Let us give praise
to the Pharmaceutical Industry.
Amen!
Our sacred Serenity Pills are addictive,
and thus we are gratefully condemned
to Lifelong Contentment.
Amen!
And now let us sing in gratitude
Psalm One and Only:
Big Pharma in the sky,
Easing All Anxiety...
on her superbly brave decision
to have the trial of her vile pimp-husband rapist
held in open court.
She said that if she had been 20 years younger: “I might not have dared to refuse a closed-door hearing.
“I would have feared the stares. Those damned stares a woman of my generation has always had to contend with, those damned stares that make you hesitate in the morning between trousers and a dress, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you and embarrass you. Those damned stares that are supposed to tell you who you are, what you’re worth, and then abandon you as you grow older.”
to learn from
rather than merely
tolerate each other.
But for our petty brains
it's too much bother.
What will they be wearing ?
Unaccountably,
Planet Earth has been banned
allegedly for its more than sixty thousand
uninterrupted years
of sheer human nastiness.
There's not much of it about
not even in peaceful, super-democratic,
quadralingual, multi-ethnic
Switzerland.
by the ignorance of Germans
of what was going on
in the concentration-camp next door.
But do you want to know
what is going on
in the nearest abattoir ?
You don't even know where it is.
capitalism demands
conformity, not liberty
– let alone equality –
and fierce competition
rather than fraternity
for all eternity.
No, just a scary sunset,
some derricks,
and a statue of hypocrisy
 |
| photo by Charly Triballeau |
make you rethink
how you relate to the world.'
– Tracy Chevalier
My literary life - so far -
has roamed for eighty years
from Little Grey Rabbit
to Raising Hare.
apart from the 'enslavement
in Babylon', the expulsion by the Romans,
the ghettoes, pogroms, Shoah,
mass-muggings, unending insults
and forced usury –
it will transpire
that the worst thing to befall the Jews
will have been
the recent seizure of Palestine.
The crocuses and violets are blooming.
When I insert my hearing-aids
I hear the kettle
(but no birds)
sing.
for when I've looked in them
I have never seen more than
an image, a curious simulacrum
no more real than a photograph,
a life-like puppet, a trick of light.
For women they are less often
a source of self-admiration than of anxiety.
The last time I looked in mine
I saw that I had my pullover
the wrong way round and inside-out.
But they are useful
for beard-trimming,
for watching pilferers in shops...
and they were once slightly helpful
in treating my teenage spots..
 |
| I don't believe I ever looked as cute as this! |
Kissing is a very small part of life.
So why does it feature
in almost every movie ever made ?
The original romances – derived
by troubadours through Courts of Love
(really courts of mutual respect)
in the 11th and 12th centuries
from Sufi Islam, e.g. Rumi – involved
no carnality, not even kissing.
Romance that spellbinds
was marriage of minds
long since degraded
to sexual compatibility.
My lycracrylic long-johns
are so warm and cosy
that it was only when
I was about the leave the house
that I noticed I had no trousers on.
But if you think that's silly,
yesterday I put my long-johns on
the wrong way round
and deprived myself
of access to my willy
though I mostly sit down to pee.
I should have died long ago from
some pulmonary condition
because I have always lived with
an open coal (now closed wood) fire
and spent most of my adolescent winters in a room
heated by an Aladdin paraffin stove
(of the old wick-burning type)
I could cook on. Now I have the more advanced
(equally-smelly) injection
kind for winter mornings. (Needs electricity.)
For twenty-five years I smoked a pipe.
Since 1970 I have cooked with gas,
and only during Covid and in a crowd
put on a mask - insofar as spectacles
and hearing-aids and claustrophobia allowed.
But I have hardly ever had a chest-cold,
let alone asthma, emphysema or bronchitis.
Most old people die of pneumonia.
I'll probably die of pudibonditis
turning me into unpleasant
human detritus.
In no way are plastic bottle-stoppers 'green'.
What proportion of them is actually recycled ?
They are an insult to, a weapon against
the ancient cork forests
of Eastern Portugal
soon to be facing ecological collapse
due to climate-change and plastics
which cause climate-change
- and easy screw-top caps.
BANTER.
The bane of my school years
and one of the reasons
I avoided pubs, sport and other
unpleasant masculine situations.
'They're only teasing.'
I 'went mad'. Nearly was expelled.
To a tree-loving Aspy
they were very dis-easing.
*
The most celebrated banterer in Europe.
I devote several hours
to getting my head
together, gathering
my wits in one place.
Then it's time for bed.
let us consider the greater holocaust
perpetrated by Europeans
in the Americas,
and smaller ones all over Africa
and in Australia.
Let us not forget the other genocides
all over the world, including Armenia,
Cambodia – and holocausts of hunger
as in India and Soviet Ukraine.
And now the offspring of offspring
of holocaust survivors
are venting ire and fire on Palestine.
Question 3.
In ten words or fewer, describe yourself.
Thanks be to the Welfare State, I'm
an octogenarian, vegetarian
Marxist Oblomov.*
Oh, sorry ! that's 12 words plus two commas.
Does I'm count as one word ?
*A book I haven't got round to reading.
is that it got so quickly taken over
and almost submerged by
ruthless and ugly
Jewish-American heterosexuality.
A report on Vincent van Gogh's damaged ear
by the handsome Dr Félix Rey (left)
sent to Irving Stone in 1930.
Following weeks of living in poverty
with the ego etc. of the insufferable Gauguin,
Vincent committed the symbolic act
and rushed to the local house of transient
pleasure, where he handed his bloody ear-lobe
to a maid called Gabrielle Berlatier -
whom, unfortunately, he did not celebrate in paint,
nor the bordello.
But he painted this one in Arles, in 1888.
I have for decades understood
that evil often begets evil,
but good rarely begets good.
an anatomist born in Cork
liked drawing male genitals
and, assuredly, regarding them.
 |
| He drew them well. |
"will be allowed to exit Gaza,”
said the Israeli prime minister last year.
– in the same way that Jews who could pay
were allowed to exit Germany
in the mid-1930s.
Though the scale of its evil and hypocrisy
is tiny in comparison with Hitler's Germany,
who would have imagined
60 years ago
that Israel could become a
vicious little power
(with useful concentration-camps)
in alliance with
illiberal autocracies
to assure its Lebensraum ?
So much for democracy !
is yet another hole to hell.
– Richard W. Halperin
as a modern 'libertarian'.
The selfless
tend not to be noticed.
Only by freeing capital
do you 'free the world'
- for ruthless take-over.
Best not to be noticed.
"Celebrating the rottenness,
that's freedom."
(John le Carré : 'The Night Manager')
Best not to be noticed.
When I lived briefly in Denmark in the 1960s
– ten years before the birth of the present prime minister –
it was hardly on the geopolitical map, a small NATO country
composed of islands, a peninsula and alleged hygge –
remote and almost exotic to a sheltered Northern-Irishman.
It used to be quite a power – owning Norway,
Southern Sweden, Iceland, Schleswig-Holstein,
Northern Estonia, Coromandel* the Gold Coast
and some Caribbean islands for the slave trade.
Now only Greenland remains.
While I was enjoying myself on dreamy Bornholm
learning heterosex in candlelit hygge
and eating smørrebrød and kryddersild,
labskovs (known in Liverpool as scouse),
boiled cod fresh-landed and stikkelbærsgrød,
Danes were doing to Innu Greenlanders
what Russians are today doing to Ukrainians : snatching
native children to turn into Proper Danes
eating with knife and fork and being
hyggelige. The fork was invented
only a century after the Inuit arrived on the world's
largest island from the western continent.
Now Greenland is a Prize Territory and,
apart from the Faroe Islands, the only overseas part
of the ancient Kingdom of the dithering Prince.
I was brusquely dumped by my Danish girlfriend.
I have never had one since.
Nor been to Denmark.
 |
| We are all now familiar with Greenland's national flag. |
from Wikipedia:
Since 2025, the United States has engaged in hybrid warfare against Greenland;[30][31] as a result, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service included the United States as a potential hybrid threat to national security alongside Russia and China in its threat assessment that year.[32][33]
* So it may have been, as Osbert Sitwell wrote:
On the coast of Coromandel
dance they to the tunes of Handel.
If France did the same,
perhaps I would have
a less stressed existence.
I refused to fill in the Census form online,
and insisted on the paper version.
(Roll on Le Pen and/or sidekick ???)
*
ON A DIFFERENT, MORE CHEERFUL NOTE :
Even though ...
Just as Homo sapiens stole the means to make fire
from Neanderthals, before wiping them out
one way another, so he will steal something even more
cataclysmic from the first superior extra-terrestrial beings
he encounters when on a galactic look-about.
Wrinkled uncle Magga Trump
You look like a Heffalump
Up above the world so high
Like a monster in the sky...
 |
| Yawning Capybara by Bob Karp |
There's little point in lapsing into
silent rage.
A little sense of humour is essential
for old age.
It is a tragedy that this language
has shackled and sleazed the word,
offering no linguistic alternatives
(as Irish offers several words
for kinds and kindnesses of rain).
In a more ignorant time
(the nineteen-sixties)
we thought that the more
it was hidden, forbidden
the more toxic and driven
Sex could become for men.
We were sadly mistaken.
Anal-genital abuse is at least as rife,
sensuality just as rare in life,
since 'Sexual Liberation'.
in the long, narrow valley
of my life. He was
my professor of philosophy,
the gentle, self-effacing
Bryce Gallie.
Even now sometimes
I shockingly & unashamedly reveal,
as I did in childhood, that I feel
the only power I have
is to throw a tantrum.
time's backwardness.
I am
אני
The Great Yam
or Yahoo in the sky.
Don't ask me why.
עֵת תעֵ
In the recent past, studies by Rubens
have sold for between £500,000 and £1m or more.
 |
| Composite: Peter Paul Rubens/Klaas Muller/Brafa Art Fair |
The study of an old man was painted on a re-used sheet of paper, and when turned over, the silhouette of a woman’s head appears through the model’s beard.
or simple criminality ?
When I was just queer-ish,
part of its attraction
was its unacceptability –
indeed, its illegality.
I was born just a decade before
the Hydrogen Bomb and the start
of the long Explosions of Choice
and Explosions of Ease
(even - though slightly - for its poor)
as the Free World
continued the rapid exploitation
and the slow but big
burning of our biosphere....
To most human minds
silence and solitude are vacancy,
not chance for trance sublime and strange
nor
to ponder, each in and on its separate fantasy.
How many human minds long to
render and receive fast influencings,
and hold an unremitting interchange
with the clear universe of things around ?
No clear universe...All is murk befogged and strife
and urbanisation,
no naked Alpine countenance of nature
but deglaciation.
Mont-Blanc:
Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni
I love the taste
of my sleeping-pills,
which is not unlike 100%-cocoa chocolate.
They are also mildly-antidepressant
and free to the poor like me..
To delicious Zolpidem
for the the polynocturia-afflicted
(sometimes five times a night)
I am happily addicted...
Plus je connais les hommes, mieux j'aime les chiens !
The better I know men, the better I like dogs !
first appeared in print in 1822 in
Reflections of 'A Lady' in the Mirror of the Somme.
It is often misquoted,
or a misquotation is wrongly attributed to
Lamartine, Pascal... even Bismarck, and often to
Madame Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein,
whose best remark/dictum/aphorism/apophthegm is:
Glory is grief sparkling with joy.
« La gloire est le deuil éclatant du bonheur. ».
(And sometimes panicles
of joy are cast out of despair
like sperm from testicles.)
From what I have read
in books and newspapers,
it is often unpleasant
to have a father.
So, fatherless, I count myself lucky.
But this has meant that
I love to see men
and portraits of men
who, in a less imperfect,
less patristic world,
might have been my father.
never were. The legend of the epiphanic kings
grew out of the stories of the Magi (sometimes
numbering twelve)
when Christianity ceased to be
a religion of slaves and the poor,
to become an imperial cult under Constantine
the Great Corrupter.
The Kufic script
is lovelier than Islam.
THE LATIN SCRIPT
is not as ugly as
missionary Christianity;
the Hebrew script
less beautiful than
the non-evangelism
of Judaism.
you are, in fact, worthless.
Capitalism always capitalises,
and reduces us.
*a famous Pepsi-Cola advertisement slogan.
