Agencies

of successive
U.S. Governments have killed
at least a hundred times more Americans
than al-Qaîda:

(click on the above for a two-hour documentary)

What makes the world go round :

Plausible
Deniability

How peculiar

that geranium-leaves
should smell of mass-murder :

the smell pervading
Bergen-Belsen
concentration-camp
was that of crushed
geranium-leaves.

Democratic Government

Meetings about meetings
to spend imaginary money
with fine distinction,
in response to 'popular
demand' for an ever-higher
standard-of-living
for the not-so-poor

guarantee
the agonising
Sixth Extinction.

I feel

as if I might have been
born on an asteroid.

Not a Little Prince
but a Diogenean Android.

after Li-Po (8th century)

The birds have melted
into mist
and mist has turned to rain.
I'm sitting on a mountain-top.
The mountain will remain.

Drugs

are egalitarian.
Religions
are not.

The Hospice at Jerusalem

Somewhere, nowhere,
everyone everywhere
grades everyone else
according to the state
and the quality or absence
of their underwear.

What I cast off in summer
is much like my mind:
underwashed by the over-hygienic.
Only the loincloths of yogis
and saints were more full
of the odour of transfiguration.

So I remain in occultation.

Unlike many

I have always wanted
to think the best of people.
But nearly seventy years
of life have finally convinced me
that some people are only at their best
in extreme circumstances
of hunger, pain or thirst -

or in what we rich, totalitarian
sedentarists insist is deprivation
(no access, for example, to
infantilising education) -

and that most people who live
in employment-economies
are mostly more than
half-way to their worst.

Breeding and fighting,

feeding and blighting,
and even
reading and writing,
we only get more terrible
as our tools get better.

Fame,

maim, blame
all chime
and rhyme.

Man is no greater
than his misery,
no better
than his shame.

Horrible words

like cull and weed,
troubleshooting, bestial
and chaste,

can have been invented only
by the terrorist species which I call
Hazardous Waste.

Book-sniffing

The sounds of that
smell are the
colours of organ
music.

On the day of the end of this little world

the prisoner on death row since 1995
is very happy to die
at the same time as everyone else.

Real people

don't shave.

Such a pity

that scientists don't seem
to talk to each other.

Climatologists, botanists
and evolutionary biologists
tell us that The End is Nigh

while medical researchers
are insanely hopeful
about extending the length
(but never the quality)
of human lives.

Ironic

The ultimate elegance :
silence.

All religion is idolatry

- So what ?
Besides the overwhelming
majority of unborn, the wholesome-
minded once-born, and the divided
Tolstoyan-Kierkegaardian
twice-born, are the very few,
and non-elect:
the thrice-born who live
from moment unto moment
of spontaneous insight.

[written after listening to a BBC broadcast
on William James'
Varieties of Religious Experience]

Saint-Lazare

Lepers catch coins in their mouths
like dogs
when they have no fingers.

Totenkranz

and Totentanz
are dead

on est en-chant-é
begeistert
ensorcelled
by the trivial
instead.

Singular and single
the wolf's and
my saliva
mingle.

for Mary Ann Heywood

Progress

We have turned ourselves into
the only mammalian species which cannot
(and will not)
clean its genitals with its tongue.
This is just one of the sad degeneracies
caused by culture.

Go figure!

In Albania today,
men who, twenty years ago,
went on hunger-strike
to help topple a dictator

are now on hunger-strike
to protest against last year's
rigged elections.

In Northern Ireland
on the other hand,
violent fanatics
starved themselves to death
just for the unsuccessful
egotism of 'recognition' as
'political prisoners'.

Cannibalism for Beginners

Bigotry
is moral tribalism

Democracy
is the codification
of bigotry.

You can dumbly vote
for the arrogant and pathetic
only when the powerful permit.

But you can subvert
the system and 'society'
every day of your life.

The last Age is
the Age of Antisensuality.

Representative Democracy

The duped
vote for
the stupid.

British General Election

I would never cast a vote
for anyone so arrogant
and so pathetic
as to want it.

Appellation non-contrôlée

In the British Isles it is very easy
to change one's name officially.

I have never liked my surname
(which is that of my maternal grandfather
who was hated by his family
for his sheer, Victorian hypocrisy) -

but I can't decide whether all my future
documents will be signed
Diogenes Xavier Antichrist

or Demerara Cane Sugar
(natural and unrefined).

Every animal

is a cathedral of chemicals.
And Man
(it seems to me)
is a doomed Vatican.

Proud never to have been employed

Next to being rich
the greatest compliment
in our degenerate
and limiting society
is to be called
hardworking.
You are very close
to criminal
if you're known for
shirking.

More urgent

than "what oft
was thought, but ne'er
so well express'd"

would be to say
what people rarely
dare to think - lest
it make their
hard minds soft.


[In other words:
To have universal appeal is to convey very aptly
something evident or unoriginal.]

God's god

is
entropy.

The world

is controlled
by people
so important
they do not exist.

The silence of onlookers

is the sound of shame.

* Contemporary Poetry

(to Paul Muldoon et mult.al.)

A wave of treated
toxins, chlorinated turds
in a slimy sea
of over-considered
words.


*(in the English language)

Non-penetrative sex

is to the cruder kind
as Dhrupad is to Opera.

[Dhrupad is the most contemplative form of Indian Classical music,
usually sung (in solo or duet) by deep male voices,
but also played on the most contemplative instrument,
the Rudhra Vina.
A single Rag can take several hours to perform.]

When death

is penultimate
integrity,
grieving is
another kind of vanity.

Though all prisoners

are political

the true anarchist
is not.

A Place to Rest

The other day I hired a grave
@ 9 euros a year for
the minimum 30 years.

It is in a beautiful, secluded,
empty corner of the graveyard
with a splendid view across
the river to the village.

Others seem to want to rot
in the open, in full sun,
but I prefer my shady Vampire Corner
where I have planted hellebore,
heather, periwinkles, costmary
and wild garlic - though not
because I think the last-named
will be necessary.

Heaven

for dog-lovers is full of dogs
for racists has no people of color
for control-freaks is a gulag
      of their very own in the sky
for Jews contains no Gentiles
for Muslims is full of virgins
      for whom there is no competition
for cats is full of mice and small
      endangered, feathered species
for me is gloriously null eternity

'Embedded Water'

It takes 130 pints of water
to grow the food and process it
to make a pint of beer.

A cup of coffee "embeds" 140 litres
of water, a cotton T-shirt 2,000 litres,

and 15,000 litres of water (plus
a lot of drugs, husbandry and transport) make
just one kilogram of steak...
for necrophagy's sake!

Words and the World

interweave
and unravel
each other.

Application of Intelligence

It requires only the slightest shift
of mind, and modest application,
to turn oneself
from sexually-deficient
to sexually self-sufficient.

Women of the World,

unite!
For the men are
faking it
too
-and don't even know
that they're faking it.

NASA

is now working on the logistics
of using the dark side of the moon
as a dump for nuclear waste,

and how to make Mars
habitable for colonising
members of our species
- which is so good at
cherishing planets.

Make haste! O make haste!

Deuteronomy & Leviticus

Every Christianity
is à la carte
pick 'n' mix doctrine
and morality.

(see Comment for amplification)

What the Cat said

Curiosity killed
the planet.

Sexual jealousy

and capitalism:
if you love the latter
you revel in the former.

When I come to think about it,

'high' culture
is only a little less trivial
than the 'low' variety.

The best future

is none.

(Brevity
is the soul of
levity.)

Arthritis :

an old dog chews on
an older bone

Mystery

is the natural order of things
which the vanity of our curiosity
imperils with such impertinence.