A Sad Accident

 at a Gay Croissant Orgy.

Of course I've never seen 'Star Wars',

which, I gather, is an infantasy film.
So, when in London in 1981
I saw posters in the Underground
announcing that The Empire Strikes Back, 
I thought for more than a minute
with great concernment
that they had been put up by 
the right-wing, working-class-smashing,
make-the-rich-very-much-richer
Reaganomic Thatcher government.

Let's not be negative!

All bad things, too,
will come to an end
when we do.
Possibly quite soon.
Sooner than our manipulated
minds imagine.

Possibly next June.

Almost no human news

is fun news, but this
amusingly-named
Bone-eating snot-flower worm,
first discovered in 2003, 
lives happily off whale carcasses
on the floor of the North Sea.

photo by Adisha Pramod

You are not what other people think –

unless, of course, you turn yourself into
what you think other people
would like you to seem to be.

Some people do this serially.

I am a thin, congealing stew

of emotion and experience –

and futile regret at what

I put my mother through.

Better late than never.

 

Tipping-point.

Even if everyone on the planet
were to live just above the level of malnutrition
and without running water or electricity
(or aeroplanes, cars, nuclear fission,
phones or restaurants or live-in maids),

the formerly abundant, teeming biosphere
might stagger on depletedly
for only another four or five decades.

I blame the great anti-hypocrite Tom Paine.

Americans are much more interested in
rights than responsibilities
or responsibility.

All property is theft

from the planet.

All that we truly own
are amputated, nugatory
and bedizened memories.

A Very Other Kind of Queer.

Oh yes, show me your sores while I'm wanking'
Lepers are terribly sweet.
And yes, you can give me a spanking,
and then I can worship your feet.

I love to hear your chains clanking...
Oh, we're in for a wonderful treat!

(to be continued)

Optimism.

photo by Jimmy Cunningham

 

LGBTQXYZŁĐÆ

Do serene asexuals and slow solosexuals qualify

to join that ever-expanding category ?

And do cuddling, kissing, non-penetrating men
'count' as homosexual/gay ?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-and-sex-in-the-digital-age/201806/solosexuality-and-pornosexuality-learned-or-innate

Unsuitable food,

far worse than what impoverished humans are often forced to buy.
A Black Skimmer feeds a Cigarette-butt to its chick.

The toxic butt has been mistaken for a fish.

Y'all know

that jazz meant sex
(related to jizz and jism, but not Jesus).

I didn't know that funk meant 'stink'
– so that funky means 'smelling of sex'
one way or another.

Sex and religious companionship
were - probably still are - a great consolation
to Blak Foke (woke and unwoke)

though sex more often involves violation.

I think it is likely

and significant that, during my lifetime,
the most quoted phrase from English literature
(excluding the Bible and Shakespeare)
is not one about human continents,
islands and promontories and the bell that tolled,
but Willie Yeats' apocalyptic :

the centre cannot hold.

Human legs

are not particularly beautiful,
unlike those of otters or spiders,
and (to me) are quite ugly when old
– which is why I wear trousers
in hot weather as well as in cold.

My favourites, hanging out to dry.

There is currently an infantile
summer fashion for all (including old) men
to wear long, drab shorts
like schoolboys.  Can it have
anything to do with pædophilia ?

Goodbye,

one of the last of Europe's great forests.

To die in your sleep

is to slip sweetly,
slidingly relax
into the excellent beyond
and everlasting space
between opposing facts. 

Time is like honey –

cloudy or runny.
We are told it is money
which, for the rich,
is solid and sure – 
but not for the poor
who, like honey, endure.

Fungus on a cactus.

 

While we were anguishing

over Nuclear Apocalypse
in the 1950s and 1960s
we were merrily creating
the Environmental Apocalypse
which we are now pretend-propitiating.

Charles Kœchlin's post-apocalyptic Piano Quintet, 1908-1921,
gives no hint of the joy of the richly-surviving flora, fungi and fauna.

For the French

an animal that is not edible
is either vermin ('nuisible')
or for keeping in a zoo –
where once were kept sub-humans, too.

read more >

Three headlines

from yesterday's newspaper : 

Sea-sponges sneeze to clear their pores.

Rise in popularity of anal sex
has led to health problems for women.

We are separated by one miscalculation
from nuclear annihilation.

Why say

in fifty lines (or pages)
what you can say in six ?

Because quantity is preferred to quality,
and forms the basis of consumer-capitalism.

The offensively glib Mr Larkin.

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   

I know this is [the] paradise [that]

Everyone old has dreamed of... *

Except that she might be just fourteen

and he seventeen and there was no consent

and both have violent fathers

and their mothers keep breaking down in sobs

and neither have jobs...

* the first 5 lines of High Windows, by Philip Larkin.

An Early Anti-War and Anti-Waste Poem

(from the 17th century) :

Jack Sprat will eat no fat
and Jill doth love no leane,
And yet betwixt them both
they lick the dishes cleane.

Georgia O'Keeffe

is, allegedly, the only female painter
to fetch high prices in salerooms.

The appalling male painter, Georg Baselitz,
notoriously declared that
Women can't paint

Perhaps
Georgia O'Keeffe painted like a man ?

It is almost a truism

that firearms in 'peacetime'
(i.e. no situation of international
or intranational hostility)
tend to be carried
by men who fear challenges
to their assumed virility.

Weedy sea-dragon

or seedy weed-dragon
in its habitat of kelp, now
diminishing all over the world.

When you're feeling low

don't be ashamed to visit youTube
and be uplifted by someone looking after
a geriatric bat 
or setting puzzles for
or having morning coffee with a crow.

And don't fail to read the comments!

Under the Cascade

of events which we have caused
it seems likely that
we were designed to fail
either by a nasty deity
or through overreaching evolution –
the origin's irrelevant.
And true to form we find it easier
to discover the origin of stars
than to investigate the source
of destructive and habitual human wilfulness.

And so we speed so heedlessly
the eventual Martianisation of the world.

Hypocritical Schadenfreude.

I have 'been right' about the collapse
of The Biosphere since around 1965
when I was 24. I won't live long enough
to suffer from the effects to which I am contributing
while still alive.

I drive
my thirty-year-old car once or twice a week
to markets and even to a supermarket, 
and a few months ago
shat on my scruples (feeling only a little less smug)
by taking a cheap flight to Morocco...
where I bought a rug.

More than 20 million farm animals

A truck carrying pigs was tracked travelling for 32 hours non-stop
 in the US in August 2021 without the animals being unloaded. 
Photograph: Hugo Borges

 

in the US alone
die on their way to abattoirs,
are condemned,
and have to be disposed of
– 'humanely ?'.

read more >

(If you can't be vegetarian, be cannibal.
 Fat white children under five are more succulent
 than tortured pig.)

'The world is too much with us',

Will Wordsworth in his limping sonnet wrote.  

But worse,
*we* are too much
(that is to say cut-throat
interfering) with the world :
a double curse.

Beside the rubble

a penny-farthing bicycle
without a saddle
in Bakhmut, Ukraine. 

photo by Bülent Kılıç

Today's Interesting Fact.

'An estimated 1.3 million' people in Britain
are part-time naturists, which is about
the same number as the membership
of the (Anglican, Episcopal) Church of England.

naturism-in-britain-is-booming >

'Authentic' Tourism:

Choosing the ho[s]tel with bed-bugs.

(The only place I encountered bed-bugs was Amsterdam,
a particularly picturesque and soulless city.)

Trying to go up the down-escalator.

Until today I had assumed
that everyone had more or less
the same torrent of monologue
that I have in my head.

But some favoured people have none at all,
living serenely inside their brains,
rather than continually scrabbling like rats
to clamber out of sludge-blocked drains.

As cities grow bigger, the misery gets greater.

(It is obvious that
the more widespread and populous the civilisation,
the more widespread the waste, the pressure
and the stress, the impositions and the devastation.)

My contribution to the 'Abortion Issue'.

Think of abortion as sparing a foetus

the grinding awfulness

of being human...the continual consciousness

the shame...

A merciful release long before

the merciful release that death is

for those who have been born and lived

and had to answer to a name.

A note on the Hindu caste-system.

For a Brahmin it is unclean
to clean,
which less-clean, lesser folk must do.
Such is human rationality :
absurd, tortured and torturing.

Nice one!

 

Little Yellow Aeroplanes.

All the flights in the world yesterday,
as shown by Flightradar 24.

I'm not sure about the blue ones...private jets ?

Goodbye 'several'.

Rest in Peace.

I'm sorry that you have been replaced
by 'multiple', which I always thought
a noun, a mathematical term – as in
'four and two are multiples of eight.'

But I will not disown you;
I will stay faithful to 'many' or 'several'
which are now 'as caviar to the general'.

People who don't like Bandwagons

don't go anywhere.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jump-on-the-bandwagon.html

My 'Goodreads' review

of Memorial, by Bryan Washington,
which featured in an edition of BBC World Service's Bookclub:

The British Sunday Times described this bleak book as 'tender, wistful and profound'.  I found it shallow and brutal.  The first (totally banal and stupid) of three epigraphs warns the reader: "Everybody, everywhere, is always talking about the same shitty thing."

This book is "a shitty thing".  The fæcal word occurs several times on almost every page, which gets a bit trying.  The book implies that (half-)educated queer Americans say 'shit' and 'fuck' (not to mention 'motherfucker') all the time.  If this is the case, it tells us all we need to know about the American education system.

There is no difference in tone or voice between the two main characters.  They are in a totally mechanistic relationship, emotionally anæsthetised and solipsistic.  Their homosexuality is anti-sensual and of the wham-bam penetrative kind, which does no service to queerness – though, since Gay Liberation, it certainly appears to have become more brutal. 

I found it both depressing and trivial, and something of a slur against queer men; many of us are holosensual rather than brusquely sodomitic.

Mr Washington should read some Jodi Picoult to learn how to write well and impart empathy into his narrative and his characters, rather than trying pathetically to emulate the dehydrated William Burroughs

I am not surprised that I found this book in a 'Remaindered'. pile of its own at quarter-price.  I am much less surprised that it is an "American Best-seller", some of which seem to be churned out of some Writers' Factory (maybe in China!).

"It's surprising how cheerful one can be

when one gives up hope."

Terence Rattigan, Separate Tables, part II.

Food for thought.

Chloral hydrate
often called merely 'chloral'
was the first manufactured hypnotic drug
(after the opiate laudanum, often referred to
merely as 'my drops') which could be taken orally.

It was widely used by the middle and upper classes
in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods
– and in 'Mental Institutions' up to World War Two.

Like most such drugs it is addictive,
but, according to Wikipedia,
'left patients much more refreshed after a deep sleep
than more recently invented sedatives.'

Women's Football.

The European obsession
with organised, competitive
(semi-totalitarian) sports
spreads like a pandemic.