from
DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR
AGAINST THE WORLD
by
Anthony Weir
published 1996
THE BEAUTY OF PERFECTION IS
ITS IMPOSSIBILITY BUT ANYTHING
IS POSSIBLE TO THE IMAGINATION
So animal and so benign
the Tyger is my sentinel
my balm of blessedness
my vigilance
the fur most exquisite
in his underparts
his eyes night-centred suns.
In his uninhabitable place
he wears a cage
of soft-edged dashing stripes
a moving maze.
I wear my beast-face:
for his desire
I am a gracious
Minotaur.
IN OCCULTATION
On the Turin Shroud
Which it is claimed
Our Lord was wrapped in
And retains His image
His clasping hands eclipse
His cock and balls
In holiness think the faithful
For comfort in loneliness
The least of misfortunes
Say I who sleep thus
and wake in occultation.
CRINOPHILY
RUE DE LA PETITE TRUANDERIE
I would like a lover
who looks like my teddybear
who will ask me to do
what I want to do
and travel with me
to the inner and the outer.
As for sex
I have no preference -
but not many women look like my
teddybear,
though I saw a splendidly
hirsute lady in Paris.
MEAT AND MY MOTHER
My father Diogenes
who lived in a barrel
and barked like a dog
used to masturbate
in the marketplace.
He pissed like a dog
on offerings thrown to him:
meat
and my mother
whom he raped
like a butcher's knife
at a cynical
Christmas Party
giving her crab-lice
with his rushed sperm
and half a lifetime
of humble pretence.
AFTER THE SINKING
portrait of Padraic Fiacc
His daddy
fought bitterly
'for Ireland' - rarely
at home - usually
on the run.
His auntie
hoped a teddy
bear would keep him happy
or comfort him at any
rate - or at least keep him
quiet while she did what she
did for the cause
without a gun.
He pulled
the arms and legs off
and shat upon the mutilated plush.
He met his mother for the first time
on the boat to America.
Now he is a whining, published poet
and a lush.
As he hugs
me guiltily and almost tenderly
I tell him
Sex is only the tip of the iceberg.
HAPPINESS IS DESPAIR HAVING A
GOOD TIME
It is as true as rain
and wind
that mind
is pain
And knowledge
differentiated pain
And wisdom the sad gladness
of the immense
realisation
that it is insane
to look for sense
inside the brain
or outside sensation.
GRAND STYLE (TRUE STORY)
Millionaire
Gordon Bennett
bought a restaurant
on entering it
And before he left
he gave it to the waiter
as a tip.
EVERY MOMENT IS A MOMENT OF INSTRUCTION
I write on time's hem,
the brink of extinction,
the end ever nearer as leaders and led become madder
and fuller of power and products
None of us more than 10%
conscious and 9% rational, our species
the irrestistible error of crass evolution.
Is the mercy of dozens of hydrogen
bombs
more likely to cover the Planet of Pain
than the long, cruel whimper of famine
and drought, the ruthless
destruction even of air ?
Insanely
we think that Creation must live only through us -
but humility is our nearest approximation to sanity.
I write, before being hurled
from the brink of extinction, poems which just a few hundred beings
in all the uncaring cosmos will read:
the beginning of wisdom's the end of our world.
THE QUEST FOR CONVIVIALITY
Many people look for
happiness
[and some for
‘enlightenment’]
who don't know how to like
their best friend.
THE EMPTY HOUSE
We are always having and wanting to have
more than that we wanted to have
and had not - so always we do
in order to compensate for what
others did or did not do to or for us
And we have no peace to be
may never have been at all
living our lives without being
always blocking each other
making war on ourselves, each other,
the world
trying to blot out the wanting
by doing and having.
We all move in the same mad direction
away from ourselves, away from being
ourselves, being animals, being voyagers,
being.
The smell of my armpit is ocean
In it I can learn to be.
Unhappiness comes
Like sperm,
from the pursuit
of happiness and comfort.
Reality is just
a little crack
in the façade
And the façade is full of cracks.
Control
birth.
Combat
normality.
We are as sperm
swimming in
the rectum of reality.
Mind activates awareness
Insight transcends mind
Wisdom's a puddle, decease is catharsis
Men are honest only as they
wipe their arses.
Deep down
most of us
are desperately superficial.
How can we think our way out of problems
when our problems
arise from
the fact that we think?
(How do I fit the
square peg of my
self-importance into the round
hole of my sense of futility, renouncing
both sadness and self ?)
Time is god, is love
is sightless, dumb
creates. destroys
and tells us only
that we are noise.
TO MY FAVOURITE DOG
(before Oscar
came into my life)
Poetic ideas
ferment in our eyes
congeal in our dicks.
You whisper sensual stanzas
into my ear.
Poems are bad
translations of licks.
Love
is Soup Dream,
Life
is Dream Soup;
Wine
is the love in
the tortured vine
and art
first pressings of the hardened heart;
Enlightenment
is really knowing
who you really are:
an animal with pretensions.
TANTRA-MANTRA
Once you have understanding
throw that understanding away
and look for a new one,
like breath after breath,
for having is clinging.
True happiness comes
when you no longer hold on to happiness:
for the spirit needs desolation
as much as the body needs death.
THE GREAT ATTRACTOR
Only 10% of the total
mass
of the once-expanding
now-contracting Universe
is matter. The rest
remains ineffable, in occultation.
As each of us crawls helplessly
back and forth between our ears,
on a planet spinning on its axis
and revolving round a sun revolving
in a galaxy which hurtles at six hundred
kilometres per second to the black holes of
the Great Ineffable Attractor,
we think we are important
and live as if we were immortal.
And we predict that the duration of the Cosmos
will be another 15 to 20 billion years.
SUPPOSE ANYTHING, BELIEVE NOTHING
If men could only feel
their cocks were feminine
and reality as just a crack
the world could almost be
the paradise it was.
THE MOTTO OF CAPITALISM: ENOUGH IS NOT ENOUGH
The animal garden
Is now a murder-hole.
Language was always the Labyrinth.
Civilisation is striving, spurning
starving, burning
mass graves and marble tombs,
wonderful wine and no-one to drink it with
but the Black Riders
the achievers, civilised dealers
in death, machine-mad
half-controlling the machine.
They are the forms of desire
(suppression of grace and soul-breath)
stencils of men,
power-bleak, power-black
teeth in the maw
of perpetual war
against Nature and grace
as the planet of pain and vainglory
hurtles through space.
MIDNIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS OF AWARENESS
Wisdom is the road to wisdom
The dust upon the road is love
The road is made of dust
Is unimaginably short
Wisdom unimaginably brief
Deep upon the road love lies
Burying the corpses of the almost-wise.
On the edge
between pettiness and glory
I walk in sleep
surrounded by
the unknowable on the unknown
boundary beyond which all is radiant
dark
and I not yet
a selfconsuming spark.
A PATH IN LAKE WATERS
Between the sleeping and the dreaming
Lie the landing and the boat
Between strange and stranger shore
A timeless lake
A floating door
A ferryman
The ancient guide
Manifest dream-master
Mythic ithyphallic bride
I am the dismembered masker
Orpheus come like ore
In the dazzling dark
The teeming maze of the mine
To drink the piss of the Minotaur
Though dreams like myths and stems entwine
We dream apart
Each drowning as we grasp the door
Abstract as thresholds
Scattered in the silent roar
HAPPINESS IS THE PROMISE OF BEAUTY
Farouche
Mr Pussy
the pansy painter
cuddled and kissed
a lion-tamer
who never had cuddled
a man before
but wrote his
address on a
cubicle-door
AS A DREAM OF A NIGHT VISION
Because I look from outside in
I seem to come to life through burglary.
Puppet deliberately tangling my strings
so as to have to cut them,
I might thus fall from
rôle not to reality but grace
belongingness beyond longing
affinity beyond sex
conviviality beyond consumingness
of fire where spiders burn
and webs transmute to puppet-strings.
Because I take and take to things
things which I make magically
execute me
and I am only questioning and doubt
looking ineluctably from outside out.
TOUCHING BOTTOM
In the silence of eventless
solitary days lurks wisdom
somewhere. I am waiting in the muddle
of waiting for wisdom
for illumination like a turnip-lantern
for the ghost of an answer
to the unanswerable riddle
Waiting for my lover
dark enfolding infinitely-gentle
Brother Death
The great cuddler
The great cuddle
At the last breath.
Where KILL is more acceptable
a word
than FUCK
people force their children to accept
unhappiness as a treatable condition.
HERE NOW, IN THE JUNKYARD
OF REALITY
The smell of death
is a lover's smell:
unchaste, alone,
I'm perfumed by
magnificent disgraces.
When day is strange dream
Divided by night
It’s time to extinguish the light
And dance in the odorous places.
THEY SAID THEY WOULD LEAD US TO GOD
BUT THEIR TERRIBLE GOD WAS MONEY
Soul resides in hair
and fur and feather
scale and leaf and earth.
Soul is part of sap and rock
and blood and turds and weather.
Soul inhabits empty spaces -
not brains nor hearts
nor tongues nor mouths
nor eyes nor faces.
Soul resides in fur and bushy places.
CULTURE IS THE VULTURE
THAT RIPS APART THE HEART
Every day that passes
I spurn the social classes
more and more and more.
I never lock my door.
EK STASIS
In the soulzone
Conscious in the
Ancient armpit
Of the Unconscious
At every moment
At the beginning
And the end of time
All that matters
Is awareness
That nothing matters
And fulfilment is
To fall apart.
It is quite difficult
to like human
beings
when you're quite sure
that you don't like being
human.
Nothing is as difficult
as not deceiving yourself." - Wittgenstein
In Siena
On Tuesday
I stole Panforte, postcards & calendars
ate too much ice-cream
and strolled to the Asylum
where I saw marvellous ceramics,
and, after modestly mentioning
my disabilities,
was invited to come and make
permanent use of the splendid facilities.
CONFESSION OF A FAILED ABORTION
In the absurd
eventuality of re-incarnation
I should be desirous
of returning as a bower-bird
or a retrovirus.
I am open
like a wound
that smiles
and kisses with
its tender edges
knives & rags
and flies & thorny hedges.
RENOUNCING SELF-IMPORTANCE
There are no good guys.
Beggars
and paraplegics
are
the
only
heroes.
TO AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
I
mourn in anger the fall
of Lucifer
who was the first political
prisoner.
All this mess
is made by prisoners
of consciousness.
BEACHED
The sea constantly
ceaselessly conjugates
the verb to murmur
sometimes very loudly
sometimes so quietly
that it's barely a rumour
And the white juices
flow
from black forces
below
and it conjugates to murmur
lovingly and cold
cold and passionate
violent and cold
So we are told
who only dream the sea
desiring it dreamingly
seeming to be awake
and just out of reach
on the small fragile beach
where the shadows flap and shake.
IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO FIND
THE REAL THING
I had a friend
who had a friend
who had a stone
for a friend,
for a teacher:
a master
of silence.
THE WELSH WORD FOR ENGLAND IS 'LAND THAT WE LOST'
More beautiful
than a beautiful thing
is the ruin
of a beautiful thing.
The most beautiful thing
is
not to have been born
and, having been born
and reborn, death
is the only decent thing.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Gertrude Stein wrote
mantras
delicately. Rude mantras wrote
refined Gert Stein.
Miss Mantras was the thing itself,
the liberty of thing
ringing in oblique observation
like mad. Mansanity
of selfaplomb and whimassured
and dedication to the liverty of word
released from mantrashliterality of consonants and vowels:
speech is cruelty to wise silenciousness.
Splendid right unto her bowels
divinely mooing sticky tantras
Gertrude Stein wrote spunky mantras
quite a lot -
as I cannot.
« MORCEAU
DE NAPOLÉON »
Ventôse 1990
"Who dares to speak of
'98 ?"
Napoleon had very tiny private
parts, hacked off, apparently, post mortem,
sold to a Canadian for £18,000
a little while ago.
His mistresses were just for show.
Had the Irish
(whom he failed to liberate)
known this, they might
have placed their trust in -
pointed in dance
around -
their 1800 phallic stones
and not upon the impotent and upstart
Emperor of France*.
*The reports on Napoleon's life and death on
St Helena are still a British State Secret.
Death is The Second Coming
Words are
the darkness speaking as light
pretending that comfort
is other than night.
ANTIFAME
The man who invented Négritude
became a very cultured and urbane African dictator.
I, who have (alongwith the title
of this poem)
just invented Dissentitude
to describe my attitude of utterly-dissenting self-effacement
am (and will remain) completely unknown
except to my computer, my non-sexual partner, my few friends
and my murdered dog.
To
be human is to imagine, then create, problems.
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