The terror of error
The error of terror
The terror of seeing
The error of being
Most
days I write down at least one poem or idea:
a complaint somewhere between a runny nose and diarrha.
Friends
are those who ask you
how you are
only when they really
want to know.
Experiences
are comparable
but scarcely communicable -
which is why we hear so little about
digging up corpses.
My corpses lie heavy, won't start to rot
until I become corpse through the magic of Death.
So I have to dig into them, through them,
deeper and deeper, scanning their faint
but plausible faces, as I shovel and shove them aside
to reach the rock underneath
where there is nothing to hide.
After
birth by misadventure
the primly rosy path of progress
to magisterial, unimaginable entropy.
Meanwhile, as
our toe-nails grow,
the Atlantic Ocean slowly widens.
Clothed, we are
only clothes.
'Life is a
gift'
like an exploding parcel.
The problem is
how to defuse it.
"The Fall
of Man" -
Was it when
Adam and Eve
mentioned property-rights
and gave God the first
of many horrible frights
and he had to tell them to leave ?
DATES, FATES
AND STATES
On the seventieth
anniversary
of my untimely birth I reflect on
those poor "White Trash",
ghetto "Negroes", homeless Hispanics,
Filipina slaves, and others of the
Necessary Underclass
who died in squalor, pain and misery
on the eleventh of September
in the two thousand and first year
of the Common or "Christian Era"
(or Papal Caliphate)
- and whose deaths were hardly noticed by
a heartless, mechanistic nation-state.
If you really
want to 'grow in spirit'
you will have to go beyond
obedience and deference.
Your strong moral structure, transcending
mere normality, will transgress
both law and custom.
Sensuality can be more teacher
than diversion.
You may need sometimes to be destructive -
for half the ancient edifice will have to be pulled down.
Thus you will attain a measure of integrity.
TRAUENLIED
Metal in mists
of blood, mankind,
tree-stumps and stubble burnt,
time maggoty out of thoughtless mind,
shameless attrition in outraged eyes -
even the worms are poisoned,
and aliens - or pornography,
or history or Darwin - are to blame.
How futile are
the prophecies!
SCARECROW ON
THE GOLDEN HORN
I have been born
and borne too many times already.
I would like to think
that my
last mother also felt this
when she tried to rid her womb of me, but only thrice...
Alas for her -
she could not rid me from her heart!
I don't 'believe
in' re-incarnation,
or in anything - because I have lived too many
tiring lives, and not sufficiently apart,
known far too poorly
too many people, and too little (and too much),
and felt too much, too long,
died too often and impermanently -
for eternity's an idiot artifice.
'A toad can
die of light!' Perhaps
my little coming death will be the last.
In the essence
and the end, Dharma is no more than function in trite
institutions of corruption,
and Yog is just the yoke of everyone's involvement
in horrors yet
to come, and passing, and long past.
this poem is a homage to William Butler
Yeats, specifically, SAILING TO BYZANTIUM.
ON GLANCING
THROUGH E.M. CIORAN'S SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY
Art seems incapable
of doubt - thus worthless.
Decay is the fulness.
So grief is replaced
by idea, by word,
by insipid obsessions like function
and progress, rebirth,
or Just
Being Useful:
directing our void over Earth.
False absolutes
wearing gold braid
stride on in parade to the graveyard
of slick definitions and concepts: 'O Rose, thou art sick!'
Dust to dust,
we lie, we sneer, we cajole,
we topple like towers into prayer,
rise up, immure ourselves in castles of disgust.
Answers are so
often questions inverted
(and so much is interchangeable:
evil and goodness, theft and property,
water and rust, purity and bile)
but questions delay the decay for a while.
Behold! twin sisters
of Jesus, of Buddha;
miasma of failure.
The sick rose feeds the worm,
and its golden seeds encased in avian shit
sprout from the aggressive
myth-mouth
of misery,
heart-stopping untruth of wealth.
Love is the worship
of the street;
honesty is half-regained by stealth.
We are long since obsolete.
After you have
burned down the ugly,
arrogant hospitals for their disgraceful
defiance of fate, go burn down vainglorious
museums and pompous art-galleries
for their glorification of goods -
and burn down the schools who feed museums
and hospitals and smug universities
- all of the self- and co-serving structures. Destroy
everything that Man (but mostly man-slaves)
erected, for the best of Man is his ruins.
O that we had built nothing, and that
nothing survived but what
we did not make: our caves!
plagioPALINSESTO
:
ÀS VEZES
TENHO IDEIAS FELIZES
Wer, wenn ich
schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen ? presagio desatándose
en lenta destrucción de ángeles -
Engel nicht, Menschen nicht, Ordnungen nicht
(louco, sim louco porque
die findigen Tiere merken es schon
daß wir nicht sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind
in der gedeuteten Welt)
lo sentimos hermoso
pero sombra,
la noche sucia, la señal como saludo -
sólo premonición,
Geschlechtsteil
des Gelds,
los cuerpos,
la cópula cayéndose a pedazos
den wir, wo wir
fühlen, verfüchtigen.
(with acknowledgement to Fernando Pessoa,
Rainer Maria Rilke & Homero Aridjis)
...NEC MINUS
SOLUM QUAM CUM SOLUS*
"Solitary
trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."
-
George Gordon Noël, Lord Byron Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 33)
Since I prefer
good prose
to mediocre, syllabus-poetry
I read Kate Atkinson,
not Séamus Heaney.
This puts me in
the
Outer Ring of Outcasts:
those who despise
celebrity, its pawns,
love scrubland,
loathe lawns.
And, being an
egregious
solitary, preferring dogs,
I know no literati,
no literary agent, no queens or cogs
of the little cocktail-and-performance
poetry- and literary-
festival industry,
don't go out for evenings,
attend no awful readings
consisting mainly of mutterings
and embarrassed pauses
but compose compulsively
a bold and bald variety of poetry
unacceptable to the
anecdotalists who rule
AngloSaxon Poesy
with its ever-present participles
and detailed, dependent clauses.
So I'll get no
ingratiating letter
from Austin, Texas - nor even
from the University of Disheartening
Ulster; so I won't
be tempted to venality,
but continue to shoplift food
(and get caught),
living frugally (washing little,
boiling water in a kettle
on the fire)
on militarist-state welfare handouts
as I've done since I was 24.
* Never less lonely than when alone -
a much-quoted phrase from Cicero.
We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves
in order to be like everyone else.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
SOME PREVIOUS MAXIMS:
Dogs
are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy
or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is
to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
- Milan Kundera
Honour
does not need to be won - it needs only not to be lost.
A
man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
-
Arthur Schopenhauer
Man
is the deranged animal, the laughing animal, the aggrieved
animal,
the complaining animal, the vengeful animal,
the weeping animal, the jeering animal,
the unhappy animal, the destroying animal,
the addictive, the life-denying,
the antibiotic animal.
A
mind
enclosed by language is in prison. - Simone Weil
Consistency is the curse of understanding.
Quietude,
which some men cannot abide because it reveals
their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise. - Charles H. Spurgeon (English Christian preacher,
1834-1892)
It
seems to me that nearly 99% of poetry is false.
But maybe high-falutin falsehood is the point of poetry ?
To
want friendship is a great fault.
Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy,
like the joys afforded by art or life. - Simone Weil
I'd
rather be Ireland's unknown McGonagall
than that island's latest Nobel laureate.
The
world is getting to be such a dangerous place,
a man is lucky to get out of it alive. - W.C. Fields
Opprobrium
is more trustworthy than praise.
To
get power over a living creature is to defile.
To possess is to defile. - Simone Weil
The
quickest of us walk about
with well-wadded stupidity. - George Eliot
more recent Maxims and Aphorisms can be read on the welog
A
poem runs a course of unseen obstacles
and comes to some sort of end with a small insight -
not a great, bogus-clarification,
such as religions are founded on,
but a momentary glimpse of something far away
which seems to be a kind of understanding.
A DIVINE IMAGE
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.
The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.
William Blake
we are all recyclable
The voyage of discovery
is not in finding new landscapes - but in getting new eyes. - Marcel Proust
La terre est couverte de gens qui ne méritent pas qu'on leur
parle. - Voltaire
a free e-Book of 198 of Anthony
Weir's poems (indexed) can be downloaded from PoemHunter
CREDO
yet another reworking of a third-century-BC poem
by Callimachus of Cyrene
Old points of view
expressed anew are crap.
Old sentiments recycled yet again,
banalities of love exposed like wounds in films,
are so much pap.
My writing's much too dissident to win a prize,
my thoughts don't come processed-flaccid from the system.
What majorities desire I just despise.