LATEST POEMS

Moralists are hypocrites!
(I know, because a moralist am I.)
Religions are more or less
the same concoction.
Truth is the weirdest kind of lie.

THE DAILY POEM
dedicated to PoemHunter.com

What I thought today
was How fine and fit and fun I felt
in splendid, silent, rural isolation.
This glorious banality was all
that I could find to say.

FROM A HISTORY OF CANNIBALISM

When protestant king Henry of Navarre
laid siege to catholic Paris
to gain his throne
as king of France

(this was in 1588)

the starving dug up cemetery bones
to grind into false flour
to make fake bread
which of course could never rise

And a widow of the lesser
aristocracy
whose children died of hunger
roasted their skinny little bodies
and eked them out
over the following fortnight
and eking, eating, sobbed.

Twenty-two years later
the man who murdered the now catholic
and popular king Henri IV
was scalded and then ripped to pieces
some of which were eaten
by unknowns of a Paris mob.

In 1717 a girl was roasted on a spit
in the faubourg Saint-Marceau.
The spit went through her head.

Armies and mobs
are the entertainment
of the evil.
Every army - every human
- is edible
alive or dead.

GREEN
THE ECOCRITES

What follows is too much like prose
but here's how I wrote it:

It's not the use of one kind of lightbulb over another
(one that no longer makes money for the manufacturers and retailers)
and not the use of machines that are trashing the earth
polluting the air
so much as the exploitation for exploitation's self-aggrandising sake
of animals
- the destruction of forests and bleak monocultures to feed them;
the acquired addiction to meat.

Bottle-banks, taxes on air-travel, recycling-plants
are cynical ploys to ease the infantile consciences
that our comfort and greed allow us to keep.
Our capacity to reason is early on
put to sleep
(this is what education and upbringing seem to be bent on)
and is replaced by childish addiction to optimism.

So, unwilling to see what we're doing,
unable to think much beyond immediate crises,
as the sky becomes more and more like Baudelaire's cauldron,
we refuse to admit that the only possible way
to even start to "be green" and reduce our "carbon footprint"
is to stop having children.

BACK IN BED

When I rang The Speaking Clock
I didn't get a shock
on hearing "Time is only
part of you that's dead."

GLOSS ON THE NINTH ELEGY

of RAINER-MARIA RILKE

My invisible other - true friend, Zoti Lamort,
unknowable, ever-present, everywhere
like a vast four-dimensional carpet,
asks me silently why I have to be,
why I, shunning destiny, laden down
with my great gift of sorrow, have to be ?
Not because there is a possibility
of happiness! No, the idea of personal
happiness (and the hunter's pursuit) is the most
vain, destructive and self-destroying of concepts
strangling Earth and us with false urgency.

Not that I feel a duty to life the dictatorship, cosmic
catastrophe. Here in my chamber of raw
understanding, wrestling the language of
unutterability, I feel only too-muchness of being
and being one of hundreds of millions too many.
I'm always thinking of leaving both the state
and the chamber - and I'm rooted by both.

Not that we make ourselves happy by torturing
wiping out, exploiting, rounding up animals -
no, increasingly we - the endangering species -
herd and exploit each other, breed
young to disable in schools, denounce any sign
of spontaneous joy in each other.
No, we seem to hate happiness.

Who, if offered the choice, could possibly want us,
who confront everything with our words and our swords and, far worse, hypocrisy -
every one of us the enemy of everything
- all creatures guiltless but us
in the power of our shamelessness ?
And we just once, like lightning or meteor
striking all other dimensions, and each of us once,
but so many millions, mirror-struck, striking
down everything sane and appropriate.

Dogs know that we live noisy irrational lives,
full of patterns and habits and unthinkingness.
The weight of our being's so gross that we are quite unaware of it – but the world is increasingly crushed
and squashed and dried up by us - like a prune
swarming with maggots - and we are here only to say: Home, Tower, Power, Ambition and Threshold.

More than ever subtlety falls away, connection
with Life driven out and replaced by the whimpering
urgency of things and stupidly urging,
hammering images. Happiness! Love! Success!
Driving ourselves to achievement, there is no-one
to praise us but Advertising,
for God was appalled when alive. The Angels are all bred for bacon and organs and sperm.
Praise the world to an Angel, and he squeals
keeps on squealing in agony.

The twist, the torque in our brains that caused language
caused badness and sadness and madness unique among beasts.

I feel too much, aware of the pain, and, novice, helplessly immature, can only breathe suffering out, cannot transmute it to anything like ‘beatitude’.
Joy is only the briefest suppression of pain.
Even my anguish is mere manufacture.
How to reduce the words that pass for awareness ?

Writing cannot be serious when all human culture’s
suppression of feeling in ruthless pursuit
of bizarre puffings-up of the trivial,
just as religions are for the anti-spiritual
to justify their badly-faked selves by,
and science is merely tearing wings off flies
to grow supremely grotesque on Buchenwald pigs.
Yes, even my anguish is mere manufacture!

No lie is big enough ever to justify us,
who could be poems if only...

We are drowning in anecdote!

In Siberia people once lived who knew seven genders and never built megalith-cells for the dead
or dead calculations for dying.
I almost live. Disturbingly, on this planet of pain
and part of the holocaust, I feel fairly contented, almost fulfilled!
Might never have known...
But there's the constant awareness
that I can neither transmute nor ignore.
And everything shrivels, and only the shame
dribbles out of, dries up in my heart.

AFGHANISTAN
2006

Eat in the South
and the Russians sweep in from the North
Drink in the North
and the Taliban come from the South
Piss in the East
and the Yanks fly in from the West
Shit in the West
and the Chinese come selling
flip-flops and computers

WHAT SILENCE MIGHT HAVE SAID TO SPEECH

Listening to the sperm die in my scrotum
and to the shedding of dead skin,
to the thickening of my blood
as I live out my minor malady of living
I reflect
that none is more suspect
than those who teach,
that to be single, solitary, is far
from being a punishment or prison,
far even from being a limitation,
but an accomplishment - a prestidigitation.
And sex is as over-rated as a beach.

A headless chicken.
Red herring in a cul-de-sac.
"When push comes to shove" -
as they so prettily say - we are all alone,
if only because we are afraid of loneliness.
Fear of solitude puts us in solitary cages
within cages. (And is it really worse to be inside
a gaol of circumstance rather than a prison
of ambition or desiring, loyalty or fear or obligation ?)

Jesus was startlingly alone,
beyond all caring.
His friends and followers abandoned him
then perverted what he taught, cooked up
a childish pseudo-history.
There is no such thing as sharing.

Slow-witted is not the same as dim-
witted. Half of wisdom is humility.
Half of the other half is poverty.
The anchorites and hermits were right
about the wisest way to live -
but why doll up their truth
in mumbo-jumbo for the collective dim -
virgin births, bodhisattvas, and translations
from Jerusalem to Paradise ?

Wisdom may be counter-evolutionary, worthless,
but only the solitary cynics can be wise.

APOTHEGM

After moving pictures
were invented
we all became
the walking dead.

ART IS NOT STUFF, BUT HOW YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE

I celebrate
The lovely fugs or fungal smells of unaired rooms
Delicious whiffs of garlic sweat I used to get
in Paris buses
Old books, wet dogs and steaming horses
(and their steaming piss)
Old ladies in old taffeta
Haylofts, rotting bananas
Sheep-wool gathered from barbed-wire
Undeodorised lovers' armpits
The sludgy must in cider-presses
Old leather trousers
Fresh quinces
Ear-wax (whose smell my dog loved too)
Melianthus major and Clerodendron fargesii:
the odour of old pharmacies
Fresh tar or asphalt
Fragrance of chrysanthemums
Foreskins unwashed for a day or two
Attics where forgotten pears have shrivelled
The faintly camel-smell of Balouch rugs
Compost-heaps, the drains of old hotels
Cigars smoked or unsmoked
Sour milk, blackcurrant leaves
Burning marijuana or peat
Freshly-dug and rained-on loam
and my unwrapped, sweet
yet-to-be-recently-dead body underneath.

(Loved and unbeloved all trudge
into death's disputed sludge.)

ENOUGH IS NOT ENOUGH

Capitalism: the cunning
fleecing the stupefied.

And we all smile
we smile
and we all smile
forced smiles
inconsolably.

AND ARE WE REALLY MORE ALIVE
THAN THE MACHINES WHICH ARE OUR ONLY PROGRESS ?

John Stuart Mill
and others believed in
The Perfectibility of Man.
But the last thing humans
want to do is perfect themselves -
indeed their civilisations ban it
so we can get on with our business
of wrecking the planet.

CONSCIOUSNESS MAKES COWARDS OF US ALL

With human reason came irrational
flight from reason to religion and belief
(false linking of effects and their imagined
causes) - and cowardice.
Rats are not afraid of us
who are a hundred times their size
and can kill them a dozen different
dreadful ways - as we can also kill
each other, or at the very least give
one another most appalling grief.

TOMORROW'S WORLD

When the oil runs out
human genius might
(but probably will not)
be able to tap into an old and trite
and miraculously-inexhaustible
source of energy at last made
planet-friendly: human spite.

SENILITY

You invented
the World
because
you forgot
you were
God
when you became
Peeping Tom.

A PORTRAIT OF THE WEEPING MADONNA

Weeping is better than talking.
This is the Instrument of Love defined.
This is the Vessel of the Virgin Birth.
A woman weeping for mankind:
One painted tear is all we're worth.

MIASMA OF A ROTTING GOD

To breed
is to eat the dead flesh of the innocent within
and ghost-live through the child that's made
from mystic incapacity
and moral void.
Stupidity is faster than wisdom.
Sterilised, I am merely a lesser,
happier infection.
Everything I want to celebrate
is threatened or destroyed.

<< BACK

DRAFTS, FRAGMENTS,
REJECTS & JOTTINGS

Anthony Weir

bearing witness to the nothing that is being

HOW WONDERFUL IT WOULD BE
TO LIBERATE EUROPE AND THE U.S.A.

Freedom of speech for the religiously wicked
Freedom of thought for the garrulous dead
Democracy for the greedy,
the smug and the obscenely overfed.

I WRITE A POEM MAGNETIC

composed using a refrigerator magnet kit
without punctuation

The young romantic heart felt true as
pleasure some lovely river singing once
though any lip must beg for gift of skin
every deep dark moon

Voices drink from bloodwhisper
almost soak or burn so slow
to die devoured

I blush in sweeter hunger
am eye aroma ocean candle
dinner sod
away from which my dance of life is over

Come celebrate the glistening creature
as each pure torrent touches
the pale petal magnificent as
morning perfume blows soul not self

But listen secret sensuous wild inspired explorer
a thousand sunwaves boil
exult eternally

Never sacred liquid naked as fresh wine
would touch cup kiss flame and cover hand
and long for love and light
for air fire god

I could always taste time missed withal
my head hard rose feels
my pitmind flower
open broken
haunt that live red star of ache
clutching the unsurrounded universe

I remember the dear hairy man
warm beautiful nectar drunk
soft blaze of cuddle joy
I kissed him and all angels

but
can nothing
good soon
come

"NOTHING IS AS DIFFICULT AS NOT DECEIVING YOURSELF"
- Wittgenstein

The animals are too good for us:
under the dead moon
we are beyond the Pale of evolution
and of revelation;
we go mad when we see the truth too soon.

GLOBAL WARMING

The larger the species
the smaller the numbers:
this was a natural law
until we came along.

According to that natural law
we are now at least ten thousand
times too numerous, devouring nature
in our addictive greed and through
our greedy cerebration
like there's no tomorrow.

Sorrow is my kind of celebration.

LOVE AND LONELINESS

Words are on the surface.
The more words there are
the more we can describe only the surface.
Depth is silent, wisdom profoundly silent
like the sap of trees.
Words buzz on the raging surface
of man's cacophonous experience
like poisoned bees.

We do not connect with the always-connecting animals,
nor can we connect with the things we worship.
The paltry best we can achieve in the panic of our words
is to connect with the idea of connectedness
imagining that we are parts returning to a whole.

Desire is the destruction of the world,
love another stratagem of control.

DOORS OF ESTRANGEMENT
(a song for the ghost of Jacques Brel)

When you're strange
the glamour
of the world is
always out of range.
You stammer.

People who are feared
are never free from fear,
go very soon insane.
All of us are losers
in a world hijacked by gain.

When you're strange
the douceur of the world
is always
out of range.

Our minds are dirty cages
crammed with beasts in pain.

When you're strange you bite
the barbed-wire of your brain.

Hair-dye
and lipstick:

one is a lie
the other a slick
cheap trick.

FUNDAMENTALS

There is an Islamic saying:
"When a dog barks, angels flee"
- which does not say much for angels
or their inventors.
Nor can one pray where a dog has been.

As Oscar (who never barks
and never licks anyone but himself) lies on
a beautiful Balouchi prayer-mat
waiting to go and run
among the sycamores and cedars,
I consider how comparatively tolerant I am
even to talk to carnivores and breeders.

THE WIDTH OF EMPTINESS

The Roman poet (Horace) said
a poet should tell the truth with wit and humour.

But nobody's really interested in truth

and with all that has been said and done
truth is not a lot of fun.

"...good people do a great deal of harm in this world."
- Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

The lone, stunted tree
on the long, dreary street
is not pathetic
- but glorious.

TO THE POLITICIANS, UNSPEAKABLE

So why did you not call for
Three Minutes' Silence
for the raped of Rwanda
the butchered of the Congo
or the incinerated of VietNam ?

GETTING OLDER
(Life is such a deadening experience)
March 2004 - September 2006

The twilight of life
seeps like bad poems
through the cracks of our failure
the downfall and darkness that we
call culture, humanity - ruins of being
through which only lamentation can pass.
Grief is the window beyond all walking
and soon the talking will turn
to spittle
and cease
and all worldliness
and world-as-lie.

Writing my poor, bleak
poems which nobody reads
(not even I)
is every bit as vain as
worshipping an infantile
dream in the sky.

Death is possessiveness.
From the heights
of despairing there's no descent.
I can hardly inspire.
Each breath is a stupefied sigh.
The destructiveness of Man
is the banal frivolity of Why.

What I write is not so much mission
as witness that the beginning of terror
is not so much beauty
as mind.
And isolation - floating
with butterflies in the stomach
above the abyss of stupidity -
is not so much loneliness as loss
of what never was but cry...

GUAYCURÚ

No word for 'must' or 'have to'
No ownership
or punishment
and no incarceration
for any creature
nor art nor manufacture
which are blasphemy
as terrible as man's proliferation

And no name that does not change
and no name to a face
No kingdoms of regret
nor republics of sleep
nor ministries of sickness,
theft and lies and death

No shame in stifling a starving child
nor stopping an old man's breath.

Where 'human life is sacred' millions die in war and genocide
and the rich get richer
and the world becomes the wilderness
the hypocrites and warring rich call peace

and I am dream
and sex is just as
infantile as religion

and human soul is nothing but
the human wilderness within

(Human, all too human)

Life is just another word for pain,
and deadening.

ZAÏREASTER POEM

Three million people died in the recent
Congolese wars, but no-one around here
or indeed in most of the armed-to-the-teeth world
seems to know or to care
(just like Rwanda)

though they are outraged when I suggest
that nobody important was crucified in Judæa that week.
Jesus, immured by a disappointed Peter
became even more cadaverous
before he was taken out to be disposed of
as my neighbour would dearly love to dispose of me.

Language is our existential prison

Doctors will do all sorts of shocking things to a person
for glory and money or just for the hell of it or out of 'duty'
They will irradiate you, put electricity through your brain
give you terrible drugs, remove parts of you
and rip out the organs of animals
to put into you - but for no money will they rid you of words
not even by simple lobotomy.

Trapped in their horrible system
they'd rather confine you to their medical prisons
than help you escape the prison of words
whose walls are like waves through which none
can pass into wisdom.

[Optimism = infantilism, voluntary blindness born of words/language]

THE UNGRATEFUL LIVING

Either we are alone
in the Universe/our brains
or we are not.
Both situations are profound cause for profound thought

by the only stupid animal
the only celebrating animal.

Our rarest attribute is honesty.

All descended out of Africa
from a Hottentottish Eve
we are terribly inbred and, until our end,
there will be no end to our diseases.
We golden codgers who melt the world
are melted only by sentiment and loss.
Every human was - is - deadly,
even Gandhi, even Jesus.

For consciousness is more than we can bear
and all our games, drugs, gadgets are failed escapes.
Art, religion, money, war, marriage, laws, progress,
nationality are attempts to squash it
into something we can manage.

So we confabulate ourselves into moral
and cerebral virgins: barbed hymens guard our brains
to stop us understanding just what we are:
the only stupid animals
(always celebrating our stupidity)

who, with our machinations and machines
remake ourselves as robots of desire.

Being hyper-autonomous
I am acutely aware that I am not person but process
- and yet also an island accessible only at the highest tide.

The self-invented, self-enhancing soul is only self
is only consciousness: continual neural, virtual masturbation
- or perhaps a deadly virus
strangely untraceable in its location.

The Chinese Emperor
who built the Great Wall
had everything that was wrought or written before his reign
smashed upon his pavement or consumed by flame
so that he would be thought
the only source of civilisation.

Thomas Jefferson recommended to the State of Virginia that 'sodomitical women'
should have the cartilage of their noses pierced with half-inch holes
as punishment.

_________________________

The Eighth Deadly Sin: to be alive.

_________________________

GOD AND ETERNITY ARE FRACTIONS OF NOTHING
21st April 2003

The most dangerous animal
is an animal that's scared.
Civilisation makes sure that
most humans are mostly fearful -
which is why there is no such thing
as power for good.

The swallows arrived today.
Flitting, swooping, chittering,
each weighs no more than a letter
and, feeding, feeding, flies each year
from Ireland to South Africa - and back.

You'd think that
the only superstitious, the only
worshipping animal

would worship swallows
or Arctic terns who fly from pole to pole,
instead of a foreskin-collector in the sky -

would celebrate superhuman
swallows instead of 'human spirit',
'human courage', 'human heroism'
and other sickening, self-congratulating
humbug !

GLAD THAT I CAN NEVER KNOW
EVEN MY FATHER'S NAME

"The more conscious we are, the more mechanical we become."
- John Gray, in STRAW DOGS

We have no Own Beyond
(consciousness of consciousness is only words)
so death, and life outside our consciousness
are such a problem for us
(the only accusing, the only stupid animals -
the only contemptuous, therefore the only contemptible of beasts)
that we lie to ourselves all the time about everything.

We lie to ourselves that people like people, really,
deny the astounding evidence (lest we're struck dumb
by admission) that there is no limit
to the contempt in which civilised people hold one another -
while the animals forgive us our unforgivingness
right up to their extinction.

Blinded by dreams and crippled by freedom
apparent or fetish, science and progress also are
religious dream and delusion - and not only because
they are hopelessly ranged with or against
the Christian delusion, the Christian denial
that the only salvation is acceptance that there is no salvation.

The only knowledge is that there is no truth.
The only truth is that there is no human wisdom.
The only human wisdom is that there is no hope
(the worst evil in Pandora's Box).
The only hope is our extinction.

If there was ever god, he died of shame.
If there is one, he, she or it is utterly shameless,
despicable Dionysapollomoses
Madness is also believing that you are not -
or are - mad - for belief is madness, denial of facts
(though facts are no more 'truth' than belief is).

Here in this culture soaked in selling and sex
we fancy we're free, masters of world and our fate
and not slaves of accident, roll of Darwinian dice,
Sixth Extinction, rapacious destroyers of all life and mystery,
crowing aloof, internecine, over poison and squalor
and world made only of money and trash that money
turns everything into - here in this unstoppable sink,
where, swamped with and stifled by information
almost nobody knows how to think.

A mythical soul is no substitute for a tail.

MORE JOTTINGS

Ephemerica rules the planet of the dead.

In French the words 'auteur' and 'hauteur' are indistinguishably pronounced.

Depressed people do not kill themselves - because they simply haven't the energy/motivation.

Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Hippocrates,
Æschylus, Demosthenes, Xenophon, Archimedes.
Pædophiles are now beardless.

Fuel prices go up in the forecourts
They are forging the weapons of spite
Brecht in Hell! - let it all start crumbling
- preferably tonight!

Blog

_______________________________________________

OLD WORK IN PROGRESS - CUT AND RE-ASSEMBLED
AND NEITHER FINISHED NOR TRASHED
_______________________________________________

Though quietude à deux and sharing,
food and wine and music, plants and stones
are the best of pleasures,
solitude is the most
delicious, least of sorrows.

Uniquely, what Man puts into life
is Death - while seeing his 'soul' as sanctum
and not slaughterhouse.

Trapped in our private catastophes of comfort
we only seem to live:
comfort, even more than consciousness,
makes criminals of us all.

...hovering like pale moths between madness and sanity.
Madness is what fashion-doctors say it is;
sanity: what business makes us buy;
consciousness: the madness of not being
but wanting to be: new rot in new wood.
We are no more alive
than the machines that are our only progress.

The only problems are human - and
the human problem is the problem of scale.
The outer darkness is much more inviting
than the inner one. What people call
'the miracle of life' is really the malignance of existence,
a very expensive and consuming hotel.

Why should we need reasons for suicide
when life for those whose consciences are open
is the only Hell ?

"In cold blood" - the cold blood of war and punishment
and especially punishment of hot-blooded acts.

Artifice and ruin,
structures of deceit and self-deception,
are the processes of civilisation...and things decay
because the Universe is expanding. When it
eventually starts to collapse
time may run backwards - and will we resurrect
and return to wombs, to seed, to ponds
to everything reducing into nothing
absolute nothing
which is what we fear death might be ?

Religion's tissue is refusal to confront reality
- which places us lower than all other animals.
Religion (which is blasphemy) is just another
great fault in our horribly faulty design

The only problems are human - and
the human problem is the problem of scale.

THE DONKEY-MILL

Madness is what fashion-doctors say it is.
Sanity is what business makes us buy.
Life has become the madness of not being
but wanting to be: new rot in new wood.

Because sanity has made us suppress
the primordial in us
and wipe out as much of the natural
as our mad technology is able to, I lie
like everyone else on the terrible edge of the clothed machine,
half-strangled by Ariadne's thread, watching the donkey
walk round and round, all day, every day for her whole life
to feed the arrogance and shamelessness
that come when the primordial goes.

Donkeys have trodden mills for thousands of years.
There are no memorials for the millions of horses
that died in the First World War - for the propagation
of madness. We are no more alive
than the machines that are our only progress,
and we even think we are more free
than corn milled by the donkey in her misery.