Sin, religion - or rational decision ?

"India's Supreme Court has suspended an order of the Rajasthan high court banning santhara
- the controversial Jain ritual of fasting unto death."

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Not a letterbox,

but a receptacle for (probably very rare)
contributions towards the maintenance
of a perpetual flame for the dead,
on the façade of the church of Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte.

The skeleton's banner reads:
Me today, you tomorrow.

An Irish comedian

has recounted that
he abandoned his horticultural course
before he could tell the difference
between a well-made plastic flower and a real one.

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you

 when you realize how seldom they do.”
                —David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest

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Aren't dogs amazing ?

But I don't think that putting a dog in something like a tank suit makes him 'adorable' !!  
Rather, it makes him brave, trusting, noble...[add your own adjective]

Our dependence on clothes is the ruination of the environment due to the unfortunate facts that they have to be washed from time to time, and have to be made - usually from water-guzzling plants.

The ghost of Diogenes tells me

that most of my blogs
are neither poems
nor proems -
but posems!

Call me Celeriac

or Rutabaga:
my thoughts
and feelings
are peelings.

Welcome to Europe,

so humanitarian, so civilised,
you Syrian refugees
who have walked for days
and often by night
through Turkey
to an EU Border
where your passports are torn up,
your mobile phones confiscated,
your clothes slashed for booty...
Now crawl away, back into Turkey.

Perhaps

we were inspired by dogs
when we started burying
the gnawed bones of our dead/.

If even the Literati -

distinguished authors like Patrick McCabe -
use epicentre to mean very centre,
what hope is there of replacing that poor word
with one which means one of the two centres
of an ellipse ?

Esprit de Corps

or Team Spirit:
a most depressing
and distressing word-pair
that soon ends up justifying
gang-rape, pogroms, jihad and war.

Perhaps

Love that persists
and 'does not alter
when it alteration finds'
hardly exists.

The Conscience of the World

is relaxing in front of the plasma TV
or ferrying its sullen progeny in its SUV.

Memory

is now for computers.
Old memory was flawed or false.
The Past
is not "another country" or another world,
but just another Third World country
to ransack for profit and bogus connection,
that no future will outlast.

God loves everybody

and almost everybody believes in love,
but can't say what it is,
beyond being something numinous.
And if someone not your mother asks you for it
you know they're wanting something else
perhaps several things
that don't amount to numinosity,
don't include straightforwardness,
are just a list.
I have experienced attraction, crushes,
affection, infatuation, loyalty,
but don't know what love is.
Neither did my mother, nor my aunt.
I think it might be just another
awareness-closing myth, like God.

The Roman Catholic Church

believes that the adolescent willy
is the Devil's lightning-rod
for all that is unholy.

Thomas Hobbes thought

that horrific human behaviour
was the result of the absurd
and institutional desire for safety and security.

Right on, Tom !

In other words the very idea of security
creates insecurity, hence violence,
hence more insecurity...
 

When we are dead

we will have become
mere record -
which is how recording started
in the dim and distant past.

Missing.

We go, or traipse, or are propelled through life
mis-seeing, mis-hearing, mis-feeling,
misunderstanding -
so that the screeds and scraps of tales
we have invented for ourselves
or have had invented for us
will not be damaged by what we imagine
to be scrutiny.

Three reasons to be a hermit.

1. To acquire sanctity, 'spiritual' merit,
heavenly and bankable serenity.

2. To lose human society
as far as is personally possible
because of disgust with the 'sterile promontory'
of evolution which is humanity.

3. A canny - perhaps sardonic - combination of the above.
Unlike dogs, humans are incapable of love.

'Elegant Shrimp'

(Hymenocera elegans)
beginning the slow process
of consuming a Starfish whilst it’s still alive.

"Our" planet

is like a carriage of an underground train
with a bomb occupying most of the space.
We are that sprawling bomb.

The basic difference

between the Americans (320 million)
and the British (70 million) -
according to the raconteur David Sedaris -
is that if the next-door neighbour acquires a big posh car,
an American will want to get one at least as big,
while a British person will want the neighbour to crash it,
or at the very least have it repossessed by the bank.

Northern Ireland

is not one of Europe's tourist hot-spots
(in fact that is one of the few things to be said for it)
- so I fully concur with these TripAdvisor comments.

For every child

with one or more proud parent
there is another (or maybe several others)
whose parents' sad and often muffled song
is What did we do wrong ?

"I am a rock. I am an island."

Amerwrecker.

I've got a rifle.
You got an eyeful.

Suddenly,

everyone answers a question with
"So..."

(But so what ? I hear you riposte.)

When I was twelve

I had a brief Religious Phase.
My last pubertal prayer to on high
was not almost every other man's
(Please, God, don't let me come too quickly!)
but Please, God, don't let me come too slowly
or not at all ! (Sorry about the double negative.)
Then I stopped being holy.

Manet

was very good at painting glasses

but poor at painting moustaches

Although glasses are easier to paint than moustaches
I cannot paint a glass but am rather good with a moustache.

Dear Mr Corbyn,

Since it seems likely that you will become leader
of the Labour party in England and Wales,
and thus likely also to transform the political climate,
I hope you will turn your attention to the scandal
of private fee-paying schools, one of which I
was unfortunate enough to be sent to.
No socialist, semi-socialist or meta-socialist government
has yet dared to challenge this vile fortress of privilege
and power which has kept the Victorian class-system
infecting and demoralising Britain and the British,
rather as the Catholic church has infected and demoralised
Ireland and the Irish.

Chernobyl's

200 km² has turned into a wonderful
wildlife park with bears and wolves,
rare kinds of snail,
a few old human beings,
perhaps even Przewlski's horses.
Perhaps the deepest tragedy of the
twentieth century was that there was
no nuclear war.

'Smoking kills!'

Smoking dulls hunger.
It is better to die from lung cancer
than from hunger.

Ketamine, Heroin, Crystal Meth...

the fabulous
monetisation
of failure.

True Grit

The Sudanese who managed to get into
and walk 30 miles/50 kilometres along
the Channel Tunnel to England
with trains whizzing by at over 100 mph/160 kph
every 10 or 15 minutes
pushing a huge wind in front of them
should get a medal, an international award
rather than a deportation order from mean-minded
Fortress Britain.

Scientists

are the new romantics.
We know the Wagnerian fate
of the old ones.

Linear

Life makes a series of holes
inside our heads
that we vainly and ridiculously
try to fill with things.

On Heaven

the pie quickly fills with maggots
and the carrot very soon becomes a stick.

I find it interesting

that the Hungarian for
nightclub is
mulató -
but maybe you don't...

My mother never liked being asked

How are you ?
because she very often had a serious headache
(which might last a week or even two).
She fended off inquiries with such replies as
Surviving,
Bearing up,
Coping,
Vegetating,
Soldiering on, 
Deliquescing
and Mouldering away.
She played golf and bridge
until dementia left her with
one foot in the grave.

My mother and I by the Loire in 1981.

Only to me would she say how she really was,
and not all the time.
I rarely ask how people are,
because I also hate being asked how I am
even though I mostly feel pretty good
and almost never have a headache.
This is amplified behavioural inheritance.

I have lived 30 years in this damp house

and I can truly say
that this morning was the first time
that I found a boiled slug at the bottom of my bowl
of café-au-lait.

We Specialize in Terrorist & Wooden Horse Detectors

"Fit yourself for the best society

- and then keep well away from it,"
said Victor Grayson, early socialite and socialist Member of Parliament,
who disappeared in 1920.

An infinitesimal number

of dogs are mad.
There are no sane human beings,
because they divide into four types:
maniacs, depressives, bi-polar -
and cattle.