We are all autistic,

and the most autistic
are the most successful.

LOVERS

The first connected me to my nipples.
The second gently squeezed my balls.

I introduced one to head-massage
and a few to armpit-sniffing.

Another (very subtle) didn't suck
but tip-tongued my cock to ecstasy
and showed me tender perineal pleasure.

With another, mutual ballsack-tugging
and beard-pulling was eye-wateringly wonderful
(they can be done simultaneously).

There was one who wrapped me in rubber sheeting
and put a mask over my face.
I sweated a lot, but did not panic.

I introduced another to foot massage
and another to 'just lying there', 

touching tenderly, enjoying each other's company.

Apparently,

men and youths who 'transition' to women
(but don't menstruate and never will)
must (in the mad anglosphere)
be considered as women.
So what should we call actually-ovulating
(and menopausal) women ? Wombmen ?

Meanwhile in Uganda, the new laws
(that have made a small international noise)
outlawing 'homosexuality' (or maybe only
'sodomy': the two are confused but separable)
should sort out the men from the boys.

"Poems tell you

what you know already,"
wrote playwright Alan Bennett about poet Philip Larkin.

I think that if they tell you anything,
they tell you what you half-know already.
Otherwise reading them would not be worth the effort.

* * *

Charles Simic

COUNTRY FAIR

for Hayden Carruth

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,

It doesn't matter.

We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.

As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly

And thought of other things.

Like, what a cold, dark night

To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick

And the dog went after it

On four legs, the other two flapping behind,

Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man

Who kept kissing her neck.

The dog got the stick and looked back at us.

And that was the whole show.

'Character is destiny.'

But what produces or composes character ?
Destiny ?

Sometimes I feel like a playing-card
with the same face or pips on front and back
in a pack of other cards which I fail to realise
have the same back-of-card design on both sides. 

Not the Dead Sea.

'This must be the place
where God decided to give the world
an asshole.'

– Douglas Kennedy on Secaucus, New Jersey,
in State of the Union.

My latest 'artwork'

in different lights, on a wall
outside my home which is partly shaded
by a tree and shrubs.
It is an 'anti-gallery statement'.

Depending on presentation,

any information, however factual,
can be propaganda.
Thus we are the victims of
The Presenters.

Yet another small Crime Against Nature.

Ever since Roman texts warned women against appearing “bristly like a goat”, body hair removal trends have come and gone, but historians say Britons now have less body hair than ever before in human history.

read the grisly details >                                     

 

Desire...

"is the presence of absence [or lack]." – Kojève

"is the wanting of the Other's desire." – Lacan

is a symptom of sociopathic arrogation. – me

When Kojève (Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov) was 15 years old, he was arrested and condemned to death for selling soap on the black market in Moscow. But, like Dostoyevsky, at the last possible moment he was spared because his uncle, a personal physician to Lenin, intervened at the request of his mother. 

Borges' dictum

that if you can't improve on silence
you shouldn't open your mouth

ignores the fact that silence
is less and less appreciated
and people are addicted to noise.

It could be anywhere.

Uniformity:
Cities look more or less the same
when you take away the flags.

Cities

from Southern Europe to Central Asia
were founded on water-bubbling
earthquake-prone geological faults. 
But this is only one of many reasons
why cities are against all reason.

Cobbett called London The Great Wen,
then the greatest of the planet's tumours,
in no way benign.

"Too much time on Twitter

...turns you into a little kid in a schoolyard
who is both desperate for attention
and afraid of being the one who gets beat up.
You end up being this phoney who’s self-concerned
but loses empathy for others.”

 Jaron Lanier

                                        [posted by @NophoneAuban]

Ireland welcomes refugees...

 less cruelly than Britain.

If you think

that death is the worst thing that can happen to you
you have had a lucky life.

Still-life.

 

photo by HE Dyal

Anything can be a religion

in all but the disposal of the dead –,
with rites and rituals, duties,
prophets and saints, sometimes
even martyrs:

football, racism, pop music, guns,
atheism, nationalism, basketball,
capitalism, war...even science,
which should be its opposite.

Better than any religion is
a shared sense of humour,
fun and the ridiculous.

The Communist Control Act

of 1954 made it a Federal Offense to communicate
'any communist thoughts' by any means, including semaphore,
in the land of free racist speech (not to mention lynching)
and home of brave bigots - who now are on the rampage
against abortion rights, contraception, the theory of evolution,
and, of course, socialism – which, they will be glad to know
has been almost universally erased through the application
of both hard and soft power : Missiles and McDonald's.

(with thanks to Bill Bryson)

Perhaps...

People are amused

by other people talking to themselves,
unaware that most so-called conversations
are conducted by people talking to themselves.

Despite the obvious fact

that we are constantly subject to Weather,
few people have the slightest interest in meteorology.
So this satellite image of the extraordinary
system now in western Europe (in late May)
will mean nothing. 
The western and central United States
are also experiencing bizarre
meteorological occurrences.
And none of us is abandoning
our hot water or our car. 

The Biggest Threat to the World

is not the crude aggressiveness
of "tin-pot" Putin and slavish Russia

but the corruption of cultures
and minds by the USA and its
turbo-capitalist, class-ridden
anti-culture of untrammelled
ambition and greed.

Everywhere in the world
you can see the ugly American
baseball cap, and hear ugly
American music: Soft Power.

Everywhere in the world
ugly American lies
about freedom, democracy 
and all that crap are enthusiastically
propagated and believed.

As for freedom:
25% of all known prisoners in the world
languish in the Land of the Free,
most of them not pinko-gray.

As for democracy: there are only two political parties
both of them crudely right-wing, both of them financed
by gross billionaires and transnational planet-destroyers.

In the Home of the Brave,
there are more guns than people or dogs
or coyotes or bison.
Guns appoeal greatly to testosterone-toxic cowards. 
The US has twice as many guns per person than
the next highest-in-league country: Yemen. 

In the Land of Opportunity
the gap between very rich
and very poor is by far the greatest in the world,
and a quarter of the population has no access
to medical treatment.

And we have all been Americanised,
however reluctantly
by the most successfully-aggressive
lowest-common-denominator
pizza and hamburger, monopoly
monoglot culture yet devised.

how-millions-died-unseen-in-america's-post-09/11-wars

The Cute Economy of Cruelty

is based on the 'commodity fetishisation'
of animals, especially dogs.

Unfortunately, dogs bred to be cute
suffer more and more discomfort, pain and misery
as they look ever more different from the wolf.

aeon.co/essays/breeding-dogs-to-be-cute-and-anthropomorphic-is-animal-cruelty

A poem by Ilya Kaminsky

 

Can I be your friend ?

 

photo by Igor do Vale

Another thing that I don't understand

about Normal Men
(in the USA at least, to judge from films)
is that they tip waitresses for looking 'sexy'
and not because they look tired,
or are good at their jobs.

However, I have given money to beggars
because they look 'sexy' as well as
managing to survive,
and often have lovely dogs to maintain –

as well as to an extremely sad Romanian woman
regularly begging in the Northern Irish rain.

Optimism:

a crime against the planet.

Sometimes I think

that I am wonderfully rational –
and then I remember that I am human.

All too human.

Paul Verlaine,

absinthe- and Rimbaud-addict
wrote a famous poem praising
Rimbaud's nether regions.
It appeared in his hand-written
and personally-distributed collection
with a title in Spanish,

portrait by Félix Vallotton

and published after his death.
It was a parody on a collection of poems
by Albert Mérat, entitled l'Idole,
each of which praised items of female anatomy.

It is 'not one of his best',
certainly not better than
the famous Arsehole Sonnet
that he wrote together
with his much younger 'Idol' Arthur. 
It is also untranslatable,
especially if you want it to rhyme.

But today I had a go at the first verse,
keeping the original ABBA rime-scheme,
and here is the result:

Even when it’s not erect
Your cock delights me, dangling there,
pale gold beneath your pubic hair
commanding my utmost respect…

Just after completing this masterpiece
of 'free translation' (in a mere 70 minutes)
I saw the Hidden Statue of Caylus
(around the corner, 150 metres from where I live)
in particularly good light,

and took this photo of an ephebe with an over-large
(or detumescent) dick by a probably-queer 
pupil of Zadkine, who lived here for a while),
which I think is apposite:

Mountains are amazing.

Best 
for admiring
and not for self-admiring conquest.

Mountains in France...
and in Albania.

Right and Might.

Let us not patronise animals
by according them rights –
but, rather, no longer arrogate
to ourselves rights over animals.

Yesterday's news – Today.

 

An addition

to an earlier blog:

Freedom of thought
is more important than
freedom of speech
(or expression)
and doesn't even require it...

but it requires open minds. 
Has there ever been an open mind ?
(What would it feel like ?)

I’m high as a kite –

Milvus milvus or artificial (originally silk
high-flyer on a string –
– after abandoning my long-time, falsely-labelled
Anti-depressant: empty, drab, dreary Escitalopram.  
It’s just as well that Bearz abandoned me
when he did (9 months ago, oh!
what a depressing pregnancy!).  

Just now, I’d be impossible to live with (or even near). 
But the sweet plants think I’m OK –
who/what better to believe ?  Hey –

(Pause while I kiss a particularly sexy cactus). 

Oh, sweet Rebutia, your tiny spines
upon my lips and nipples  – and willy ? 
no, please don’t be rough,
you naughty and presumptuous succulent !
I’m not that tough...
And not so silly.

I’m very sensitive, you know.
(But, on reflection, pretty silly.) Even a feather
passed across my nipple or my Nether
Regions makes my whole kooky kundalini glow.
So...

... Not to be continued – in the interests of
Undemocratic Google Decency!

ANCIENT TORSO OF APOLLO

– my free translation of a sonnet from Rilke's
Der Neuer Gedichte, Anderen Teil, 1908. 

Headless, he glows! See in the slight

twist of his hips a kind of smile swerve

towards his broken neck. How the curve

of his chest dazzles with a light -

no - more like the glint from a still-living pelt.

An echo of a gaze gleams from a mere torso

as from an oil-lamp turned down low.

This mutilated marble stump can melt

our stony hearts, its radiance spreading far

beyond its broken surface, like a star!

On this small ruination there is nowhere

that does not greet you with an accusing stare.

This fragment that could sit upon a shelf

commands you now to change your very self.

I first tried to tackle the translation of this famous poem around 1970.
It appeared in my Tide and Undertow (1976) as an example of a failure
in translation.  This was because – as with most poetry translations (most poetry-translations are failures) – I tried to be too faithful to the difficult original.

Today, still rejoicing in the uplift of my recent (non-menopausal) change-of-life*, I read this misquotation or mis-translation of the last line of the above poem by the popular (hence shallow) poet Heaney: 'You must change your life.'  Well, changing one's life is very much not the same as changing your self. 

So I went back to the original and decided to have another go.  Although I retain the rhyme-scheme of the original sonnet (which I think is important) I have been more relaxed (and maybe also more perceptive) in my approach some fifty years later.

I hope you like it.

Back in the 1970s I could only imagine what the torso looked like.  But today (Glory Be!) I found within 5 seconds via the internet what looks very much like what Rilke saw in the Berlin or Paris museum.  Note the smile!

*occasioned by my abrupt abandonment of a long-prescribed anti-depressant, resulting in my return to a bi-polar high, such as I enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s.

My life

is a static kind of space-travel
through the eerie chasm and chaos
of consciousness.

Part of my garden

after recent, welcomed rain.

Well, not really.
This was once a dump of ashes & small items
by the gable of a Catholic nursery school (that is to say
a Catholic indoctrination centre) run by
The Good Sisters who got rid of the ash from
their wood-burning stoves
like they got rid of doubt.

The old-fashioned nursery-school closed. 
A couple of years later
I arrived nearby, and saw an opportunity for
embellishment-experiment.  I 'took it
upon myself'.Ashes are dry. Caylus sits upon
porous limestone.  It has taken seven years
for this former dump to transform. 
Above it, to the right, are the remains
(a square keep or donjon) of a twelfth century castle.
From now on (after years of waste-water
nurturing in summer), this little prettified
cornerof Caylus
will probably hold its own against drought.

The Ramblers and Cyclists have come out

from hibernation – in Expensive Kit.
The ramblers have the obligatory little rucksacks
and Pilgrimage-to-Compostela staves
to help them on what seems to me
a joyless exercise. Their gaze
falls mainly on the ground.
The cyclists mostly see just their knees.

Somewhere 'on the autistic spectrum',

I enjoyed
the few dinner-parties to which I was invited.
The pleasure for me came mainly from the food
and other people's pleasure.

'Secret History'.

Perhaps all history is secret.
Public history is doctored, embellished,
invented, amputated and presented.

I was born during the reign
of the British Empire, and have
endured its untruths
and fabrications all my life.

On Parks (French: La Nature)

Too much mowing.,
Not enough growing.

There's a Great Deal in a name.

Countries, cities, towns, villages, streets

(and of course people) have their names changed.

During the Revolution the nearby village of
Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val changed its name to
Libre-Val.  It returned to its full,
pre-revolutionary name in the 1960s.

The republican Irish Free state (established 1922)
changed the names of towns|
and counties containing the words King or Queen:

Kingstown became Dún Laoghaire; Queen's County
became Offaly; Queenstown became Cobh.
Dublin was renamed Baile Átha Cliath, but nobody
in her right mind has ever called it that.

The USSR had a fun time changing names of cities:
Nizhni Novgorod became Gorki, Tsaritzyn turned into
Stalingrad (of course),
and after that Great Dictator was denounced: Volgograd.

Königsberg became Kaliningrad. Now the Poles are 'officially'
re-naming it Królewiec.  The Lithuanians will probably
go back to calling it Karaliaučius.
Both of these mean Kingstown.
Kingstown-in-Russia.

I wonder when a Trump City will emerge
from defiled Floridian swamps ? As for other names,

I suggest that New York should now be called
Destruction-upon-Hudson,
Washington: Genocide-in-Raped-State
(as Virginia will henceforth be known)

and London: Mind-boggling Corruption-upon-Thames.

"War on Drugs"

 If plant-based 'recreational drugs'
had been re-legalised decades ago,
the far-more toxic – indeed deadly –
Fentanyl and Crystal Meth
might never have been made in small laboratories
to kill more people than Covid-19
or Alzheimer's disease.

Outcastes.

For dogs,
dog-racist France is one of the most miserable countries
in the world.

The weight of the world

is only slightly greater
than the mass of misery
which Man has put upon it.

I'm fairly certain

that I see colour differently to many other people.
Like the Aztecs, I see many shades of green,
and can actually start 'freaking out' when
deprived of that colour - e.g. in the desert
and (of course) in cities.

This is particularly interesting, since I am (or was)
a painter.  I suspect that other people will not see
as I do this early painting, on wallpaper,1965,
obviously influenced by the great Vincent,
amended some 40 years later).

by kind permission of The Bearz Collection,
Seaforde, Northern Ireland.

Before the Internet

pictures of art-works, megaliths
and other buildings could only be seen
in expensive art-books.

Paintings in galleries were
(and still are) often defiled by their frames.

We now take so much for granted.

The loathesomeness of Gauguin

was not just that he infected 11-year old Tahitian girls with syphilis,
nor that he abandoned his impecunious wife
and 5 children in Copenhagen,

but (thirdly) that he inspired the equally-loathesome Picasso
(an equally second-rate painter) and infected

the already long-pestilential Western Culture*
with the viral capriciousness
of much "Modern Art".

*Now called The American Way of Life

Thankyou, Bearz,

for inspiring this expanded
version of your observation this afternoon :

The 'Great' (prentious) Museums
(and Art Galleries)
are mass graves for paintings,
and show-cases of destruction.

Why do thrillers

now so often involve killers ?

Murder is not the worst crime.

Americans are obsessed by guns.

I don't have the imagination

even to write a short
short story,

but I can easily imagine
visibly-diseased people
being driven from towns and villages
to die in ditches, desert, rubbish-dumps.

Hunchbacks have had a bad time in Europe.

 

Bravo, BBC Radio 3.

Its morning programmes on the day
of the crowning obscenities in Brexitland

began with Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose)
and Charles Trenet (La Mer).
We deteced a very subtle dissident comment
from a programme-planner
but of course not sufficient to throw
into the works a spanner.

S. Holmes & G.J. Danton

It is quite hard to explain

to people who don't think
they have lost their wits

that you just sometimes
seem to lose your wits.

I 'm pretty sure

that Britain (now jitteringly and fashionably
referred to as [the] UK)
and France (always called France
even when it was a tiny statelet)
together have committed more 'genocide'
in India, Africa, Indo-China, Australia...
(not to mention Tasmania, Ireland
and the murderous Scottish Highland
and Island Clearances)
than Germany and the Austro-Hungarian
& Russian Empires combined.

Spaniards and other Pale Invaders in the Americas
may well have murdered more 'unacceptables'
and 'sub-humans' than the Nazis.

In Shakespeare's day the Irish were considered
'subhumans' like Calibán 
and the Tudor opinion of the Scots
provided the modern word Donkey
(from Duncan, cf Dunce) to replace Ass.

Do you (on your Smart-Phone)
fondly imagine that universal mutual respect
will ever come to pass ?

In the merry Mary-month of May

the politics of dancing
prohibit
flagrant, masturbatory dancing.

near pole or cave.
That's no way for
civilised people to behave.

Never mind the neurons.

Perhaps
Alzheimer's Disease reveals
'the real person'
both in the 'sufferer'
and the carer.

If so, can the condition
be called disease ?

(Just talking to myself.
 It would be insane not to.)

Never mind the blood and guts

the violence and militarism,
the obscenities of the religious...

freely available for view by all,
even 'innocent children' –

don't show even a very small
old-man's cock or half a dead man's scrotum
or anything that would a century ago
have been called blue.

Western Values must be upheld
and reinforced by YouTube-Google, too.

Suicide:

irrational ?
You must be mad!

(Insanely,
I just haven't yet got round to it.)

Read the Good News !

https://aeon.co/essays/from-the-cynics-self-sufficiency-to-an-ecology-of-wanking.

France is a paradise

inhabited by people who think they're in Hell.'

– Sylvain Tesson 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/may/01/france-gone-to-hell-politics-of-nostalgia

And in the same paradise:

First dung beetles are rewilded in France.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/30/france-first-dung-beetle-reintroduction-rewilding

'Small Fort'' is its name.

Irish village prepares for return of hotelier
AKA Donald Trump)...

The more cruelly

a people or a society treats its children
the more 'successful' it becomes,
through 'successional psychopathy'.

Hence the 'great' European empires,
whose children were treated
with a cruelly-monastic rigour
which has morphed into
the cruel competitiveness of modern childhood.

There will be no 'Queer Liberation'

until queer men (and women)
can audibly mention and appraise
other men (or women)
in public spaces/places (such as cafés),
exactly as (the often woefully-unliberated)
Normals do.

Hardly surprising.

 

Many Europeans want climate action – but less so if it changes their lifestyle, poll shows.

I don't think I could tell

a diamond from a well-cut bead of glass.
Why would I want to ?
Amber, jet, and ordinary opal –
or just a strikingly striated pebble –
is just as beautiful –
not to mention a perfect blade of grass.

My first (fairly brief)

encounter with Xylazine:

www.beyond-the-pale.uk/tranq.htm

picture allegedly from The California Examiner
 offered me by nice Mr.Google

Very Few People

actually want Power (with a Big P),
but it only needs a very few
to take it (or be offered)
for the world to fricassee.