The Lost Planets

Around the Universe
(in which our galaxy is just a dot,
and we a dot within our galaxy)
there are uncountable
Perfect Worlds exuding joy
(which cannot be detected
by radio-telescopes).

The Earth is not one of them.
It is one of the Lost Planets
of the Multiverse, sulking
in a remote corner,
as Lost Planets tend to do
in their sad destitution,
trapped and cowed
by the mad logic
of their strange evolution.

The Four Legs of the Beast of the Apocalypse.

At the front: money and power.
At the rear: permanent overpopulation
and the money-and-power system
which encourages it.
Its penis is profit.
Its balls are the work ethic.
Its tail:
the fear that money will fail.

My Reader-statistics

How very sad
that nobody reads
my blog in Chad.

Freedom of worship, but no freedom from religion.

Churches are everywhere -
with their towers and steeples,
showing how we are micro-managed
by other people's
stupefying religions.

The purpose of language is deception.

When people talk about
JUSTICE
they almost always mean
REVENGE.

Most of us

live like headless chickens
until we die
uneaten.
But there may come a time
when we will be headless
and cannibal.

Perhaps

the most powerful word
is not Exterminate!
but
but...

Great

poets try to conjure
words to say what is unsayable.
The fools! 
Words are illusion,
not tools.

Ogden Nash *

made quite a splash
especially in the 1940s and '50s.
Now he's forgotten,
which I think is just the typically-rotten
behaviour of readers
who are mere consumers, bottom-feeders
of the corrupt and corrupting Literary Fashion Industry.

* 1902-1971 - read one of his poems.

For Dína and Doudou

SETI
is constantly listening
for 'intelligences' in outer space.
Few try to pierce the cultural fogs
that shroud the limited intelligence
of inner space,
let alone listen to dogs.


Dína can be seen on Jindra's blog.
Here is a photo of Doudou (aka Stan) :

Against my principles

I cleared tall-growing nettles
from a rough part of my garden
- then heard the buzzing of distressed
bumble-bees: I had blocked their nest.

Text approved,

and photo taken by JINDŘICH HRDLIČKA.

If men were suddenly

turned into women
they'd die of misery.
If women were suddenly
turned into men
they'd kill themselves.

Every euro,

pound, yüan and dollar
is a declaration of
our pride - perhaps our faith
- in moral squalor.

La Tour de Montaigne.

La Tour de Mazot.
Le Prince d'Aquitaine.
A dog called Spot.

Another brat

produced by the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg firm :
another pale and pampered  royal manufacturer of sperm.

Steve Jones *

(described as being Wallace **
to Richard Dawkins' Gromit)
succinctly outlined Evolution on the radio
as 'A series of successful mistakes'.
He meant natural experiments, of course.
The case of Homo sapiens sapiens, however,
might better be described as
unsuccessful and unnatural divorce.

 *Geneticist and Fellow of the Royal Society.
**Pun.

Glorious wordlessness :

taste -
from wine to persimmons
to genitals.
Oh enjoy, without haste !

Give a dog a bad name...

Have you noticed :
only Muslims are 'extremist' ?

As soon as colonisers
and other 'Christians' stopped
despising them,
they started
demonising them.

Language and Society

Words secrete more words.
Rules demand more rules.

And so we have schools.

Cut flowers

don't know
that they're no longer alive -
nor do headless chickens -
nor most human beings above 25.

An apophthegm for Mr Anonymous

PERHAPS

the logical materialism of our civilisation
owes much more to materialism
than to logic.

(see more on the  PERHAPS  page on my labyrinthine website)

Perhaps

the worst invention of all time
(apart from writing
and the measurement of time itself)
is the Water Closet - the start
of a sewage treatment system
that wastefully, expensively
breaks down, disperses
our excrements, thus squandering
one of the world's
most renewable resources.

Jobless = Godless

in the Anglosphere.

No people, either.

My unreliable Uranian
acquaintance tells me
that sex is very good
on Mars -
where there are neither
internet nor bars.

Another English Food-scare

Traces of mares' milk
have been found in
Hungarian dairy products...
and hints of human smegma
may soon be found in Philadelphia -
a city in which Brotherly Love
is no more evident than in any other...

Our evolutionary cul-de-sac

 (draft for a future poem)

After we invented and developed
language
we turned ever more tribal,
addicted to telling each other
preposterous stories in a variety of tongues,
the stupidest of which was that
as a species we are Very Special.
Now we tell each other in a variety of tongues
that each of us is Special.
So our cerebral inventiveness has hurled
us into our language-blocked,
evolutionary cul-de-sac
because the wrong kind of communicators
rule the world.

Summertime - and the snipping is easy...

click to learn more >>>

The Church Militant

'WELCOME TO THE MACHINE !'

painting by Kris Kuksi - but not with my title

Dear Readers,

Some of you might think
of the millions of people
who are dying as you read this.

A few of you might think
of the millions of men and women
who are masturbating as you read this.

But far fewer are thinking of the millions
who are excreting bloody, wormy or infectious turds
in utter squalor - as you digest these sterile words.

Why do we never hear the word

'Christianists'
applied to Christian Extremists
whether Catholic in France
or Pentecostal in America ?

'Nature abhors a Vacuum'

Success
is a lead balloon
for airheads.
Failure
is for philosophers.

Entropy Rules

Life :
not so much a privilege,
not so much an adventure
as an obstacle course,
an endurance race
to nothing and nowhere.

How true, even in our enlightened times :-)

Men strive especially for three things:
riches, pleasures, and honours.
Riches lead to immorality,
pleasures to shame, and honours to vanity.

  — Cardinal Lotario dei Conti di Segni.
subsequently Pope Innocent III (1198-1216)
De miseria humanæ conditionis.

It was this pope who called the revolutionary Fourth Lateran Council of 1215,
which, amongst other things, allowed commoner weddings to take place in church,
and transferred power from monasteries to bishoprics.
He initiated the policy of compelling Jews to wear items of clothing
which would identify them.

He also initiated the Albigensian genocide and the Fourth Crusade,
and called for a Crusade against the Moors of Spain.

Surely he was admired by Adolf Hitler as well as the nascent USA !

Crusade-crazy Innocent III is honoured in the
U.S. House of Representatives.

 

Is love...

...the comfort you feel
in shared silence
in quiet loyalty -
nothing to do with
pity, gratitude, neediness
or sex ?
Or am I talking about
something greater than love
(and politics, economics,
civilisation and mankind)
which is contentment ?

Religion

is phobosophical.
Our intelligence is largely notional.
Our lives are more than nine-tenths emotional.

'Ave atque vale'

- my version of a very famous poem (Carmen CI) 
by the Roman poet Catullus, on the demise of his brother.

Brother,
I've come a long, sad way
to meet you finally
and pay my loving, last respects.

My living, longing, weeping flesh
has brought the funeral offerings
and performed the solemn rites
to honour your unanswering ash,
to grieve
              at your untimely death -
to greet you and take leave.

It is possible to like people

while also despising them.
Contempt is a great insulator,
whose meanest expression
is hypocrisy.

Canine Wisdom

Language

is like a primitive church wall, a conglomerate

barrier with a tiny alabaster window
through which (we fancy) we communicate.

Fools

are easier to suffer
than those, like me,
who think they're wise,
informed, perceptive,
and near the top of
the intellectual tree.

The Illusionist Sects

Almost every form of Christianity
is a doctrine designed
to prevent you from following
the simple, frugal,  
harmless way of life
that Jesus had in mind.

.

Anti-abortionists

will do anything for the unborn,
who are revered like angels
- until they're born
and lose their symbolic nature,
neatly womb-enclosed,
and become flesh
in blood and pain,
and start to scream and shit.
After birth - that's it -
you're on your own, baby.
There are too many of you on this earth.

Yesterday's news - VaticAl-Misr

As the populace of Egypt acquaints
itself with Continual Revolution,
the reigning, completely irrelevant Pope
turns two of his predecessors into saints.

Insanity Rules (no surprise)

Read this amazing document >>>

Homage to Catatonia

Of all the beautiful places
on earth, the one I love the best
(even though my sleep is
much-interrupted by BNP
- the clue is in the Pee *)
...where was I ?  ...Yes,
of all the beautiful places
on earth, the one I love the best
is bed.
I'm looking forward to
The Big Sleep
in earth
when I'm dead.

* Benign Nocturnal Polyuria

Understanding

is the apparent grasp of one idea
concept, meme or 'thing'.
The fitting of that apparency
into a pre-conceived pattern
is called Meaning.

Man's privilege of absurdity *

The idea of security
creates violence,
hence insecurity...


* Thomas Hobbes

Normal

is very
strange.

So, where do we start ?

Most Icebergs

are human.

Pleased to meet you !

A Sarcastic Fringehead.

Civilisation

is merely the mechanism
whereby humans
can make other humans
dislike themselves,
not just each other.

My Auditory Impairment

On a news bulletin
I misheard 'gunman'
as 'government'.

I, too, am evil.

Hatred is evil,
and even hatred
of evil is evil...

To sink or to swim ?

It's quite a decision to have to make
when you're being swept out
(and out of sight)
by a current and a tide -
for panic blots previous
flirtatious thoughts of suicide.

Cheap hotels

can be poky and bleak.
Couchsurfing can be bleaker,
especially if you're over 50
and a truth-speaker...

Poem of the Month

I had no intention ever of translating Rilke's famous, much-translated 

and strangely cold, un-empathetic poem about the ever-pacing

PANTHER in the horrible Paris zoo

- but came across a beautiful panther-picture,

so I made a new version/translation to accompany it.

Links will allow you to see other translations,

some of them almost unbelievably bad.

The Myth of Communication - a Paradox

Language is a
Big Lie
divided into
millions of little pieces
which can be strung together:
an infinity of monkey-kebabs.

I'm a poet with a beard
who has little interest in being read
and none at all in being heard.
When you are other
why bother ?
Consciousness is slow, unkind.
We and words are less than wind.

God is Dog