"Poetry is pretty inconsequential

when written young," wrote the Great Poet Rilke. 
"But at the end of a (preferably long)
lifetime of sense and sweetness ten good lines might be written.
Real poetry comes not from emotion, but from experience."

What twaddle!  Lifetime of sense and sweetness ?
Keats had written fine poems by the time he was twenty -
and Rimbaud at seventeen had already written some of his best,
none of them pompous, some of them startlingly unrepressed...

As our eyes aren't capable of seeing it:

CLICK FOR EXPLANATION

Old, I don't feel particularly old.

When I was young
I didn't feel particularly young,
and rarely had the energy to be bold.
Death has always seemed to me
eternal respite, return to the organic fold,
and to lose my shameful humanity
as my corpse gives up its rigidity.
And I would rather die
a month, a year, a decade 'early', quietly at home
than later in a tasteless hospital. The end of life
is when we should be least controlled.

The French are no longer starving.

The President has decreed a temporary ban on
on snaring blackbirds and thrushes with lime (glu)
on tree-branches, pending a decision on the venerable practice
by the upstart European Court of Justice.

To the terrible god of the imagination.

If only we in our heads could find ourselves
and be Us, not Thine
as wine in the cracked wine-glass is wine.

Celebrated until now

Sir Hans Sloane Square, Killyleagh, county Down, Northern Ireland.

for his Philanthropy
with statues
and squares named after him
in London and (more recently) in a little
Loyalist-British village in the county Down
where he was born an instrument
of local colonial oppression,

Sir Hans Sloane
used some of his large fortune
made from slave-breeding
and hideous slave-labour
without compassion or discretion
in sugar-virulent Jamaica
to found the British Museum -
itself a soul-numbing monument
to empire and possession.

Flies

don't stand on ceremony
but on shit
and us
and anything that's rotten.

Ever since I've lived alone

(since 1966, in fact) people have "dropped in".
For the first few years it didn't bother me,
I even welcomed one or two of them
with open arms (or, sometimes, fly).
But soon I found it tedious, especially
when I was painting, tubes scattered on the floor
(I painted on my knees, 'in all humility').

I find it impossible to say don't come, 
I like my solitude,
or come by mutual arrangement only;
come, take me to a megalith -
or something else of interest or fun.

Somehow I have always attracted
lonely, bored, rejected people.
So they've arrived and bored me.
Is it that I'm too good a listener
or just too easy to dump loneliness upon ?

Some, with whom I lost patience (in an unruly outburst)
were so aggrieved that they never got in touch again.
People I would have liked to visit tended not to come..

Even now a lonely 'burden on the state'
(much younger, less robust than I) drops by three times a week
to ease the burden of his isolation  - with a tot of  La Réunion rum.

If you thought (as I did)

that a little of Bach goes a long way:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry_XQvxzeGQ

Vicious Circle

The father and mother
of all crimes *
is Domestic Violence
which inevitably results in
'Adverse Childhood Experience'.

* (against humans, if not against Nature.)

A date to remember.

On this day
in 430 CE
the Visigoths
sacked Rome

and some of them
made it their home.

There are people who like dogs,

and there are The Enemy.
My favourite tongue-twister is
I am an anomalous, misanthropic, Irish entity.

"Founded in 1506,

"this Care Home is set in splendid landscape
 and offers a perfect wellness-environment,

 with spacious, shady gardens
 and a balmy climate similar to that of Cannes and Nice.
 It is accessible by rail from Paris and Lyon
 via a branch-line from Tarascon which takes just twenty minutes.
 For further information, please contact the Director."

Vincent van Gogh: Quarry-entrance above St-Rémy-de-Provence, 1889.

for more astounding paintings from this place and time, see
https://www.pinterest.fr/ourartpage/van-gogh-saint-remy-asylum-paintings/

Here is a list

of the emigrants from the Swabian-German village
of  Glogowatz (now Vladimirescu) in the Banat (area then of Eastern Hungary
and now of Western Romania as well) between 1905 and 1914
to North America, mainly New York State,
on ships with such names as Pannonia (= Hungary)
Carpathia and Slavonia from Trieste,
as well as a few others from Hamburg:

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~banatdata/genealogy/DDB/ByVillage/Glogowatz.htm

And here is a painting found by my Lithuanian friend Almina in a second-hand shop
in Colorado, which has Glogowatz written on the back:



















Swabian Germans founded settlements as far east as north-western Turkey
and the Russian river Volga.  Several famous Russian musicians,
notably Alfred Schnittke and Sviatoslav Richter, were of Volga-German stock.

Teeth, etc.

Scary!
No wonder that I came to fancy
bald hairy men with rough hands and beards!

Doris Day, very popular when I was young.

The green areas on this map of Africa

show where hippopotami still survive.

The red areas show where they used to thrive.

Pink square football.

The most dangerously-biased people
are those who are most insistent
that they are not biased.

The most dangerous bias is optimism.
But I would say that, wouldn't I !

The Good News

is that failure
is a pathetic social construct.
Or, to put it another way,
the greatest success is death.

Warfaring people

want panoramic views -
and so the planet will have innumerable vistas
of treeless landscape.

The Power of Subtraction

When you take longing
away from love
you get companionship.

MoMA : Museums of Miserable Animals

Zoos are galleries of misery and torture
 - though some small creatures might be happy there.

Art galleries are painless zoos of paintings
for the same hungry ghosts who come to stare.

As civilisation progressed

life became less of a challenge
and more of a chore.
Hence the importance
of competitive sport.

To my self-centred shame,

I have noticed only intermittently
the blackbird song which has been with me
most of my life.
Now, a cracked and huffing little bellows,
I sit on my high balcony
and listen (also intermittently
with human fake-humility)
to the blackbird singing in the cherry-tree
below.  Within that fragile creature
is far more than I am, far more
than in all humanity
and its deafening, apocalyptical vulgarity.

Once Upon a Time

everywhere was beautiful.
Then came a time to fell,
a time to burn, a time to sow,
a time to reap...to fight,
to get down on our knees,
to weep over human graves

but not the stumps of trees.

Being a somewhat gullible 'innocent',

it is only now that I discover that

Quaker Oats

has nothing to do with
and never had anything at all
to do with The Society of Friends,

and that it was an early brand-name
(after Coca-Cola, McCormick's Spices and Lipton's Tea)
in the hideously-serious marketing-game.

Note: Modern 'branding' began as a result of legislation
for the registration of exclusive trademarks
passed in the USA.

Quaker Oats is a bland baby-food - in contrast to authentic Scottish and Irish porridge
which is made using 'pin-head' oatmeal, has a nutty taste and an almost al dente texture.

So many novels

have been 'one of the best I've read'.
Fill in your name here to get one when I'm dead.

..........................................................

"Crown Shyness"

is a genuine - and wonderful - arboreal phenomenon.

See more pictures here.

OAFISH

The Social Contract

It is inevitable
and 'only natural'
that most people
would rather work for evil
than not work at all.

To hell with gender!

Is this a male or female 'mouth-flautist' ?
Does is matter a priestr's or a nun's fart ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83GwqJko1C8

We don't "live and learn"

- least of all from History.
We half-live, half-learn
rather ineptly.

Before the pandemic...

One of the many things

that I have never understood
is why people keep seeking status
when it piles on responsibilities,
stresses them out
and turns them into zombies.

It all depends...

...on the depth of your conception of trustworthiness.

'Farceur' P.G. Wodehouse invented a character called Psmith

(the P being silent, as in Freud).
His novel Leave it to P..... repeats and holds up
a single 'Poetic' line (or Line Poetical)
to ridicule.
I quote it here and add another
to make a splendid Rhyming Couplet
which Pelham G. would probably
have wished to smother
- so I have changed the first word
so as to make the first three accord
with the title of my website:

Across Beyond the pale parabola of joy
I spied the penis of a pissing boy.

Considering that the former, well-paid Spanish monarch,

(for insulting whom I risk gaol if ever I return to Spain)
has laundered millions upon millions of dollars
from Panama, Sa'udi Arabia, Liechtenstein, Bahrain...
and banked his cut in Switzerland,
I am wondering what other European royal families
are involved in similar self-enhancing but unpresentable activities.
The Heads of State of Belgium and the Netherlands
are well-known for nefarious activities in the past.
But what of the similarly well-paid monarchs of the semi-
United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Denmark (not to mention
the Grand-Duke of Luxembourg and the Prince of Monte Carlo) ? 
I surmise that their elegant but sticky fingers
are (or have been) in stinking pies -
from procurement of teenage children to more 'elevated' enterprise.
The rich have always wanted to be richer.  It has been so
since the invention of agriculture long ago.

By a long semiotic process

we clogged our brains with words.

After the Plague

after Jotamario Arbeláez

for there is a plague
running through us
the plague the terrible
plague upon the planet
After the plague
if there is an after
But there may not be an after
because of all that has gone before
After the plague there may be war
and after war there will be plague
and after war there will be famine
and drought and war and pestilence
and yachts and palaces
and much of what went before
but more

With the first fence

came the continuous,
continuing war of the end of the world.

"Kilroy was Here"

and was followed
by large corporations.

see https://www.thoughtco.com/