'Quality of Life'

sounds as dodgy as
'Human Dignity'.
And if 'Human Rights' were anything more
than a capricious construction of the bourgeoisie,
they would protect us at the very least against
everything that came after their invention.

Someone in Bessarabia

(now called Moldova)
visited my blog
for 50 seconds.

'Holy'

is hyperbole
for 'human'.

Until 200 years ago

slavery was almost universally accepted.
How long before
we find wage-slavery barbaric ?

What a pity

that our most common
disability
should be our so proud and wilful
stupidity.

Light -

such a depressing word:
light music, light entertainment,
light refreshments,
light
everlasting lite.

I am a pacifist

When 'they' accuse suicides and attempted suicides
of cowardice, are 'they' admitting that human life
is some kind of war -
against nature? the world ? death ?
or suicide ?

Cowards always toe the line.

Enantiodromia

In the country whose national myth
is that anyone can be a winner,
everyone looks like a loser.

Word of the Week

from a Norwegian diplomat:
bewilderness.

Fifteen caskets

fifteen borrowed coffins formed the stage
at Montgomery, Alabama, after the first
successful Civil Rights march in 1965.
One of the principal performers had,
twenty years before, in Germany,
dug up bodies disposed of by the Nazis.

I'm ready

to think the best
of people, but
I don't get even
their second-best.

It is time for me to stop listening and start imagining...

Love, loss, loneliness,

yearning – and frustration -
are the continuous products of
our Great Civilisation.

The Resilience of the Human Spirit

(which might also be called
lack of humility)
is the dark power behind
the Sixth Extinction.

Every dog, every true heart knows

that the lap of luxury
is for pissing in.

Disease

also suffers from diseases -
as life contracts romantic love.

Can governments make us good ?

was one of the set questions
asked by Sophie de Grouchet, Marquise de Condorcet,
at one of her salons de conversation.
- Or do they merely enforce obedience ?

Newly-liberated Americans,
fearing that there was no such thing
as good government,
declared that the foundation
of government is fear,
but this did not answer Sophie's question.

Over 200 years later I think we can say
that governments can seem to make us better,
if not good, and they do this not through government
but through a new barbarity:
representative democracy,
which has insisted on the exclusion
and/or punishment
of those who transgress the totalitarian
rules of Christian charity.

"Women's bodies are now the bodies of hairless boys"

said Germaine Greer.

But depilation
seems appropriate
if you're as false as a woman
as the effeminate men
who demand it.

The Zoo of Dissidents

Swept them up
Locked them in
Charged admission
And when they all died out
we brought back bear-baiting
and the ducking-stool.

in memoriam Philip Larkin

Now that tobacco smoking
is illegal in most places
(soon even in cars)
I have taken up cigars.
Now that homosexuality
is legal, it has lost its attraction.
Now that sexual abstinence
is considered freakish
I am enjoying it greatly.
Suicide is the last taboo:
I shall enjoy it, too.

Once is enough for anything.

Literature

is the attempt to build
with words a bridge
across the chasm that words create
- and thus is only language.

The Medical-Industrial Complex

also ensures that the whole planet
becomes grist
to a system of systems
created for their own sakes
in the name of Human Rights.
Humanity and Healing.

In times gone by

the main meal for most
in France was
bread and soup.
Today, soup is one of the few
foods they don't eat bread with.

Poets and Prostitutes

There are two kinds of poet-prostitute:
1. the whores who write poetry and are not many;
2. the poets who prostitute themselves
and are two a penny.

Modern medicine :

the industrialisation
of mercy.

Hippocrates would be appalled.

Papal Bull

Benedicts I-XVI

Only the Vatican few
can lick the Papal Balls
with Indulgence.

Western Values

One in every three
American servicewomen
suffers sexual harassment
assault or rape.
They might well be safer
under the Taliban.

A message

to all dogs & men & women :

If the hand that feeds you
restricts you, ties you up,
imprisons you, keeps you on a lead -
BITE IT !

Attack on a stupid cliché

That which is
'in our DNA'
- the urge to reproduce, to strive -
'free will' can counteract...

...depending on how 'free'
and 'willing' people are
or want to be.

Post-Socratic

Since Christianity and Islam
began to rule the religious roost
a new and maybe-deeper
philosophical question
should have taken root :
is the unexamined afterlife worth living ?

Quid pro quo

The more we automate our lives
the more like automata we become.

The manager

had a smile
as thin as the rubber
on an over-used condom

and a face to match.

What has changed ?

Pope Boniface VIII
(who lived at the time of Dante)
was 'gay'
and atheist.

Worship

is not irrational.
On the contrary.
But I would say
that the only rational object
of worship is entropy,
decay.

The first step

on the sad road to wisdom
is an inability
to take yourself seriously.

For nothing is important -
and poetry is an impertinence.

If you are published

you are commodified.
This is the only accolade
in capitalist societies.
Big Deal.

Post-trauma

My most beautiful part
is my navel.

My life
is exile from the womb
I should not have grown in
on a planet I weep for.
Every day is leisure
to put off dying -
because I'm seduced by the dribs
and drabs of merest pleasure.

Mad Science

A gerontologist
forecasts that soon
the fortunate (and their pets)
will be able
to live twice or even three
times as long as they do now,

watching the unfortunate
starve and strive like voyeurs
with binoculars at Belsen.