It is surely no coincidence

that those countries which have introduced laws against homosexual liaisons
are among those where women are treated as mere sperm-bags and chattels.

Even a chosen few

- even any
are far too many.

Doctors

are fashion victims,
interested only in conditions
and diseases deemed 'sexy'
by the media.  So,
skin conditions and diseases
are no 'sexier' now than
they were 500 years ago.

Ne regrette rien !

The secret of 'happiness'
is to be content with failure -
others' as well as your own.

Virility

and femininity
like health
are simply how you feel.

If thy neighbour's hand offend thee...

I keep finding abandoned
right-handed gloves.
I wonder if Sharia Law
has come to county Down
to punish the healthy number
of shoplifters operating there.

A Sheltered Life

Do you know that, as a solitary
and happy child of the 1940s,
and a beneficiary of the Welfare State
(free orange-juice and milk and rose-hip syrup,
free medical, ophthalmic and dental treatment
well-removed from abject poverty and vice)
I have never even seen a cockroach -
though in middle age
I was once a host to pubic lice ?

Loneliness

is just being bored
by oneself.

"Nothing in life is to be feared,

only understood," wrote Marie Curie.
But the most fearsome things are those
we understand too well - such as governments
which are a thousand times more scary
and certainly more disingenuous and devious than the few
terrorists who make them ever more powerful.

'Art' is a by-product

of conflict.
So, come to think of it,
is war.

Twitterati

hash-tag <#> :
self-regarding.

The abandonment

of nineteenth-century
survival-of-the-fittest eugenic attitudes
has contributed handsomely
to the survival-of-the-fittest
medical-pharmaceutical
industrial complex/

Composing

the most beautiful silence:
eyelid-music.

A matter of priority.

and photos can be good if you focus correctly.

Hiding the Essential.

Like a twig-stiff stick-insect
I want to resemble
something nobody
seeks for, registers or stalks.

from Venelaulu (Barcarolle)
by Eila Kivikk'Aho
translated from the Finnish by Anthony Weir 

If there are 'Aliens'

the last things they'll have
will be language and genitals.

Two Quatrains after Abu al'-Ma'arri

We came here unconsulted. When we go,
    quite unconsulted from this life we're sent.
    Meantime we progeny of  discontent,
spend half our lives commuting to and fro.




..........

My hope is that the vile, unruly pack
  of humans can somehow be withdrawn -
  as there to a camel might come a dawn
with no large burden on his aching back.

Once upon a money

they ran out of time.

If cowboys had worn tutus

instead of the cheap, uncomfortable
genitally-irritating trousers with thick seams
whose name derives from the French for Genoa (Gênes),
and whose coarse material suitable for sailors
first came to New France from the town of Nîmes,
the lower-lumpenbougeoisie and the hard-playing rich
would now all be wearing tutus.

Money needs corpses

with tongues
(to be placed under).
This is an example
of the interdependence
of the unnatural and the supernatural.

The most important things

are
mere marginalia.

Two of my least-favourite words

(even when not used together) :
popular
and
culture.

I just wonder about the knife...

A poem by Pentti Saariskoski

Life is pushed on/into humans

to make them decide with due diligence
the position wherein

they would like to be dead.
Grey clouds scud

over the Babylonian sky

and earth enters the mouth like bread.

 (translated by Anthony Weir) 

from Runot ja Hipponaksin runot
(Poems and Poems of Hipponax)

A powerful 14th century satire

from well before the Br'er Rabbit tales, and indeed the French Revolution:

Low-born (infantry) archer-hares take Justice into their own hands at spring-time
by shooting, tying, trying and hanging a noble hound -
whose grave is 'desecrated'  in the autumn by...another noble hound digging up the bones.

click on the pictures to enlarge them

Marginalia from the Decretals of Gregory IX
with gloss of Bernard of Parma (The Smithfield Decretals). 
British Library.  Re-blogged from Dogs Depicted.

" Books...

... are thick letters to friends",
wrote the poet Jean Paul.
I disagree.  Like blogs, and poems,
books are letters to oneselves.
Everything we do voluntarily
is self-aggrandising, self-justifying.

Decline or Fall of Man ?

It is so refreshing to read a headline like this.

the tidal wave that has come is liquid
not Balkan.
(note the rare intransitive use of the verb 'to flood'.)

People who cannot live alone

can form dangerously futile groups.

French 'cuisine' :

The art of turning poor people's food
into rich people's food.

Update on the Olympics.

A profound observation

by Seneca :

Debility is the mother of Cruelty.

This text is one of several on tiled seats in a little square
which celebrates Seneca in his hometown, Cordoba (Spain).

Seneca was the Emperor Nero's tutor, so he knew
whereof he spake...

In the sixth-floor café

of the Museum of Used Condoms
(run by the Anti-natalist, Anti-vivisection Society of Vegans)
(admission free - schoolchildren get a present from Santa)
I thought:
Every lament is merry
and every hurrah is sorry.

An important sociological question.

Why is it that we will eat the same breakfast every morning
but require variation in the main meal of the day
(except when the main or only meal is breakfast) ?

The Gratefully-oppressed

include not just the poor
squatting in a ditch
who are necessary to support the rich
and "are always with us",
but also those with not just one
but several water-closets.

Álfurhæð : Three cheers for Icelanders !

More of them believe in elves
than believe in the Christian God.

Fast Food

An Angel Shark engulfing a Horned Shark.

(re-blogged from "And the Sea")

Not ants but locusts!

The King Lear question:
who is there to tell us what
and who we are ?
The cats, the dogs.

A wonderful new art-form.

The greatest art is either natural or fleeting
(or both, like lightning).

I suspect

that those who so loudly denounce Russia's attitude to public 'homosexuality'
would act similarly against those who agitate for the right to assisted suicide,
and for intelligent debate about quality of life, superannuation,
anti-natalism and overpopulation,
and would dearly love to celebrate it with parades of Self-Denial Pride.

We are the only species

that gets bored outside captivity.
Our caged and restless minds
have to be distracted
by problems, goals, beliefs
- or pacifying drugs.

Another Sordid Sochi Story

Dogs like this are being rounded up and destroyed
in advance of the Wicked Winter Olympics...

Two of my favourite words

are
      WOEFUL
and
      USUFRUCT.

Together they would make
a fine beginning
or end to a poem -
or just as they are
on a page
grinning.

Successful Women Defend Patriarchy

With thanks to Jindra for this photo.

The Defence Ministers of the Federal Republic of Germany 
and the constitutional kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands...

Violets against Violence

The motto of the SSSS
(the Super-Soft Sex Society) :
Celebrate the Shrunken
Willy-Violet.

The best of man is his ruins.*

Abandoned railway-station in Sukhumi, Abkhazia.

* This is the epigraph of my Megalithic Ireland website.

First - the 'Hearing Impairment'.

Then the nocturnal polyuria.
Then the moderate tinnitus.
Then the cataracts.
Then the nocturnal crural pruritus.
Then the doctor insisted that I take tablets
to reduce my blood-pressure.
These conflicted with the aspirin
I take to thin my blood...

If you're lucky, age is merely
the gradual accumulation of minor ailments
and the tendency of things to sag.
But there has to be a point where I say
"Enough is enough", and reach for
the handy somnifers
and the sturdy plastic bag.

click to enlarge

You write a poem,

stop.

       Then silence.


The silence is
a better poem:
the rest is
(as Verlaine wrote)
merely literature...

Peace

is the lull
between the lightning
and the thunder.
Language is
evolution's greatest blunder.
Words
fail.

Flicking through

the Old and New Testaments again
I conclude that the Jews who wrote them
had few redeeming features,
and Jesus' ego was bigger than his brain.