God was a bit stoned

when he made this fabulous creature.

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Le Grand Filou

My handsome, unreliable friend -
a leaf-and-bud-growing, wine-and-plant-loving
Basque gypsy, with splendidly
patched trousers, a braided beard,
and a shaggy dog -
'suffers' a bit from illiteracy,
so he can't read the names of the plants I give him...
Clivia nobilis, for example.
He's had no "education" to corrupt his mind,
or hypocritise his sometimes
brusque behaviour -
many think him unrefined
but importantly for me,
he has a sweet and boyish nature.

In his unmodernised and grimy,
butt-and bottle-strewn, but friendly flat,
he has a special thermal cubicle
crammed with Special
Aromatic Plants. I thought
as he showed them to me:
What a divinely-odorous couch to lie in,
and what a splendid bed
for an individuated animal to die in !

"What's The Purpose ?"

(or "God's Plan ?")
The Purpose is children
and their Purpose is children...
THE Purpose is overpopulation.

Don't miss this!

The Ghost 
in the House of  Wonks ... >>>

Against the grain

Poetry
consists in
what
you say.
How
you say it
is of importance
only to those
who like form,
not substance.

Liminal

The transition
from human band
to human herd
can happen in a trice.
Belief that we are
more than sporadically,
conveniently rational
is utterly absurd.

A few lame lines on Blog-composition

If I were to spend a fortnight
or a sixmonth on a poem
it still would be read by few
(let me take this opportunity
to thank all of you
for reading this and 'me') -
so I may as well have a little bit of fun
tossing off quips and observations,
bad rhymes,
and nihilistic jeux d'esprit.

Diogenes said:

"If you don't want to
(or can't)
have a dog,
BE a dog."

(dedicated to a 'follower' called People)

Meslier Updated

"The Great and the Good"
(a phrase which justifies authority)
from the World Bank to the Vatican,
might justifiably be strung aloft
with the intestines of fanatics.

[Wikipedia entry]

I like the assonance of Vatican and fanatic.

Confession of a Hypocrite

My despicable but often
all-too-cheerful self
(which is, despite everything,
larger than my ego)
is ashamed to be human,
but enjoys food and wine,
rain and trees and landscape,
and absence of wife
(and child or children),
too much to have the guts
and the integrity
to abandon
this shameful life.

God's Gift to Antinatalists

If more men
could become addicted
the planet might
be less afflicted.

A Montaignesque Musing

Like the higher apes,
humans evolved
the intelligence to lead
very easy, playful lives.
But something went wrong.
We preferred 'progress'
(which we perceived as gain)
to peace, and thereby condemned
the world to pain.
We are 'hard-wired' to strive,
competitive challenge is
"in our DNA"
(though not in mine). Anyway -
we moved out of
our easy East African habitat
in order to lead difficult
competitive lives in hostile regions,
aided and abetted
by those we made
our slaves and servants
through clever and befuddling religions.

[see my Michel de Montaigne blog]

As Michel de Montaigne pointed out,

torture
like everything systematic
(such as Prometheus'  Daily Vulture),
is an unique product
of  'advanced' culture.

Last year,

more academic papers were written about
snowboarding 
than about
species extinction.
You can see where we're going.
(Hurrah!)

part of the femur of a dodo

Fast Food

(from Uncyclopedia)

Having devised a new food,
the American entrepreneur naturally seeks a way 
for all 310,000,000 Americans to eat it at the same time.

[more]

A word I discovered on YouTube:

eargasms
I have been having them for years,
sometimes along with
the much rarer orgasm.
What is yourgasm ?

Leading Americans love wargasm.

Jesus preaching

 

peace

in the Gaza Strip.

Has anything good ever
happened in "The Holy Land" ?

If you ever consult Wikipedia,

consider this part of the entry under the first name John:

"John owes its unique popularity to the vast number of Emperors, Kings, Popes and Patriarchs that have borne the name, and also to two highly revered saints, John the Baptist and the apostle John, who wrote the Book of Revelation."

Well, of course, the Book of Revelation was written by John "the Divine" of Patmos
who was not an Apostle, but was a rather disturbed and disturbing visionary who was confused and conflated with John the Apostle when the New Testament sort-of-coalesced in the third century.

Hundreds of thousands of people know this, yet the sentence quoted above stands uncorrected in Wikipedia.

USE THAT 'RESOURCE' WITH GREAT CARE!

The problem with too much awareness

 

 is that it leads to way-too-much awareness.

Fried and Adorno

Erich Fried wondered
if it still made sense to write poems
in a world we have trashed*.

Of course nothing
that we do "makes sense"
except in the crudest fashion -
but better to write poetry,
or be comatose, or in a coma,
than to try and change the world,
and run the very high risk
of making things worse
in the long term.
(The merits of inaction,
pacifism, hiding, flight
as opposed to action.)

Adorno's hypocritical quip
that art after Auschwitz
was barbaric, was itself
an ignorant reaction
that fed the inane Left,
China's Cultural Revolution
and Germany's Red Army Faction.

*Die Frage liegt nahe
ob es noch sinnvoll ist
bei dieser Lage der Dinge
Gedichte zu schreiben.

A Thursday evening, Belfast, early 1950s

Three knocks on the door.
It's the Pig Man!
Up I jump - out to the scullery -
pick up the Pig Bucket
nearly full of potato-peelings,
cabbage-stalks, burnt toast,
sour milk, eggshells, and
the cooked tripe I refused to eat.
I hand it to the Pig Man
who goes to his cart
and empties it into an old milk-churn.
There were many things I wouldn't eat,
most of them parts of animals -
but also beetroot, tomatoes, cucumber..
I loved porridge, baked rice pudding,
semolina, toast -
but it was eggs I liked the most.

On Tuesdays it was the
Buttermilk Man who filled
the chipped-enamelled quart-jug
from the back of his little trap.
He sold the butter also.
With luck, their ponies
with their noses
sometimes in nose-bags
dangling from their halters,
would leave delicious-smelling
turds for our scabby roses.

Every fortnight "The Old Woman"
nameless in her interestingly sordid
black shawl would call, and be rewarded
with sixpence. Once or twice - a shilling.
Her old-dog smell appealed to me.
Once I gave her half a crown,
and was myself rewarded
with a 'dressing-down'.
I'm older now than she was then...

Twice a year
the Scissors Man
and knife-grinder would turn up,
the dribbles from his nose
deftly moistening his
carborundum-wheel.
I loved to watch the trickle
as he honed our worn, stained steel...

Who cares a damn

about Chech'nya ?

The Nebra Disc

Inevitably the astro-archæologists
have dreamed up marvellous theories
about this object's function as a
lunar-to-solar calendar-corrector.
But - much more interestingly -
it's obviously a rather desirable
accoutrement or badge
for a Bronze Age sorcerer.

The German for 'entertainment'

is
UNTERHALTUNG :
the holding of people under
- a spell, an enchantment
- or a system.
Marlene Dietrich
was a gentler kind
of Unterhalter
than Hitler...

(for Dada)

The Lonesome Hobo

Arranging his makeshift
newsprint-mattress for the night -
he finds a scrap from
a porno-magazine
and places it – by starlight
- as best he might
- just right.

(for poetavagante
in memory of Taneda Santoka)

If there are Masters of the Universe

they are not at the top of the food-chain.
I am surrounded by pathetically perverse
humans, trying to 'put paid'
to natural selection,
and behaving as if they were
Masters of the Universe...

In the war on terror

ignorance is strength
and questions are
dangerous.

My Saxon friend

is not sure if he should call
where he once lived
an Insane Asylum.  Why not ?
It was asylum for him, and he was
looked after by the insane.
In everyone's head is a
Psychiatric Unit known as
the brain.

The problem with science

is that is has no use for metaphor,
though all knowledge,
perhaps all consciousness,
is metaphorical.

Shakespeare

did not think his plays would last,
but hoped he would be remembered
for his sonnets.

He over-estimated his future
audience and readership.
Comparatively few folks read
his fourteen-liners, but the corpus
of his speechy, creaky dramas
will be played and overplayed,
commented on and studied
across this ravaged, savaged planet
until the mercifully-conquering
Aliens from Aldebaran ban it.

Cities are inhuman

because of the sheer numbers
of humans.
Most human problems
are mathematical.

The family

is just the blunt instrument
of paternity.

The Wicked Witch of the West

(whose funeral, commanded and orchestrated 
by her arrogant and vainglorious self, took place today)

did not intend to be wicked.
Nor did Hitler.
Her Welfare Entitlement reforms
made me appreciably richer
for being wilfully unemployable.
But when she supported Apartheid
by calling St Nelson Rolihlahla
a Terrorist,  I tore
up and posted her my nasty
British passport,
and changed my nationality.
Furthermore,
her and Slimy Ronald's, and the World Bank's
Axis of Evil  made the obscenely wealthy even wealthier
at the expense of the powerless and the poor,
unchained Christian and Islamic fundamentalism,
caused untold misery and environmental degradation,
fostered wholesale and worldwide corruption
by their apotheosis of the ruthless 'entrepreneur'.

Praise not

those who achieve so much
but those who get by on
- and enjoy -
so little.

The insider phrase

for
stuffing consumer goods with extra gadgets
that cannot be repaired,
or cost a lot of money to replace, is
FEATURE INFLATION.

If "all art...aspires to the condition of music,"

as Walter Pater said,
then most music aspires
to the experience of orgasm.

Her challenge :

to sum up
civilisation
in a single word.
Easy!
ANTIBIOTIC.

Why North Korea will not start a war.

'The people don’t have anything,
so they don’t have anything to lose if they went to war
– but the régime's leaders live in such luxury
that they will not want to risk what they have...'

–  Joo-il Kim (condensed from a report in THE INDEPENDENT).

Liberty:

a bourgeois fantasy
except for those in gaol
or in a holy state of misery.

True optimism:

looking forward to
The Big Nothing.

Maternal Expectations

My poor long-suffering mother
wished me not only to enter
respectable society, but to excel
within it.  But I never joined.
So never coined.
The only job I ever had
was an unregulated, untrained,
unqualified teacher of "Liberal Studies"
to day-release engineering apprentices.
It was the early 1960s, when there were apprentices.
It was in Belfast, so they were all Protestant.
I encouraged my 'pupils' - who were only slightly
younger than I, and far more savvy -
to tune into life, turn on their brains,
and drop out of the rat-race.

I had read Kafka but not Kerouac
or Ginsberg. It was nearly 20 years before I myself
took cannabis, let alone LSD, so I guess
I was a sort of proto-hippy.
It was such a pity that Timothy Leary
fancied himself as some sort of
psycho-cultural guru-midwife...
I am now Emeritus Professor of Dissident Mumblings
at the University of Life.

How do you like to spend your mornings, Mr Kintz ?

“I like to call in sick to work at places where I’ve never held a job.
Then when the manager tells me I don’t work there, I tell them I’d like to.
But not today, as I’m sick.”

― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

[ more ]

The two most liberating states of mind:

amnesia (up to a point)
and contempt (completely).

On surveying my small snake-sanctuary

Terra suckled them.
I am tattooed with them.
They symbolised the path of the ecliptic
to followers of the cult of Mithras.
Christians hate them
and still revel in the Judaic myth
of their abasement and expulsion
from a place that never was,
which soon the earth may be
thanks to the greatest
force for evil ever known,
whose scientific, humanist,
progress-worshipping offspring
are the awful power behind the throne.

Rabanus Maurus De rerum naturis.
Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 291, detail of folio 142r

Hey! there might be real people out there...somewhere...

"The next person who tells me I need to quit contemplating suicide and learn to "sell myself"
is going to need a back brace. What am I, a Dorito?"

ANN (KATHRYN FRANCIS FINGAL O’FLAHERTY) STERZINGER, ESQ.

I am told that my blogs are too bleak, so here's a Dopey Joke:

What did the suicidal slug say to the other slug ?
"When one is jointless,
life is pointless."

On reading a poem by MSR,

a much-awarded poet:

Why is it that so much
poetry in English now sounds so
similar: carefully-constructed,
polished, neutral-toned, remote,
sterile as museum exhibits warning
DO NOT TOUCH ?

The Music of the Spheres:

God's Tinnitus.

In the oft-mean-minded

 and continuous
- indeed, almost obsessive -
debate in the Anglo-Saxon countries
about Social Welfare and its Freeloaders
(i.e. the Deserving and the Undeserving Poor)
no mention is made of the hardly massive
numbers of those who, like me
(and such miserable luminaries as the often-depressive
Paul Verlaine, van Gogh, Modigliani...),
from the start are Intellectually
and Inspirationally Active,
and naturally, Economically Passive.

Atlas High

'The weight on my willy
is driving me silly
- but it's there to
hold up the sky...'

A Revolutionary New Form of Dress,

perhaps adapted from
Abaya, Chador - or
(since this one has a camouflage design)
Burqa.

(NOTE: According to some scholars, Muslim women are not required to dress modestly in front of  blind, man-loving, asexual or emasculated men.
 

A Homage to Omar Khayyām Nishapūri

Understanding is a sea.
Every Tweedledum and Tweedledee
can bathe, submerge
in wordless and heroic waves.
Sufis say that all understanding
- perhaps all life -
resides in, or just is
the dot below the letter B.

A Bad Motive for Cannibalism

Horrific that
Saturn-Kronus would devour his sons
lest one replace him.
Just as the sleep of reason brings forth monsters
so the micro-management of children
produces zombies.

Nogen,

der bo'r i Midtjylland, besøger ofte denne blog -
men også bloggene af jindra, blastedheath, woodenlodge, saynotolife, o.s.v.
En Dansker ? 
Jeg er meget nysgerrig...

The most- and least- addictive drugs

Sugar bestrides the world
like a chemical colossus.
So they ban cannabis.

After Globalisation

the world will split in two
opposing factions
defined by female subservience:
one whose women are
encased from head to toe -
and one whose women's
bodies are on show,
even in the snow.

A Perverse Announcement.

Removed from between
your legs, suffice
to sniff my fingers.
and return - halfway - to Paradise.

I learn with amazement

that many men still keep in touch
with friends from way-back
when they were at school.

 (here is one:
together we listened
to records of Tom Lehrer,
Ma Rainey, Séamus Ennis)

I'm sure that those of mine still living
would see me now as some sort of
adolescent ghoul.

Absolving the Irredeemable.

Priests
and bishops will bless anything
with their mystical, testosteronal powers -
guns, ships, tanks, armies, abattoirs,
nuclear warheads -
but not contraceptives.
Not tramps.
In the past
bells were not just blessed
but could be baptised.  For all we know
there may have been quiet blessings
of concentration camps.

Maya Angelou has written

that she didn't receive a single kiss
in all her years in Arkansas.

From Norway to New Zealand,
via Ireland and Iraq,
the south is a different country.

The reason why musical satire died

long, long before Tom Lehrer's
translation to the bosom of Abraham
was the invention of Pop and subsequent
commercial plebnoise to sap young minds
of intellectual vitality,
cushion their brains against cogitation,
and smother their thoughts in infantile banality.

[listen]

There's no sense

in having a sense of the ridiculous
if you don't have
a sense of the serious.

Work

is the word.
You are not encouraged
to labour or toil
but to work.
Though your gainful employment
in the rest of the mob
that calls itself 'human'
is probably toil
if not labour, travail
or drudgery, even
wage-slavery,
you'll try to fob
reality off by calling it
just work,
just your job.

Dull.

I know how the weather feels.

Pharmaceutical

and agri-chemical companies
have such power, that it is much more practical
to wipe out measles than to save the bees.

One and Zero

Dualism, bipolarity,
binary oppositionism,
charge and discharge
haunt the Western mind:
right and wrong, good and bad,
them and us,
Muslim and Christian,
atheist and believer,
you're either with us or against us,
friend or foe;
you're either male or female,
besmirched or clean,
straight line or circle -
you can't be both,
you can't be in between.

So it's not surprising that the modern world
now depends on simple strings of 1 and 0.
and not on 1¼ and a wee bit more than nothing,
or one and zero, yes and no,
in a fuzzy-fluffy blend -
which is why computers will ensure
that we fail as a species, and soon end.

Zero is not the opposite of one
but one's absence. Hallelujah!

I + 0 = Io, Goddess of the Dawn,
to whom I Owe each mortal day.

'Us' and 'Them'

"I can find little that is good about human beings on the whole.
In my experience most of them are trash,
no matter whether they subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine
or to none at all."
                                 - Sigmund Freud, 1902.
(my italics)

Christians brought guns

to Japan, which was why
the first enthusiastic,
voluntary Christians there
- as in many places earlier -
were war-lords.

(but read here)

Gross Domestic Product

Trade is a half-necessary evil
which, if unchecked,
buries us all alive.

The man on this Albanian stamp

was the great proponent of mind/body separation,
a sub-Christian dualism (endorsed by the Catholic church)
which has led to the continuing
torture of, and contempt for, "lesser" animals
("without souls") - and not only in France.
Dogs were nailed alive onto doors
"to prove that they had no feelings".

The 'scientists' who performed these 'experiments'
were blind and deaf to suffering - as are millions
in the world today.

A no-brainer

Random quotation from the Quotationary:

Man did not weave the web of life, 

he is merely a strand in it. 

Whatever he does to the web, 

he does to himself.

-  Chief Seattle

Although in body

I am thinner at 71
than I was at 17,
I am almost sure
that I suffer from
obesity of mind
for which there is
no known cure.

The more insistent

the optimism,
the worse the situation becomes.

News

Continuous information:
continuous stupefaction.

The nearest we now get to the Delphic Oracle

They pulled out her/his tongue.

Felicitous states

Gladness
is a word now rarely used.
Contentment
rarely comes up in conversation.

There is a big but very
fuzzy difference
between joy and pleasure
(or enjoyment).

And between happiness and fun ?