A Found Poem

A small rodent bummed a ride
on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Madrid.
The airline took swift action.
According to reports,
passengers on flight 150 saw the mouse
running down the centre aisle
after the plane landed in Spain.
The airline had the plane fumigated immediately.

The mouse died in due course,
and travellers booked on the return flight to Doha
had to wait for six hours while the fumes dissipated.

Many of the passengers missed connecting flights,
though the airline said it would cover any costs they incurred.

In October, a flight from Zurich, Switzerland, to Málaga, Spain,
was delayed five hours after the discovery of a mouse.

And last December, a flight from London to New York
was cancelled for the same reason.

Even though mice might seem to be a small threat,
airlines take such extreme precautions out of concern
that damage might have been done to complex electrical systems.

If this is true -

- then the reverse is probably also true.

Free Speech -

Good idea...
Pity about the abuses
- but abuse is
"in our DNA" !
 

Death - the last fuss.

When, after the next bus
you don't have a next place to go
time slows down to nothing.

My Heaven

is a late-autumn or a winter fire,
with book, cake, music and fine alcohol to hand,
perhaps a mellow cigar (and, if possible, a dog
 - but no children and no wife.)
My smug achievement is to have been
in a time-rich position to enjoy
such a homely, mostly-dogless (thus Grade II)
heaven for almost my whole life.

The idea of 'progress'

arose with the idea of the independent, improvable, imposable self
in its selfishness, self-regard, individualism, personal alienation,
romantic egotism and social isolation. 
But the second millennium saw the idea of 'progress'
starting to wane; while, on the other hand,
the Century of the Self and its utter banality
gave way to the Century of Ultimate Ambition,
The Great Escape from Reality.

Chicken and Egg

As public lavatories disappeared
from European towns and cities
(partly as a 'last-ditch' reaction
against men cruising men)
those of the aspirational classes
(which is to say most people)
began to add plumbing to their homes,
so that no bedroom will be thought acceptable
unless it has a walk-in, 'en-suite' bathroom.
Meanwhile, millions of the less fortunate
have nowhere to shit (let alone have a shower)
- and even if they had, there are no sewage works
or pipes to ensure that rivers, lakes, bays and seas
aren't utterly polluted.

My very own Joke that I made up myself.

What is the name for a very difficult process of cogitation
by a Bear with Very Little Brain ?

Quantumplation.

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing.

No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money.
Yet it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.
[...] Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching
for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.
We must all hope we find them.”

- Mark Rothko

Christmas Cards.

On the radio last week
a 23-year old declared that
she had never sent a Christmas card
- mainly because she did not know
the addresses of her 'friends'.

(I managed to receive only two this year,
neither of them home-made. My goal is Zero.)

Pink Floyd's view of our situation.

And then get back in our hutches.

Jesus was anything but A Family Man

though it took him some years
to escape familial oppressiveness
and become a preaching Free Spirit,
nomadic, impulsive propertiless
and probably asexual.

On the Planet of Lost Souls

Spamfighter wished me a Merry Christmas

and went on (at length) to say :
"Society is an ever changing concept, 
so we keep track as best as we can."

Hmmm.

All ideas are bad,

I sometimes think,
perhaps even all equally bad.
Life is much too complex
and subtle for mere ideas.

There's always something good

somewhere, if it is very small
and if you think about it
very hard and long enough.

In the world we abuse

if the Christmas Rose blossoms
it just blossoms.

In the age of the 'selfie'

I display my new Afghani

(e-bay) rug:

If the taking of a photograph

is an act not just of record

but also of laying claim

(to a moment, an experience, an object,

a person, a landscape, an action, a scene)

a 'selfie' might be the making of a claim

to existence (if not value)

under one's own terms

and in one's own right.

Wisps of cloud

         masking
the moon-mask so fleetingly :
my deepest thoughts.

Civilisation

Hawks hacked
by hawkers' handsaws
and thrown away.

Life

is a stumbling
across the steep roof of Hell
gazing at gew-gaws.

The Genetics of Pain.

It is as if
humans exist only to transmit
and prolong suffering
so that it can reproduce like the humans
it rides on, the humans
whose minds flow
from their thoughtless arses
like fæces into streams and rivers
down to the acid sea...

read more >>> 

The Black Hole of Consciousness.

Emma Whitehead, 2002

Have you noticed ?

that people don't offer
anything any more - instead
they (more poshly) proffer,
even in
Man-Booker prize-winning novels. 

Times have changed...sort of...

...like the Victorians urged us to
switch off our genitals ?

Look what mayhem that wreaked
and is still wreaking !

In Our Time ?

When did intelligence
become a handicap ?

URL Fun

anom.ie
caca.ca
titbit.it
borg.es
whoop.ee
upyourar.se
abnorm.al
sheikofara.by
om-mane-padme-h.um
itwill makeyougoblind.jo
howdareyoucallmeki.ke
whythe hell.ru
readingth.is
rubbi.sh ?

...and so on, almost ad-infinit.um

Kitschmas Aspirational Comes Again.

The baby born in a stinking stable
did not become the Duke of Dung
or the Count of Colic -
but Prince of Peace,
Light of the World
and perhaps the Solar System,
and evermostsuffering King
of gory, capitalist Kitsch.

A room of one's own.

Do demographers realise
that the more wealthy we become
the more space we require ?

It is often tedious

to be with people
who like being with people.

The Dictatorship of the Will

is the imposition of a tidy garden
in the jungle of the mind - so brief
so brief, so fragile and so violent.

"If one tells the truth

one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out."
- Oscar Wilde

"Why tell the truth when you can get away with a lie ?"
- Jimmy Savile, entertainer, fixer, friend of royality and serial pædophile.

They start sexualising little girls

almost as soon as they can walk
and then are surprised, outraged
that almost one in four is 'molested' by an adult,
usually a relative.
For little boys the estimate
is one in every eight.

The aspiring

dream of winning The Prize.
Their chief god is
Lord of the Flies.

'The Night Watch'

and the phone-watch.

Some people think that 'wine-talk' is pretentious,

but the nine-year old Spanish
Cabernet-Sauvignon and Carmenere
blend which I drank recently
carried a definite, if subtle, hint of banana.

A wonderful word

which I heard on the radio yesterday:
operationalise.
This could, in turn, produce
operationalisation, 
and even

operationalisationally.

I used to wonder

if God had a conscience.

Floating in the blood-baths,

alongwith millions of raped and refugee
are the remnants of Babylonians, Sumerians,
Assyrians, Phoenicians, Canaanites,
Hittites, Nubians, Fellaheen, Jews,
Medes, Persians, Romans,
Greeks, Arabs, Turks...
all of them bruisers of landscape.

A fetching portrait

of a prostitute at a 19th century lumber-camp in Michigan
reminds me of the great orchestral conductor, Sir Simon Rattle...

How Ambi turned into Paisley

"It began as a teardrop in Babylon. Where the sunlight came from Astarte, shameless goddess of the fecund feminine. The boteh. Stylized rendition of the date palm shoot, tree of life, fertility symbol. It danced through Celtic art, until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps. Then it fled the wrath of Mars and Jupiter, dove underground as Empire rose.
"Some historians claim it travelled to Mughal courts from Victorian England, as the foliaged shape of the herbal. Evolved in the 18th century into a cone, then a tadpole. But a legend in Kashmir calls it the footprint of the goddess Parvati, as she ran through the Himalayas at the dawn of time.

"Ambi. Form of a mango – fruit that ripens and rots the dreams of all South-to-North immigrants...

read on >>>

Any delusion will do.

When we stop worshipping the elements,
spirits and gods, we don't stop worshipping.
We find something else to bow down before - progress
for example, education, acquisitive rationalism,
political systems, justice, truth, revenge :
material answers to spiritual questions
which are themselves deluded.

Christmas Shoppers

Behind the anxiously vacant faces
are not so much beings as demanding
tangles of unending pasta-brains
pushing the whole of Nature into a shrinking ghetto
and down compulsively-disinfected drains.

A brilliant intellect

  can often be the companion to a truly asinine personality.

- Kevin Myers on Susan Sontag >>>
 

Religions

really are no more
than elaborate conspiracy-theories.

Breadth, depth, age...

Now I realise the extent of my own stupidity,
having discovered the hidden depths of another's
after forty years !  As Diogenes said,
It takes a wise person to find another.
But wise people do not want to be found,
for they hate self-promotion and publicity.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."

Sixty people are involved
in a 'routine' operation merely to replace one knee
of an insured person in the USA,
an ordinary citizen in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
and a rich person most other places -
while millions of the poor of the planet
have to shit behind bushes (where there are bushes)
and no clean water... 

Birds and Beasts.

A murder of crows

A muster of storks
An ostentation of peacocks
A parliament of owls
A party of jays
A peep of chickens
A pitying of turtle-doves
A rafter of turkeys
A siege or sedge of herons
A skein of geese [in flight]

A sord of mallards

A sounder of boars
A spring of teal
A tidings of magpies

A trip of dotterel

A busyness or feamyng of ferrets

A gaze of raccoons
A crash of rhinoceroses
A drift of swine

A wake of buzzards

A deceit of lapwings
A descent of woodpeckers
An exaltation of larks
A fall of woodcocks 

A dole of doves  

An unkindness of ravens

 [more]

A superfluity of nuns

and

A devastation of people.

Poets and politicians

The second-rate promote
the second-rate even though
they might slightly appreciate
the excellent
in an unengaged, bemused fashion...

...and mere extremity of fashion
is what the second-rate consider
to be startling originality.