It is often easier for us to complain

or keep silent
than to praise or rejoice.
Is Man the only endogenously
miscommunicating animal ?
Certainly he is a very lonely voice.

Or is it only in our culture of ricocheting blame ?

At the end of the year

I discovered two things quite by accident:

1. a bland or acrid red wine can be greatly improved by adding a small pinch of cinnamon or cassia.

2. (at the age of 71¼) the likely identity of my father. [see comments for more]

What we get to see of politics

is largely pantomime.
Religion has glorified male vanity to God,
while art has split between the two extremes
of therapy - and fraud.

Sex :

to communicate
first like a flash-flood
then like a drought:
the game's
not worth the candle:
it's not like handball
nor an edifying country ramble.
In fact, the sickening scandal
of it is that it hi-jacks
all the tender and generous feelings
which men could otherhow
distribute around
in their daily social dealings.

After being swallowed, 
a Rainbow Trout fingerling peeks out fron the gullet of a Northern Pike.

The thing about thoughts

is that nobody's interested in yours -
so you might as well not bother
expressing them, especially not
in a 'consumer-democracy'.

It is an ugly culture

in which parents would prefer
their children to be murdered
than to be suicides.

I know the last line is ungrammatical, but this is a sort-of- poem about

the Unintended Consequences of "Gay Liberation".

Wherever 'gay' men
are no longer perceived as a threat
to patristic Family Values,
they indulge in rejecting
the errant: outsiders, beggars, hill-billies...
and even want to stifle each other
by marriage, put chains on each other's willies.

for Jeffrey Dudgeon

Projection

We attribute to others
our most glaring faults.
Thus the English
find the French rude
and the Germans ruthless.

(Fish-Eye, much re-blogged)

It is very sad for me

that men tend to be
more touchy
than touchy-feely.

Perhaps Socrates

the footballer
is wiser than was Socrates
the philosopher.
And he's thinner if not taller.

A lot of time can be saved

by disliking people on sight:
time to plant trees, read books,
choose wines, write poetry, self-ignite,
learn Lucid Dreaming, re-instate
the Caliphate,
and, best of all, autofellate.

It is not widely appreciated

that English potatoes are very male
(King Edward, Home Guard, Ulster Chieftain),
while French ones are feminine
(Charlotte, Belle de Fontenay, Rose de France).
Could this be why French potatoes taste so much better ?

The Real Awfulness

of the Mega-Church of Mammon's Chief Festival
of greed, false generosity, hypocrisy,
overconsumption (and of course overpopulation),
is that it has been embraced
wholeheartedly by "humanists", Jews,
Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus
- which leaves only a daring few
vile dissidents like me
to spit upon the Christmas-tree.

After the Liberation

'gay' men pranced
(though some slunk) into
the stadium of normality,
where proper queers police a
standard superficiality.

In this vale of other people's tears,

There is no such thing as rightful property.

Not even our egos.
Everything we acquire
even before birth
we capture from each other
and plunder from the earth.

Solitude is best at Christmas :

people are easy to avoid
because they're all shopping
or recovering from parties
and pill-popping.
or jetting
or fretting or writing lists.
So (paradoxically) Christmas is
a good time also for vegetarians
and anti-natalists.

Thus the culture of war infects our language.

It is much easier to say
I was devastated
than to say
I am heart-broken.

Poetry is moribund.

Prose has had its day.
And neither
entropy-therapy
nor ecstasy-cure
exist in
all the gray.

As Lewis Carroll would have said to Diogenes:

if you're not totally baffled by people
you don't know them.

On meeting a beautiful (non-canine) person.

No-one informed me,
nobody warned me
that the Slough of Senility
could turn (but oh, so briefly)
by common and complicit magic
into the most ecstatic
mudbath of vagility.

Indoctrination

I remember texts
   from the Bible -
but have difficulty
   remembering 'good sex'.

The Monads

are windowless
nomads in the wilderness
of human understanding,
for we ourselves
are only monads
with gonads.

My nipples are
the windows
of my soul.

In Main Avenue South,

Britt, Iowa, USA
(formerly The Chief picture-house)
lies the Hobo Museum
on more than just a floor,

and every day that passes
I loathe the turnkey classes
more and more and more.

Better than the extremist silence of nuns:

the wise might indulge in not more 
than 140 well-chosen words a day.

The Decline of the Species.

As spontaneous ceremony
diminishes
so do people.

History

(as badly-balanced opinion)
ended a few years before 2000
(1422 AH).
Since then there has been
only data.

Explanations -

even when needlessly complicated
- are too simple.
It is more intelligent, more sane,
more respectful, to wonder
than to explain.

A Manichæan Heresy

for whomever ever feels the same

And the never-naked God said:
Let there be light!
and there was light.

And Satan said:
Let there be heat!
and there was heat
and hugs and lots of
intermingling fun
and passion.

And Satan said:
Let there be moisture!
Behold! The Kingdom
of Come that's scrummy,
scrotummy,
the loving beyond a mere
Second Coming
which God's gangs deny
in their dour devotion
to a grizzling, grisly
boss in the sky.

What we call Charity

Shops are known as Thrift Stores
in the USA and Canada -
which says quite a lot about
the North American mentality.

On one of his 'Off-Days'

Einstein wrote:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.
For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand,
while imagination embraces the entire world,
and all there ever will be to know and understand.” 

But because our imagination is so limited,
we know too much and understand too little,
and what we strive to know
is censored by our pitiful imagination.

Skyscrapers

and legal codes:

they tower.
We cower.

That's power.

The Water and Babel

In 1962
I understood a French film
only by reading the Danish subtitles.
In 2012
I understood a Danish film
only by reading the French subtitles.

The misty difference between
the two long-separated, but related acts
was caused by senile cataracts.


A week later I relied to some extent on French subtitles while watching an American thriller.
I have hearing-loss as well!
 

There is a mystical difference

between refuse
and re-fuse.
LINGUA ANGLORA INSOLITA EST.

Some questions about School Shootings

   (Apart from freak occurrences in Norway and Scotland)
why do they tend to happen in the USA
   rather than, say, Kazakhstan or Mexico ?

Why do right-wing Americans mythologise guns ?
Why is it worse to shoot babies and young children
   rather than adults (or dogs) ?
Why did we not hear about the Iraqi babies
   bombed and shot by the mad United States military ?
Will all American schools become like airports
   or Green Zones ?
Can the War Against Terror continue
   to exclude Americans and real terrorism ?

Work

(especially paid employment)
is God
in our peculiar, joyless culture -
and we all love
interrupting other people
doing it.

Smelly old men

are smelly on purpose -
but only by day
to keep people away.

An optimist

is someone who has problems
with insight.

Not one of us is big enough

to take even the tiniest fraction
of responsibility
for Man's malignity and misery.
But not to think of it
is derelict.

If the Universe

is the result of Intelligent Design
the designer very cleverly
created the moon just so
that it would take intelligent
animals just so much time to discover
that it revolved exactly so that just one side
faced both Earth and Sun forever
(O Lux horribilis! Lux æterna)  -
for that could surely
not have been by accident.

Beautiful Being Killed

I went to the city

- one of my very rare visits.
After a little light shoplifting
I saw two Romanians whom I knew
from the town.  They greeted me
with smiles.  I gave one £1.  (A pound=$1.60)
I gave her mother a pound.
They were on a very bad pitch.
They wished me a Merry Christmas.
I never ignore beggars.

Homage to Pam Ayres.

People who live in centrally-heated homes
with microwaves, washing-machines,
food-processors, tv sets,
computer-games and garages (...)
think my house a hovel,
while in my rural solitude
I ponder in sweet lentitude
upon great subjects - such as
deceit, desire and the attraction of the novel.

Today is the Feast

of the Immaculate Conception.
This is only one
of the more ridiculous components
of life's hydra-headed
Dirty Big Deception.

I care

and I care that I care
too much
and probably
I care too much
that I care.
Silly caring
is just ersatz religion.

Time is a theory.

Death is the end of time
for each of us, because
we measure time by life, by process.
When there will be no more humans
to imagine it, measure it,
time will end...

...and l'esprit de l'escalier
will become l'esprit du tombeau.

In Memoriam Alan Watts

How wonderful
if the millennium
of Europe's second rise
were coming to an end,
and its exquisite savagery,
its land-grabs, art and smugness,
ceaseless wars and conquest,
its ignorant arrogance -
though it's too late to mend
the damage...and start to dance.

The Collective Unconscious

If people ever
get even a little wiser,
the stupid will just
expand and reinforce
their petty empires of bleak prejudice.

Without possessing

Elie Wiesel 
quoted his five-year-old grandson:
"If I love you more, will you suffer less?"

A truly profound question
whose ramifications could fill a library.
The simple answer, of course, is:

"Yes - and no! But loving 
(not possessing)
 is a good state of being."

A tweet to Twitter

Hafez wrote:
The words you speak become the house you live in.

 حافظ
Khwajeh Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi,
14th-century Persian mystic and poet, whose tomb is in Shiraz.

Translation of a poem by Hafez

FROM A LARGE PITCHER
version by Anthony Weir, 2012

From a large pitcher
drink the wine of oneness
to wash your consciousness
of life's futility and greed,

and still keep your consciousness
magnanimous
like a great vessel. 
There can never be a need
to shrink awareness
into an unopened bottle!

When your mouth is blest and full
with wine of oneness
you are selfless,
prideless, free of dull
me-ness, cleansed of meanness.

Look to the pebble on the road
for inspiration,
not blue sky: aspiration
involves deceit, corruption,
and life becomes mere letters of a code.

Absorb the wine of oneness, give it body -
murder hypocrisy, not your heart.

Bestir yourself!  Get ready!
Lift up the jug - now start!

Chomsky in Paris

with thanks to:  hearts of clearest glass

Empires deliquesce

from pomposity and pomp
to dribbling pomposity.

Stupid Intelligence

- the concept that came too late.

Just a suggestion...