.

When you're born without

an armoured heart
you turn to petty crime.

Good religion

doesn't grow.

My sensational new internet business venture

Black condoms embossed
Blow up the Vatican.

There are only two Human Problems :

the first is overpopulation;
the second is refusal to confront it.

With all the words in the world

and time beyond life
we are incapable
of self-description.

It struck me yesterday

that hypocrisy is not just
a terrible condition

but a deadly weapon.

If you think you live in reality,

just wait until you die...

Cotoneaster

berries fall onto the frost:
hearbeat of winter.

Solipsism

My own anger made wonder-
ful is what I hear in thunder.

Winding Forward

I'm losing me
I don't care
I'm losing care

At last: to sever!

Only the stupid
live forever

Faith, hope and fondness -

these three
tend not to fall away:
the first is stupid, even cowardly;
the second a little less stupid;
but the third is real.

Philip Larkin :

one of the greatest
letter-writers
since Kafka
had pretty astute
opinions about his almost-terse
but undemanding verse.

He was too self-knowing
to call it art.

He preferred MacNeice to Yeats,
so had handicapped himself
right from the start.

Life

is an umbilicus
connecting me
to nothingness.

I'm going to fix

my dinner.
But it wasn't broken.
It didn't even exist.
Maybe I'll drop dead before it is fixed.
It will then belong to the
Kingdom of the Unfixed Nothingnesses.

Don't we all ?

Truth

The bedrock of social cohesion
is nothing but a quagmire.

To those who whinge

about taxes, pensions
school fees, and the
Cost of Living
I suggest
you get a life

Go out and beg

Enantiodromia

Happiness, faithfulness, love :
three concepts
which contribute importantly
to their opposites.

Just deserts

If Gaia was so misguided
as to evolve us,
then, I have to say,
reluctantly and sadly,
she pretty well deserves
what we're doing to her.

with no apologies to Ian McMillan

Today, for the first time
I heard someone described as
a Stand-up Poet.
It made me think
of the urinals in Florence's
magnificent railway station
and urgent men
in commodious cubicles
without locks
and with flamboyant
erect and generally
boring cocks.

You couldn't make it up

a True Nonsense Poem about hunches and guts
found on the BBC News Website.


An ambitious project to assemble poets from all of the Olympic nations in 2012
has been launched in London.

Simon Armitage, the poet behind the idea, said: "My hunch is this will be
the biggest poetry event ever - a truly global coming together of poets."

The unique congregation, called Poetry Parnassus,
would take place at the Southbank Centre for a week during the 2012 Olympics.

It is hoped more than 200 poets - from all continents - will take part.

"It's insanely ambitious," said Armitage, the Southbank Centre's artist in residence.
"There are political issues, geographical issues, linguistic issues all to be overcome."

He said that for Tuesday night's launch, part of the Poetry International 2010 festival,
poets from almost every continent had been invited to perform.

“We couldn't get a poet from Antarctica.
My gut feeling is that there are poets absolutely everywhere.”

In Memoriam P.A.L.

Sex
- for men at least -
is Doing the Business.

O for a life
without business!

Reality and legend

As belief in unicorns waned,
Denmark, which had enriched
herself by selling, at still-unmatched
prices, Greenlandic narwhal-horn
(of which the royal throne is fashioned),
became ever less significant
as an European nation.

Dogs are so much cleverer than we

They have no myths
no legends or history
to stupefy them

and correctly consider
cause and effect to be
merely circumstantial.

Insanity:

infinity.

Dogs control their feelings

far better than do humans.
We'd rather control dogs
and each other,
the weather
and the world.

I have learned far more

by reconsidering
what I don't like,
than by wanting or getting
what I like.

(But of course, I don't live
on a giant rubbish-tip
in Nigeria.)

Human curiosity

is fractal -
but human wisdom
is a bloody stump.

Am I sorry

that I can't write dense riddle-poems
which will sprout
game-filled thickets of interpretation
out of quagmires of unmeaning ?

Not really.
I think such poems
underhand and overweening.

Was the poet mad

besotted,
or just stupid when he wrote:
'What will survive of us is love' ?

What will survive of us is hunger.

When push comes to shove
Team Spirit is torture
Gang-rape is Esprit de Corps
and love
is of self and of war.

The Papacy

was a kind of mediæval
internet:
master, medium and plaything
all at the same time.

'A light unto the Nations'

Isaiah 42. 6

Unfortunately all religious people,
all moralists
want to be lights -
and blind and/or set fire
to themselves and many others.

Most of the time

thought is just
the P.R. of the mind

and art
the occupational therapy
of the heart.

'Aspirational'

is a weasel-word for
unsatisfiable.

My aspiration, alas!
is that people should
be reasonable.

Despite the cathedrals

of his literature,
what Man knows about himself
he'll never dare admit.

The Horst Wessel Song

should be frequent, private listening -
for anything that's ever happened
can happen again.

Rigor Vitæ

How strange
that it is easier to read books
than faces!

Never shaving
I rarely look in a mirror
to see the face I hardly know,
reflection that I cannot read.

Maybe there is nothing to be read:
I am just a talking head.

Modus mortis

According to Howard Jacobson,
T.S. Eliot told W.H. Auden that
he played Patience every night
because it was the nearest thing
to being dead.

Memento vitæ

Dead tired
means tired to death
of not being able to die.

Morality needs Religion

like a hole in the head.

Ego:

the denial of reality.

Most door-knobs

are more sensual
than most men.

Humans are at odds with the world.

I am at odds with humans.

Reputable surveys

show that people with religious faith
are more law-abiding than those without.

This is not surprising:
laws are usually drafted pretty well
according to religious faith and faiths
prevailing.

To be desired

is one thing, a pleasant thing.
But to be valued is quite another,
for most people
do not value mere desire
in a culture largely turned
towards the aspiration
to immediate gratification.

Woollier than thou

It is much more common
for people to change their
sect or even their religion
to suit their politics
than the other way round.

The majority

of majorities
is usually wrong.

Beyond/above

sex
beyond/above
love
is naked and
transparent
mutuality.

What we criminally flush away

Pee has replaced piss.
Poo has replaced shit.
English has become the tongue
of Pee and Poo.

My graves are flowering

"Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge"
- Psalm 19:2

Long experience
has shown me that
the only people who are truly
down to earth
are dead.

Similarities between Adolf Schicklgrüber and me:

I'm vegetarian
Adore German Sheepdogs
Am tidy and organised
Loathe monotheisms
and write diffuse and tergid prose.

On the other (left) hand
I am an Israel-hating Jew-lover
(especially of Kafka, Lazarus the Leper
and Spinoza).
Moreover, I speak and write
in expectation
of contradiction.

Maybe my father was
Jewish French-Canadian
and not my maternal
grandmother's brother's
son...

A piece of tergid prose: Capitalism is Feudalism

Just as 'humanism' is Christianity with all its hypocrisy but without its razmatazz, virgin birth, vulgar miracles and gew-gaws, so capitalism is a 'refined' (as in sugar) form of feudalism - with the important difference that place, social position, birth have partly yielded to an aspirational, utilitarian, quasidivinely-established criterion of merit.

Villeins have simply become employees, with much better working conditions, but still in fief to superiors, with very little opportunity for avoiding their globally- (if not divinely-) established prerogatives.

Mass-employment and the employment-imperative are the reduction of the villein to the wage-slave - or worse, to the unemployed - a situation well-understood by those who rule recently-feudal and now-capitalist China.

And technology always further impoverishes the poorest, and further handicaps the most disadvantaged in relation to even the modestly rich.

Unholy (Apollonian )Trinity

Three Great Dictators
have carved up the world :
money,
education
and television,
each in service of the other.

In prison

you know where you are -
but not where you might be.

Genital Food

If truffles are prized
as much for the
expensive naughtiness
of their cunty taste and smell
as for their rarity,
smoked eel
should be nearly as prized,
especially by women,
and queer men like myself,
for its cockiness.

Henry Ford

had a photograph of Hitler on his desk
Hitler had a photograph
of Henry Ford upon his desk.
One could almost laugh...

Right-wing extremists

in the USA
claim that federal Health Care
and Welfare Benefits violate not only
the tenth amendment
but also the Tenth Commandment.

Meanwhile the French government
has turned to Ethnic Cleansing,

and Israel spends American aid
on Sisyphean
Cyclopean fencing.

'The Sanctity'

Human life is so precious
that millions are not just allowed
but forced to die of hunger
and disease.

Absence

can be complete,
but nothingness,
like happiness,
cannot.

When sex is a hit-and-run

accident,
love is a distant
ambulance.

Religious Education

(to a Lonnie Donegan tune)

O, Jesus was a mummy
he wore a mummy-cloth.
He rose up from a sepulchre
and flew round like a moth.

Best Before :

perhaps we were all
'best before'
we were born...

and are least noxious
after we die.

We would rather use

weapons
than our minds.

Economics

Continual growth:
the goal of every
cancer.

The most liberating handicap :

to be unable to want.

Real guns

have butt-hair.
Real men
don't shave.
Reality is
landscape.
People are
wallpaper.

Religious Conversion

is illiberation.
But, thinking magically,
to convert piss into water
would be far more useful
than water into wine.

On the Pope's State Visit to Britain

Along the rutted paths of hope
they creep like mine-detectors...
Millions would suck cock
for a handful of beans
a bowlful of rice.

Four Forbiddens beginning with S :

Suicide
Solitariness
Silence
Smegma

Towers of Silence

have all but disappeared.
Noise now marches on the world
from terrible towers
of so-called song.

Righteousness

more often than not
is the conformism
of the spineless.

Older Englishmen abroad :

rigid faces,
ridiculous hats.

Insurance :

the first truly universal
religion.

Moral Authority

a rare commodity
a contradiction in terms.

On the ninth anniversary

of the pinpricking of America:

the depths of despair
have risen to new heights.

In the Past

When there were
showy flagellations
prayers were called
ejaculations.

Education

The more information there is
the more babblingly dumb
we become.

First

we complicate life
needlessly

then try to
simplify it childishly

(and/or vice versa)

A 'terrorist'

operates crudely
against the interest
of a nation-state.

A transcendental anarchist
tries simply, vainly
to subvert the interests
of all nation-states
and the forces which
finance them.

We are born subject.

Our subjection to the nation-state
is proved by Birth Certificate.
We die as subjects
and are certified as dead.

Between birth and death,
our first and our last breath,
the State is in possession,
is lord, of our identity
over which we have only
minimal control.

Now pets have passports.

To hate the State has no effect on it
but some - or terrible - effect on you.
The Greek dramaturges knew
that the State
is Fate.

Stoolball

The ancestor of baseball
and cricket, invented by women
500 years ago, was played with
a milking-stool and a turnip,
beetroot, or rutabaga.

Arabesques

swirl and replicate
without the slightest sense
of purpose,

but each tile-pattern
or carpet is unique

and for reflective minds
a mandala.

No breeder

is harmless.

The reason why

there are no jokes
(not even irony)
in any Scripture
is that we are too
indoctrinated
to take jokes seriously
or to laugh at religions.

Nuclear Power

More destructive
even than possessions
is possessiveness.

The story of mankind

is the story of enslavements.
And now we are enslaved
by an idea of the New Enslavers:
the Employment Ethic.

The Command of Hierarchical Employment
is the latest, most refined
form of slavery.

Comfort

is not happiness
nor even contentment.

Nor does it lead to happiness
or contentment.

Comfort is the subtlest
and most seductive
kind of enslavement.

What's so good

about living longer
if you get more
and more depressed
and ever more
dependent ?

Such beautiful words

for what we do well:
assassinate,
desecrate, plunder
and cull...

GOaD

(what the donkey would hate
if donkeys could hate)

Good
Order
and
Discipline

Before civilisation

children of seven
were self-sufficient.

For a dog

piss on a tree
may be information
and poetry.

In a Parallel Universe

or a far-distant galaxy:

Finding the right word

Is it a robocracy
or a robotocracy
that runs us
and guns us
like family cars

or spies ?

Robots

We are all motorists now
driving on the designated
side of the road,
insured and licensed,
heeding the warnings,
following the signboards,
filtering, giving way, slowing down,
stopping and not stopping
as the State decrees
- and children can no longer
climb trees.

From the bottomless pit

of suburbia
rise the Gewgaw Culture
and the National Theatre
of Cruelty.

Propaganda

Neither French 'cuisine'
nor American 'democracy'
are what they are
cracked up to be.

The Chinese government well understands

that capitalism is inherently
monopolistic, hence
ineluctably
anti-democratic.

Anti-love-poem

for one who will never read this

Despicable
when not ridiculous,

we are evolution's
royal wrecks.

To be in love is silly
to be loved oppressive

So let's have tender,
unpenetrative sex.

Faith, knowledge

and belief
are tools
for ignorance
and fools.

The wise
can only face
the bliss
of entropy
which is
the only whisper
of Grace.

A Crown of Thorns

is nothing more
than a metaphor :
the pain
of the barbedwireness
of the brain.

Freitod

Where suicide is outlawed
it is not to protect us
but to keep us from escaping.

(after Bardhyl Londo)

Soul-shit

There's no such thing as
soul
just a hole
a soul-slit...

Confession of a HomoseNSual

Half the homoseXuals I meet
depress me;
the others make me angry.

'Sport'

Competitiveness
infantilises.

The Past

is a lone wolf :
let it pass, and it will sing
to the Northern Lights.
Try to capture it,
and it will attack you.

Chaos

and vandalism
are not the same.

All business
is unfinished.

What is a mind ?

but a freak and defective
reasoning-processor
with attitude;

a badly-designed
cogitation-apparatus
which, conscious of its
own deficiencies, is just
a mutant, an evolutionary
aberration.

Poetry

is not information
- so this is not a poem
(so far).

Democracy
turns out to be
government
by hypocrisy.

This is now
and certainly
despite your snorts
a poem
(of sorts).

Toxic emissions

can also be
emotional.

Orpheus

Animals are
infinitely more enchanting
than music


















even music of the most profound
and temporarily-transforming kind.

Secret Power

Those who affect
your language
affect you.

Nakedness

was heroic in ancient Greece,
shameful in Judæa,
the mark of slavery in Rome,

and is thought sinful even now
everywhere Europeans have
worked their dire effects,
because it is dismally,
stupidly configured
with penetrative sex.

Only a fool

can continue to imagine
that life is worth living.
All the living are fools
who have learned nothing
from the living or the dead.

Wider still, and wider -
for no fool is a spider.

(from the Patmospherian Gospel of
St Anthony Vasectomicus
Tome MXM, Cap.666)

Christianity

slowly, slowly drained
the colour from the world.
Islam puts a little back:
red and black.

Big Brother

Behold!
From a compulsory
but undefined social contract
oozed Nanny Leviathan:
government
by television, newspapers,
and (of course) banks
- backed up by tanks.

The more

words
The fewer
truths.

"Gay Pride"

in Belfast:
no-one threw bombs.
Many threw up.

Many tons of rubbish
were thrown down.

Employment :

the strings
that pathetic human
puppets dangle
from - and are emotionally
strangled.

A humble refutation of monotheism

If we are 'made in God's image',
God must be a pretty ugly animal
compared with, say, a Slow Loris.




















And if we are the best that God
could produce, God help Him!

(I guess he didn't so much die
as lose the will to live...)

Tournament of values

What nobody will learn at school
is the only thing worth knowing:
how to live.

A Maundering

I am so disgusted by double-think,
mendacity, hypocrisy and greed
that I sometimes think that if
al-Qaïda of the Amazing Aircraft
were vegetarian non-breeders
I'd join them.

But then I remember that a certain
Adolf Schicklgruber Hitler
was a vegetarian non-breeder...














'There are no good guys.'

A short ride in a fast machine

click here for story and video

If thoughts ever

become clear in the
clogged sewers of our brains
we will have become mere
processing-plants.

Truth

is ambiguity.
It mocks.
The greatest truth
is paradox

and cocks
love other cocks.

Still-life with reflection

The least of our crimes against Nature

is the sensory deprivation
and boredom of domestic animals
unto dullness, depression
and death.

"Day unto day

uttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge"
- Psalm 19:2

A kind of lampshade, skin
over skeleton, I glow
from the softness of
your passion
moon-fashion
and not inflamed
by man's mean fury
his insane and mere complexity

Feel! I festoon
your labyrinthine, abracadabrantine stair
with a sub-luminary softening
that cannot come from ordinary light

That rare and velvet
darkening
is a kind of kind shadow-flare
that makes us both aware
of the sheer simplicity of sanity
Deep in the sewer,
the brain's profanity,
hearkening
to each other's heart,
we perform the elegant and touching rite.

Television

Not the Black
nor the White
but the Bright Death
of Difference -

the seductive, hypnotic
meta-holocaust.

Minotaouranos

Expensive and poor,

religion is just
an expensive and poor
substitute for simple
or animal connection.

America

Dreams
are oracles
that few can interpret;
but fantasies
are desperate.

"The land of the free"

is one of only a few
from which the poorest
cannot escape.

Which is why
there are no American
refugees.

The only time

that I like civilisation
is when I am confronted
by its ruins
and its ruin.

Trees

give more than they take.
Is that why we cut them down
instead of worshipping them ?

We don't say

'Beware of Trojans bearing gifts',
since almost all of them were slaughtered
except Æneas, his father,
and some anonymous others.

The Trojan horse
was Greek, of course.

In the afterlife

everything goes very
very slowly
because we are still
very old.

This is excellent in orgies
but not so good
in offices.

George W. Bush was quite right :

there is no word in French
(or any other language, except Japanese
which uses the same word in the same way)
that corresponds with the English word
entrepreneur.

Entreprise in French means 'business',
and un entrepreneur is anyone
who does a job for money or reward.

(This, of course is neither an apophthegm
nor a poem.)

Civilisation :

the war against the longing
it creates.

Who

would not be wiser
if s/he had a
frugaliser ?

click here to learn more

Switzerland

Just reversing the colours
of a flag does not diminish
your insanely profitable crimes.

Francis

For the rich
the rarest luxury
is poverty.

from the Library of Zion

The most prized
bookmarks in history
would have been manufactured
from the undecayed
pressed foreskins
of leadingNazis.
But few or none were made.

'Love'

is the most expensive way
to learn humility.

The Thief of Time

I so look forward
to my suicide.
But when and where
I can't decide.

Click on the image to read the poem

Most information

is useless
(if not dangerous)
without the information
to inform it.

And so it goes...

Man was ever cursed

with
too much imagination,
not enough empathy.

Superlative

(inspired by Orhan Veli)

FOR ANGELOS PETROUTSAS

I love thin hairy bearded men,
I also love hunky working men
and sexy men on the dole
(I'd make the latter piles of toast) -
but I love thin, hunky, working-but-
unemployed, bearded men the most.

Ergmadromic

football's
goal-driven skill
displays the spoiled infantilism
of the European will.

Suicide

(inspired by Orhan Veli)

I know
it isn't easy to live.
I know very well
that living isn't easy
Especially if you
(think you) have to shave.
But dying's no doddle either,
guys.

To leave this world
when you decide you've
had enough
is not the easy option
that you think it is.
Let me tell you
it's only for the bravest
of the brave.

The greatest curse

of communism
was that it strengthened capitalism.
Millions were sacrificed by the one;
millions continue to be killed
and maimed by the other.

Beauty

(inspired by Orhan Veli)

How beautiful the colour
of fresh green tea
is
in the morning
in the fresh air.
How beautiful
the fresh air
is.
How beautiful that tree.
How handsome and how
venerable the waiter
is.
How beautiful the tea.

Every blithe attempt

by the millions of Irrational Optimists
to justify their doctrines
adds to the planet-sized grounds
for rational pessimism.

Like woodworm

in the roof-beam
we rule the world.

Pro Patria

(inspired by Orhan Veli)

Many died
Many more were maimed
Some gave speeches
None spoke out

Shoplifting :

somebody
has to do it.

Sexiness

(inspired by Orhan Veli)

Where
where is my sexiness ?

One of Satan's minions took it,
couldn't sell it,
couldn't even give it away -
so he threw it away.

O where O where
is my sexiness ?

Rueful

Torturers get very tired.

Travelling

(inspired by Orhan Veli)

I have no intention of travelling.
I am happy in these gorgeous gorges
of the Aveyron.
But if I were to travel
I wouldn't go to Beijing,
La Paz or Mafeking.
One day you might think
you've seen me making
taking magic potions
somewhere beyond the seven oceans,
farther from here than eerie Pyongyang...

but I told you:
I have no intention of travelling.

Homework

"I am a voluntary patient.
"I am a voluntary patient.
"I am a voluntary patient.
"I am a voluntary patient.
"I am a voluntary patient.
".. .. .. ............. ..........
"I am a voluntary patient
in this perfect ward."

Our prejudices are foisted on us (chiefly by the press)

Most drug-dealers make less
than the minimum wage.
They trade for about 6 months
and live with their mothers.

Between the known

and the unknown
are the brilliant mind,
the rotting heart.

To be no longer

To be no shorter
A trice on a bicycle
An ape on an icicle
A sperm-aborter
An old shame-monger

From pilgrimage

to tourism

From prophets
to advisors

From hermits
to loners

From saints
to surgeons

From hatchetings
to holocausts

- We bathe in Progress ?


for Kalliope Amorphous

My contribution to Universal Ignorance Day

is the proposition that the world is God's junk DNA.

Christmas

decorations insult a tree
with the flim and sham
and flummery
we shroud ourselves in.

Without earplugs

life could well
become intolerable.

I live

(as the Germans say)
'Like God in France'
- in France.
But
thank God
I'm not God.

On the fishmonger's slab

the frightful
symmetry of suffering.

God didn't die

- he/she/it/they
witnessing us
just lost the will to live.

On the planet of screaming trees

the many-headed monster
of deception is also
a democracy.

The Only Church

that is not evil
is the church of
Dog.

"Homosexuality",

like life,
is a condition
whose cure is simple
but not easy.

We think the world

is full of what we know.
But it is filled with
what we'll never learn.

The Destruction of America

White people spread
like disease through the world
their banners infected,
their meanness unfurled...

Where monotheism was imposed

(in Arabia and the Middle East)
the terrible results are now
reverberating.

Sow the patriarchal wind -
and reap the bloody,
world-destroying hurricane.

Ideas are terrible :

they separate us
from each other
and everything.

Henry Ford

had to hire 900 mechanics
in order to find 100 who would
work on his toxic assembly-line.

Nine out of ten were real men
in those days. Now ninety-nine
out of a hundred are deodorised
wage-slaves - thanks to evil men
like Henry Ford.

Many victories

are Pyrrhic.
And all are hollow
as Hell.

Agencies

of successive
U.S. Governments have killed
at least a hundred times more Americans
than al-Qaîda:

(click on the above for a two-hour documentary)

What makes the world go round :

Plausible
Deniability

How peculiar

that geranium-leaves
should smell of mass-murder :

the smell pervading
Bergen-Belsen
concentration-camp
was that of crushed
geranium-leaves.

Democratic Government

Meetings about meetings
to spend imaginary money
with fine distinction,
in response to 'popular
demand' for an ever-higher
standard-of-living
for the not-so-poor

guarantee
the agonising
Sixth Extinction.

I feel

as if I might have been
born on an asteroid.

Not a Little Prince
but a Diogenean Android.

after Li-Po (8th century)

The birds have melted
into mist
and mist has turned to rain.
I'm sitting on a mountain-top.
The mountain will remain.

Drugs

are egalitarian.
Religions
are not.

The Hospice at Jerusalem

Somewhere, nowhere,
everyone everywhere
grades everyone else
according to the state
and the quality or absence
of their underwear.

What I cast off in summer
is much like my mind:
underwashed by the over-hygienic.
Only the loincloths of yogis
and saints were more full
of the odour of transfiguration.

So I remain in occultation.

Unlike many

I have always wanted
to think the best of people.
But nearly seventy years
of life have finally convinced me
that some people are only at their best
in extreme circumstances
of hunger, pain or thirst -

or in what we rich, totalitarian
sedentarists insist is deprivation
(no access, for example, to
infantilising education) -

and that most people who live
in employment-economies
are mostly more than
half-way to their worst.

Breeding and fighting,

feeding and blighting,
and even
reading and writing,
we only get more terrible
as our tools get better.

Fame,

maim, blame
all chime
and rhyme.

Man is no greater
than his misery,
no better
than his shame.

Horrible words

like cull and weed,
troubleshooting, bestial
and chaste,

can have been invented only
by the terrorist species which I call
Hazardous Waste.

Book-sniffing

The sounds of that
smell are the
colours of organ
music.

On the day of the end of this little world

the prisoner on death row since 1995
is very happy to die
at the same time as everyone else.

Real people

don't shave.

Such a pity

that scientists don't seem
to talk to each other.

Climatologists, botanists
and evolutionary biologists
tell us that The End is Nigh

while medical researchers
are insanely hopeful
about extending the length
(but never the quality)
of human lives.

Ironic

The ultimate elegance :
silence.

All religion is idolatry

- So what ?
Besides the overwhelming
majority of unborn, the wholesome-
minded once-born, and the divided
Tolstoyan-Kierkegaardian
twice-born, are the very few,
and non-elect:
the thrice-born who live
from moment unto moment
of spontaneous insight.

[written after listening to a BBC broadcast
on William James'
Varieties of Religious Experience]

Saint-Lazare

Lepers catch coins in their mouths
like dogs
when they have no fingers.

Totenkranz

and Totentanz
are dead

on est en-chant-é
begeistert
ensorcelled
by the trivial
instead.

Singular and single
the wolf's and
my saliva
mingle.

for Mary Ann Heywood

Progress

We have turned ourselves into
the only mammalian species which cannot
(and will not)
clean its genitals with its tongue.
This is just one of the sad degeneracies
caused by culture.

Go figure!

In Albania today,
men who, twenty years ago,
went on hunger-strike
to help topple a dictator

are now on hunger-strike
to protest against last year's
rigged elections.

In Northern Ireland
on the other hand,
violent fanatics
starved themselves to death
just for the unsuccessful
egotism of 'recognition' as
'political prisoners'.

Cannibalism for Beginners

Bigotry
is moral tribalism

Democracy
is the codification
of bigotry.

You can dumbly vote
for the arrogant and pathetic
only when the powerful permit.

But you can subvert
the system and 'society'
every day of your life.

The last Age is
the Age of Antisensuality.

Representative Democracy

The duped
vote for
the stupid.

British General Election

I would never cast a vote
for anyone so arrogant
and so pathetic
as to want it.

Appellation non-contrôlée

In the British Isles it is very easy
to change one's name officially.

I have never liked my surname
(which is that of my maternal grandfather
who was hated by his family
for his sheer, Victorian hypocrisy) -

but I can't decide whether all my future
documents will be signed
Diogenes Xavier Antichrist

or Demerara Cane Sugar
(natural and unrefined).

Every animal

is a cathedral of chemicals.
And Man
(it seems to me)
is a doomed Vatican.

Proud never to have been employed

Next to being rich
the greatest compliment
in our degenerate
and limiting society
is to be called
hardworking.
You are very close
to criminal
if you're known for
shirking.

More urgent

than "what oft
was thought, but ne'er
so well express'd"

would be to say
what people rarely
dare to think - lest
it make their
hard minds soft.


[In other words:
To have universal appeal is to convey very aptly
something evident or unoriginal.]

God's god

is
entropy.

The world

is controlled
by people
so important
they do not exist.

The silence of onlookers

is the sound of shame.

* Contemporary Poetry

(to Paul Muldoon et mult.al.)

A wave of treated
toxins, chlorinated turds
in a slimy sea
of over-considered
words.


*(in the English language)

Non-penetrative sex

is to the cruder kind
as Dhrupad is to Opera.

[Dhrupad is the most contemplative form of Indian Classical music,
usually sung (in solo or duet) by deep male voices,
but also played on the most contemplative instrument,
the Rudhra Vina.
A single Rag can take several hours to perform.]

When death

is penultimate
integrity,
grieving is
another kind of vanity.

Though all prisoners

are political

the true anarchist
is not.

A Place to Rest

The other day I hired a grave
@ 9 euros a year for
the minimum 30 years.

It is in a beautiful, secluded,
empty corner of the graveyard
with a splendid view across
the river to the village.

Others seem to want to rot
in the open, in full sun,
but I prefer my shady Vampire Corner
where I have planted hellebore,
heather, periwinkles, costmary
and wild garlic - though not
because I think the last-named
will be necessary.

Heaven

for dog-lovers is full of dogs
for racists has no people of color
for control-freaks is a gulag
      of their very own in the sky
for Jews contains no Gentiles
for Muslims is full of virgins
      for whom there is no competition
for cats is full of mice and small
      endangered, feathered species
for me is gloriously null eternity

'Embedded Water'

It takes 130 pints of water
to grow the food and process it
to make a pint of beer.

A cup of coffee "embeds" 140 litres
of water, a cotton T-shirt 2,000 litres,

and 15,000 litres of water (plus
a lot of drugs, husbandry and transport) make
just one kilogram of steak...
for necrophagy's sake!

Words and the World

interweave
and unravel
each other.

Application of Intelligence

It requires only the slightest shift
of mind, and modest application,
to turn oneself
from sexually-deficient
to sexually self-sufficient.

Women of the World,

unite!
For the men are
faking it
too
-and don't even know
that they're faking it.

NASA

is now working on the logistics
of using the dark side of the moon
as a dump for nuclear waste,

and how to make Mars
habitable for colonising
members of our species
- which is so good at
cherishing planets.

Make haste! O make haste!

Deuteronomy & Leviticus

Every Christianity
is à la carte
pick 'n' mix doctrine
and morality.

(see Comment for amplification)

What the Cat said

Curiosity killed
the planet.

Sexual jealousy

and capitalism:
if you love the latter
you revel in the former.

When I come to think about it,

'high' culture
is only a little less trivial
than the 'low' variety.

The best future

is none.

(Brevity
is the soul of
levity.)

Arthritis :

an old dog chews on
an older bone

Mystery

is the natural order of things
which the vanity of our curiosity
imperils with such impertinence.

'What is important'

said the great heterosexual chansonnier,
Georges Brassens, 'is the sum total of affection,
tenderness and fellow-feeling
that a man can offer another.'

We have the arrogance

to think we're more than
animals ruled by appetites.
But our appetites have become
ingeniously multifarious

and our reason is their
pathetic slave.

Truth

invented by humans,
exists only in laughter.

Our skins

feel like
the skins of snakes.
We are one of only two
mammals without fur.

This evolutionary
accident was our
Original Sin.

At the deepest level

of civilisation:
prison.

Optimism's ruthless,

unremitting rays
glare out from almost every human act
and scorch the Earth

which merely adds
to hubristic humanity's self-praise.

POLICE SAY

(a found poem)

Police say 28-year-old Anthony Coffman
walked into the Jay C. Foodstore,
pulled out a hunting knife
and attacked packages of hamburgers.

When an employee tried to stop him,
police say Coffman lunged at the man
with the hunting knife.

"He told people at the store
that God had sent him there to do that.
And he was trying to save young girls from the beef,"
said Deputy Police Chief David Lutz.

Coffman is charged with criminal mischief,
and criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon.

Kiss Bomb Outrage

no soldiers hurt.

Integrity

is as painful as truth.
Even as a backward youth
on a backward-looking island
I realised that pain may be
the only path to integrity.

THE ROAD HARDLY-EVER TAKEN

This path leads
to no destination.
The others lead to death.

My life

is as of a naked boy
at a masked ball.
But I am very strong.

O planets! O galaxies!

Beyond pain
and happiness
I will soon be dust
and infinite again.

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE

- A MORE-OR-LESS FOUND POEM

A Russian (said to be the World's Cleverest Man)
has turned down a million-dollar prize
for solving one of mathematics' toughest puzzles.

Dr Grigori Perelman, 44,
who lives as a recluse with his mother
in a small flat on a run-down housing-estate
in outer St Petersburg, said through the closed door:
"I have all I want."
She said: "We don't want to talk to anyone."

They both share her $75-a-month pension
because he has been unemployed since 2006.

The Millennium Prize was given in 2006
by the Clay Mathematics Institute
for his solution of the Poincaré Conjecture, posed in 1904.


Dr Perelman openly e-mailed his solution in 2002,
but failed to turn up to receive his prestigious Fields Medal
(equivalent to a Nobel Prize)
from the International Mathematical Union
in Madrid four years ago.

At the time he stated:
"I'm not interested in money or fame.
I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

"I'm not a hero of mathematics.
I'm not even that successful.
That's why I don't want to have everybody looking at me.

"If the proof is correct then no further recognition is needed.

"I do not think anything that I say can be
of the slightest public interest."

Neighbour Vera Petrovna said:
"I was once in his flat and I was astounded.
He only has a table, a stool and a bed with a dirty mattress
which was left by previous owners:
alcoholics who sold the flat to him.

"We are trying to get rid of cockroaches in our block,
but they hide in his flat."

Dr Perelman once said to an American journalist:
"...there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest.
But almost all of them are conformists."

"He is someone who sees the world a little bit in black and white,"
said Marcus Du Sautoy, Oxford University's Professor
for the Public Understanding of Science - who obviously
has little understanding of morality, let alone meta-morality.

Dr Perelman is also a talented violinist.
His sister lives in Stockholm.
She, too, an eminent mathematician.

In March 2010, it was announced that he was the first person
to meet the criteria for
the Clay Mathematical Institute's Millennium Prize,
also worth one million dollars, but that he had declined it, too.
No-one else has been offered one of these prizes.

The Poincaré Conjecture was more than 100 years old
when Dr Perelman solved it
- and could help determine the shape of the universe.

Miracles

To turn water into wine
is only to add consumer value
or to disinfect.

But to have turned wine into water
would have avoided
unimaginable slaughter.

Reason enhances acquisition.

So we fall victim to acquisitive rationalism,
which can be fought only by reason,
since reason solipsistically and compulsively sabotages
intuition, sensibility, mystery and reverence.

This is why quasi-rational narrative
has swamped Western culture in general
and poetry in particular.

Youth is rarely wasted

but the rest of life often is.

Religion shrinks

the mind and the heart
- but not, alas, the penis.

Whitey wishes he were black

I am the indecent colour of dying,
a shame-shifted corpse
of beige-pink-blue-gray -
the ku-klux shade of ambition and lying.
The taste of my heart is the taste of dismay.

Time's Streamers

Between the sleeping and the waking
Between my genes and my vasectomy
Between misgiving and mistaking
Between occlusion and dormition
out from a floating ocean
a floating river flows through me
to the transcendent not-to-be

Capitalism

In Poppy Adams' The Behaviour of Moths there is a fine description of an ants' nest, to which ants work frantically to bring pieces of neatly-cut leaf - not to their own larvæ but to a big, bulbous grub which has hacked into and commandeered the ants' communication system.

As it gets even bigger it eats the ants' neglected or dead larvæ, too,
then commands the ants to bear it in a procession to another nest where it will continue its development.

Thus is capitalism.

DORA'S BOX

The most insidious ill is success,
and here's the paradox:
though now pandemic it cannot be infectious.

When push

comes to shove,
a right
is only a rite.

Pipeninsulipsistic

So much of
men's talk is
tail-trail
of lost peacocks.

The gap between the spheres

is the great consciousness between
truth and fiction
sleeping and waking
singing and talking
art and science
imagination and insight
sex and gender
love and happiness
inspiration and expiration
death and glory
desires and terrors
the left brain and the right -

is the universe
of unseen mirrors.

Art

can teach us very little
but animals almost everything.

Homo sapiens sapiens, never knowingly reasonable

My critique of Reason
is that it is rarely pure -
simply because pure reason
can rubbish the extreme cunning
that we parade under the name
of intelligence.

CERN

Stupid scientists
ask how the Universe began
- but not exactly where
their food comes from...

and so it goes,.

SCIENCE

is a cul-de-sac :
Theseus and the Minotaur.

Religion is the best excuse
for enmity and war.

The most malignant disease

is success.

Though epidemic,
it is not infectious.

More

lessness -
please,
please...

To change the world for the better

- or just to prevent things
from getting worse -
you must start at the beginning
by creating a new Universe.

Listening to the radio

I heard dolmen
instead of doorman.
I'm getting alzheimeristic
and more and more mystic.

Approaching Seventy

At last
I'm music
while the music
lasts.

Information

occludes knowledge.
Knowledge obscures
understanding.

Until yesterday

I thought that Janis Joplin's line
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
was glib rubbish. My reply was
Freedom's just another word for grabbing what you can.

But now I realise that what she was trying
so incompetently to say was that
you have no idea what freedom is if you are still
clinging to comfort, order, things, people or ideas -

in other words, the only freedom is death.

After my March bath

I start to scratch. Cleanliness
is next to weakness.

Nearly 99%

of poetry
(it seems to me)
is false.

But maybe
highfalutin' falsehood
is the point
of poetry ?

Restless night.

Beneath
the glistening, sticky moon
Man rips the robes of time.

Readers of this blog

would never think
that I am insanely
happy, or happily
insane...
and that the older
I get the happier
I seem to become
-despite being human.

Language

is the mere
and easily-debasable
currency of thought.

Squeamish people

are far more numerous
than revolting things.

The wrong whys

always want answers.

Higher Intelligence

Most of us
are wrong about most things.
Most animals
are right about most things.

All heaven

and no hell
in the well
of smells.

Politics :

the only crime
against society ?

Alone

I'm never alone
for I have
ten moons
to scratch me.

The secret of happiness :

to be superficial
- with insight.

When the happy

are not invisible
they are crushed
by the unhappy.

Insanity

is rarer for individuals
than for groups.

Solipsists

are people who constantly
make love with their egos,
their smugness, their hypocrisy,
and think they are
mirrors of time.

What Christian church

is not a client of
the Church of Pontius Pilate ?

Philosophy

could be life
beyond tears.

The road

is very short between
the meat-maker
and the bridge-builder.

It is the road of
false intent.

Masculinity

How strange
that men bond
by doing silly
or illicit
things together...

It suggests to me
that In the Beginning
men, like male elephants,
were held in check
by matriarchy.

The day is dateless

How sweet the day!
The day is hateless!
The earth, the sea, the sky
are hateless, and Man,
at last no more,
is fateless.
There is no more man.

The world has risen
from the nearly-dead,
the world is glorious,
all creatures fed
except Man's parasites
and viruses.
And godlessness,
marvelling at all the food,
said
It is good.

The meek shall inherit the earth

VOTE FOR THE MEEK!

9th February,1909

Today in 'Rotten History'

The first US federal law prohibiting the importation of opium was enacted, aimed not at the damage the drug was doing to American society (none: white people weren't using opium), but at the hated and despised Chinese,living mostly on the west coast -
who, of course, were victims of the British Imperial policy on China.
The British 'Opium Wars' were declared in order to swamp Chinese society and administration with cheap Afghan opium.

A little later, marijuana and other forms of cannabis were outlawed in the US - mainly because it was making the despised and hated underdog African-Americans happier than they ought to have been.

The world

is much too kind
to the graceless
and ungrateful.

Original Sin

The first crime
was when a human being
felled a tree for the first time.

Alienation: the crime against Nature.

During the Renaissance

there were more women
immured in Christian convents
than in Muslim harems.

The Joker

cracks an egg.
Behold!
Catastrophe.

Faute de mieux

we have all been born.

Nothing is merely relative

except
truth.

WC

Western Civilisation
a water closet
soon to be
a stinking latrine.

The most wonderful privation :

to be unable to want.

(blog lost by Blogger)

Despite the alleged

'sanctity of human life'
individuals don't matter
in the larger world.

Homo sapiens

is the only species
parasitic on itself.

We love others
of the species
to serve us, even
(or especially ?)
if they die in the serving.

Words from the greatest social engineer ever

'Poets should be
the engineers of human souls.'

(attributed to J.V. Stalin)

Spartacus

and his fellow 'terrorists'
did not want to liberate slaves,
but to become slave-owners.

Plus ça change...

What Cain said to Abel

Business
is
business.

The essays of Michel de Montaigne

were banned by the Catholic Church
for 200 years, because of his respect
for animals.

The meaning of life

is to prepare for death
with elegance and
enjoyment.

Sex :

too often
the latrine
of romance.

The sound of history :

water
going down
the drain.

No wonder I slightly admire the wily Odysseus/Osama !

It is sickeningly amusing
that the Haitian earthquake
(200,000 dead in the poorest country in the world)
gets less news-coverage
than the brilliant, Homeric
attack on those hideous and terrorist New York towers
(3,000 dead in the richest country in the world).

One American= 66,666 Haitians -

Of course!

The birth of OK

After rough Och Aye met chique D'Accord OK was born a little bitty guy (un petit gars) soon to be clad in Denim: a cloth (de Nîmes) originally woven in Provence, badly tailored into trousers resembling those once worn by Genoan sailors (de Gènes, corrupted into Jeans).

Denim originated in Indian fishing communities around Bombay (Mumbai) and was the fabric used for Dungarees.

Every building

is a crime.
















The best of man is his ruins.

In the rich countries

most people
look like the cold
undead.
In two of them
I'm fighting
the tough cushions
in my head.

A 'failed state'

is a country where you
get arrested for
pissing in a park.

Lying precedes language

In the constructed universe of language is our having, hence our being.
And language is the most powerful weapon
in our war against the world.

Telling, not showing

In the fly-trap of luxury,
unrecognised,
the greatest luxury
is suicide.


(A poem to celebrate
Google's decision to
cease blocking Blogger
& Blogspot in China.)

As our tools get better

we only get worse.

The Nazis demonstrated

that a society can be both evil
and ridiculous...
like any society with
concentration-camps for animals,
nuclear bombs
and poncey military parades.

Purpose -

perhaps the
stupidest thing.

Continuing happiness:

if it existed
it would be
a rather greater miracle
than life.

Death

is no indifferent enemy
but the universal friend.

Coprophilia

Capitalist shit:
fresh today,
toxic tomorrow.

Religions which seek converts

are inherently intolerant -
for if they were tolerant
they would be happy
to leave other people be.

What's so great about equilibrium

when see-sawing is so interesting ?

Epicurus Summarised

Simplicity + goodwill = happiness

God said

Let there be light!
Satan said
Let there be heat!

To be ignorant

of history
is to be ignorant
and infantile.