"All well-bred persons lie -

"Besides, you are a woman:
"you must never speak what you think."

- William Congreve: Love for Love.

We think we are the Pinnacle of Evolution -

but, beyond its boundary,
we are - each of us - unnatural and no more than
merely mindless weapons.

Foot-fetishism ?

I told a very boring 'friend' that I got cruised in the big park where I take my dog, Asterix. 
By quite a sweet guy who told me I was handsome and kissed my hand.
My acquaintance said:
"I suppose getting cruised in the park by a sweet man made your day."

I said: yes, a bit, but unfortunately I have got to despise men so much
that I am well beyond having my day improved by a small,
not to mention mere,
sexual advance. 
I'm pretty sure I won’t hear from the handsome chap who cruised me.
 But I’ll let you know if I do. 
He reeked of chemical product.  That would have to go
before "intimacy" could "take place"
or occupy emotional-sensual space.
What makes my day is sniffing Asterix’s feet in bed. 
Delicious!

I’m going blind and deaf and feel all the time
that I'm slowly dying. 
But there’s always Asterix’s feet to buoy me up
and save me from senile sighing.

Not until my seventy-eighth year

(and going blind with retinal blotches)
do I learn that silk is not by silkworms spun
but boiled off them while they are alive.
I should have been told this when I was five
and already examining little girls' crotches
and watching rabbits fuck in hutches,
just out of curiosity, and just for fun.

An Englishman was recently sent to gaol

for suggesting a National Punish-a-Muslim Day.
Poor guy!  He was, of course, on the right track,
leading to
the Neo-Fascist Castrate-Your-Neighbour Week,
and my own (superior, Nietzschean) call  -
not for action, but reflection -
The International Ashamed-to-be-Human Year.

The (not too distant) future of Artificial Intelligence ?

The Confessions of a Smart Dildo
by Rob Otnik.

If freedom were ever to exist

in settled societies whose populations were not enslaved
by mobile phones, mad aspirations, Christmas,
binary attitudes to almost everything
from gender to God
(male, his opposite: the Devil, also male),

then anyone could walk undressed
in suitable temperatures,
and natural, nubile or wrinkled,
wherever she (or he) wanted
without risk of rape or arrest,
or even being particularly noticed,
just as now anyone can (and many have to) walk around
insanely, stiflingly over-dressed.

It is absurd that our behaviour is controlled by
merely religious and repressive taboos,
endorsed by political parties
and governments to the bitter end.

My dog

is emBARKing on a book 
called Rude Recipes for Cultured Canids.
including Kitten Tartare amongst other
tantalising treats for toutous. [Fr.]

We are considering Crowd-funding.
Anyone know a good Agent ?

“Good enough”

is an alien notion to the far-from-perfect people of the West. 
They oppress themselves and the world
with the blasphemous notion,
the virulent infection,
of Perfection.

Theseus was, of course, a racist bully.

But perhaps a bit of his common-sense violence could be applied
to those aspirational middle-class parents
who actually stretch their "too-short" children by surgery,
as Procrustes did to his victims.
The middle classes are already oppressing themselves
even more than the underclasses.

It seems obvious to me

that literacy precludes 'wisdom'.
So, 'Books of Wisdom' are bogus,
though not books which help you
overcome the handicap of literacy.

Obviously,

much more thought goes into a
suicide
than into a pregnancy.

It's a pity there is so little thought
amongst so many people.

When I was a bit younger

I pissed in all the holy-water stoups I passed,
whenever possible.  Now, however, I visit few churches
(having finished my researches into 'marginal' motifs),
so I piss instead into the conveniently-placed
letterboxes of the ever-odious bourgeoisie.

Two (of the many) things I hate:

Machismo (except self-ironically)
and the grotesque, false femininity it has created
and relies on, like Pharaohs
on pyramid-builders.

"The Damaged

will not politely go away."
   - William Trevor

Civilisation makes sure that we are all damaged
to a greater or lesser extent.

A bit of heavy entertainment.

For those with an antique idea of a gay man,
this is a Pansy/Faggot looking for friends online.

Aways very conveniently placed for decent-sized dogs.

The Family is absurd.

As Bourdieu said,
'the family' is not a unit
but a disparate assemblage of strategies.
And even a series of scenes
from the Theatre of the Absurd.

Dog born without hind legs

walks on his front ones.

Socialists of the world - wise up !

Margaret Thatcher famously, and rightly, said
There is no such thing as Society.
There is no such thing as The Working Class,
much less the Urban Proletariat.
All is flux, always.
The appallingly-ground-down English workers of Engels' time
bear little relationship to those of today.
The Russian workers of Lenin's time
had little in common with the German workers
celebrated by Brecht and Käthe Kollwitz,
or to the English workers cast in concrete by Hoggart and Lawrence,
or the American ones celebrated by Woody Guthrie.
The French working-class of today is very different from that of 1950,
and from the American underclass,
and from the Chinese factory-workers,
and from, worst of all, "illegal immigrants"
and the Indian Untouchables.

Bourgeois anarchists like me and Prince Kropotkin
and Peter Pan
tend, however, to inhabit the same Never-never-land.

Ostrichism.

On the one hand,
scientists, the World Health Organisation
and governments are ensuring
that there will be no more Great Pandemics
like the 1918 influenza outbreak -
which killed more people than World War One.

On the other hand, they criminally ignore
that we humans are already
the most dreadful pandemic so far.

Being queer

was fun with a pal
when it was illegal.
Now that it is pretty well normal,
and nasty right-wing, racist Christians
claim to be 'gay',
I have become happily asexual.

Philosophers

are fools by definition:
wisdom is not more lovable
than inanition.

Dogs and children

(such as Wendy and Flush)
are the first to suffer
when the machine of capitalism
comes and starts to crush.

The real Gay Liberation

is primal,
is freedom from the Male Gaze -
the compulsion to look at women in general
as sexual objects of greater or less merit.
Instead, queer men, male gays
exhibit a rather more selective and discreet
tendency to appraise and appreciate
certain types of men whose manner
and allure appeal to their gonads via their eyes,
as flies are appealed to by meat.

Belief

is, by definition, irrational;
and 'faith'
(as the great rationalist Nietzsche wrote)
is fraud.
Unreason
is God.

Sustenance through food, and oblivion through alcohol.

Throughout History
and ten thousand years before,
'Women were concerned
with the immediacy of survival,
while men needed escape
from the consequences of their war.'

Antony Beevor: Berlin, the Downfall 1945, p. 310

One of the main reasons I left Ireland

was because within my lifetime
I witnessed the inexorable decline
of flora, fauna, mushrooms and fish
through that mean little island's
unwholesome agricultural devastation.
In my last years there in rural solitude,
earthworms  had given way to flatworms,
Agaricus campestris had vanished utterly
and, although I still saw the robin and wren
in my garden, and heard the blackbird sing,
I heard no cuckoo, no lark (though I'm going deaf)
and no swallows came to my barn in spring.

Agaricus campestris  (Field or Meadow Mushroom)

I hardly noticed that I had no father,

and I think I have been most fortunate
in not having one (except for one primordial, unfortunate moment
which cost my mother dear).

But here are two poems by a great Irish poet

who seems to have revered her father.

My Father, Long Dead

My father, long dead,
has become air

Become scent
of pipe smoke, of turf smoke, of resin

Become light
and shade on the river

Become foxglove,
buttercup, tree bark

Become corncrake
lost from the meadow

Become silence,
places of calm

Become badger at dusk,
deer in the thicket

Become grass
on the road to the castle

Become mist
on the turret

Become dark-haired hero in a story
written by a dark-haired child

*

Guardian

My father,

a most gentle man,

fed the leavings of the table
to nesting crows
that screamed and whirled
in a nearby stand of trees.

From a branch of sycamore
that overhung
his newly-planted drills,
he suspended
by its gnarled legs
one dead crow;

for weeks
the wind-jigged carcass
swung there
in a crazy parody of flight.

My father,
a most gentle man,

appeasing the dark gods,
their appetite
for sustenance,
for blood.

*

EILEEN SHEEHAN

Many men are bullies.

Many men are victims.
Many men manage
to be both.

Freedom, for a man,

is primarily spatial
and, secondarily, sexual.
Which is why we have spread over the globe
in our billions,
and have made so little emotional progress.

Deep Communication.

I wiggle my toes.
He wags his tail.

Language cannot do better.

No sacred texts required.

My "religion"
is tree-worship.

Trees are "the soul of the world"
and grow through deep sorrow.
We are still cutting them down
so that there'll be no tomorrow.

My dog's favourite place to lie

is on my Immortality gabbeh.
which depicts a peacock on the Tree of Life.

This might be symbolic
but, more likely, is because
(apart from my bed) it is
the softest place in my sweet house to be
and close to me when I am tapping quietly
(as now) on my computer.