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.