PERHAPS...

a poem to be read aloud
before a crowd

PERHAPS

what we call 'intelligence' is stupidity
- for if man was better than dysfunctional,
had true intelligence,
and was not obsessed by gain,
he would have devoted it entirely
to sensual pleasure and being beautifully
happy, rather than
to trashing a world
that he truly filled with pain...

PERHAPS

the most wonderful
word I know
alis
I N T E R I M

PERHAPS

I am because
you are
and I don't know
who you are.

PERHAPS

I am not a person, but a place
of thistly thought.

PERHAPS

a poem's a small echo
heard through deadly noise.

PERHAPS

we are hungry ghosts,
all equal
in our emptiness.
Perhaps
'enlightenment'
is elegantly-doing
nothing.

PERHAPS

what the hungry ghosts call
life
is merely virtual
for the very few who
live.

PERHAPS

their 'crimes against humanity'
are nothing compared with
our crimes against nature

every day.

PERHAPS

true soldiers
shoot themselves.

PERHAPS

the greatest achievement is
stillness.

PERHAPS

love is the most
expensive way to learn humility.

PERHAPS

to love solitude
is to know happiness.

PERHAPS

respectability
is the worst kind of
corruption.

PERHAPS

PERHAPS

'god' is in each of us,
armpit and arsehole,
foreskin and vulva,
cancer and pustule,
dandruff and fæces -

while 'the devil' is in
words and theses.

PERHAPS

religion is
at best
the politics of the supernatural,
and
at worst
the economics of superstition.

PERHAPS

the best thing about the Tuareg
is that they never wash.

PERHAPS

education
acts on the mind of a child
as a Trojan does
on a computer.

PERHAPS

the logical materialism of our civilisation
owes much more to materialism
than to logic.

PERHAPS

progress should be measured by
the diminution of the self,
not the world.

PERHAPS

poetry is not 'the best words
in the best order',
but the tautest expression
of the fiercest thoughts.

PERHAPS

life is
piles of trivialities
until the last supper
intravenously
way beyond hope.

PERHAPS

as knowledge of minutiæ increases
wisdom declines.

PERHAPS

a tombstone
is attachment
petrified.

PERHAPS

the earth was formed
from the smashed womb
of the Angel of Suicide.

PERHAPS

in the Beginning
was no word,
for words
are outcry
of absence.

PERHAPS

the hair around my heart
was always grey.

PERHAPS

a genius is someone
born with exactly the right psychoses
at the right place
at the right moment.

PERHAPS

people who miss people
really miss themselves.

PERHAPS

the only vacuum
is the space between people.
The rest is connectivity.

PERHAPS

deep down
most of us are
shallow graves.

PERHAPS

only cruelty is more despicable
than self-promotion.

PERHAPS

the culture of capitalism
is the decoration of greed.

PERHAPS

because humans
live like humans
inhumanely,
animals
can't live as animals.

PERHAPS

Santa Claus does not exist
because
there are better things to do.

PERHAPS

in the end
everything is food
and death.

PERHAPS

the personal
is the political
only
when the personal
is just for show.

PERHAPS

'the intelligentsia'
is a mafia because
none of them is
intelligent enough
to be dissonant
or dissident.

PERHAPS

purpose is the last religion,
(whose chief and murderous god is money).

PERHAPS

no philosophy
is worth expressing.

PERHAPS

even the poor
have more money than sense

PERHAPS

it is enough
to picture blind conspiracy
of molecules - of stuff
and anti-stuff.

PERHAPS

consciousness
is a wound.

PERHAPS

the first step towards wisdom
is to cut off your feet

PERHAPS

it's not what's going on that matters
but what's going off.

PERHAPS

nothing that is guarded
is worth having.

PERHAPS

without God
or gods
we would still be in Paradise.

PERHAPS

silence is the truest
depth within us.

PERHAPS

opprobrium is more
trustworthy than praise.

PERHAPS

it is a blessing
to gain the hate
of the hateful

who are legion.

PERHAPS

obedience is
not humility.

PERHAPS

thinking is not doing
but refracting.

PERHAPS

thinking about thinking
is becoming.

PERHAPS

the Evil Empire is not capitalism
but the family.

PERHAPS

some of us aren't born
with a vacuum inside.

PERHAPS

happiness comes
not when the unfillable hole is blocked
but when the wound is healed by licking.

PERHAPS

the core of confidence
is humility.
Or, to put it another way,
true confidence is humble.

PERHAPS

poetry is not
'the best words in the best order',
but the tautest expression
of the fiercest thoughts.

PERHAPS

philosophy is distraction
from distraction
by distraction.

PERHAPS

it is because anger
is the most genuine emotion
that it is the one
least countenanced.

PERHAPS

time
in the toilet of the restaurant
at the end of the universe
is very sick.

PERHAPS

the most addictive video-game is
sex.

PERHAPS

sex is better on your own,
since nothing that you do is false.

PERHAPS

what most people think is
social harmony
is just inertia.

PERHAPS

optimism
is never more than
shallow.

PERHAPS

most human activity is needless -
- except the prevention of human activity.

PERHAPS

the finest human achievement
is the undoing of human achievement.

PERHAPS

the best of man is his ruins.

PERHAPS

Life is
Death masturbating.

PERHAPS

testosterone
has wrecked a million
times more lives than heroin.

PERHAPS

the most destructive drug
is work.

PERHAPS

we were all 'Best Before'
we were born.

PERHAPS

the worst thing
that can befall a writer
is to be published.

PERHAPS

it is kinder
to be a pædophile
than to be a
meat-eater...

PERHAPS

...kinder still
not to have children.

PERHAPS

the keenest Christians
and Muslims have always been murderous.

PERHAPS

what is sacred
is secret -
which is perhaps why holy books
are no more
and no less
than literature.

PERHAPS

children don't know they are
plans
and adults don't know they are
ruins.

PERHAPS

the object of Democracy
is to ensure that everyone
practises
'decently'
the same hypocrisy.

PERHAPS

the greatest evil
is its celebration of itself.

PERHAPS

the greatest evil
is the most basic
desire.

PERHAPS

the world is ruled
by strengthless dead
in dodgem cars.

PERHAPS

the greatest power is
no-power:
a molecule of air.

PERHAPS

love is the other side
of a coin.

PERHAPS

'soul' is just a fancy name
for misery.

PERHAPS

Osama bin Laden
is a most interesting
latter-day fusion
of Agamemnon
with Odysseus.

PERHAPS

the best that one can be
is useless.

PERHAPS

wisdom
is dark.
and stupidity
is blinding light.

PERHAPS

mind, too
is shit.

PERHAPS

it is the trivial people
not the serious
who need to 'lighten up'.

PERHAPS

every 'middle-class' value
is false.

PERHAPS

the basic Human Problem
is that human imagination
is not compatible
with possibility.

PERHAPS

sex is silly -
though sometimes it seems
majestic.

PERHAPS

the biggest mistake
one can make
is to take
oneself
seriously.

PERHAPS

Anglophones
are good at catching shoplifters
because they are always looking sideways.

PERHAPS

shadows
are the illuminations
of the secret.

PERHAPS

desire is what the Mummy-Lords decree.

PERHAPS

Christian Heaven
is as sterile
as a hospital
without a single animal.

PERHAPS

Never
is where most
people live.

PERHAPS

The Good Life is
doing nothing
disgracefully gracefully.

PERHAPS

there is nothing to understand
because meaning
is meaningless.

PERHAPS

who is dead, and who's alive
is often mere opinion.

PERHAPS

war can be abolished
only by abolishing armies.

PERHAPS

most people would rather
be entertained than wise
- or happy!

PERHAPS

the only humility possible
within our culture
is anonymity.

PERHAPS

the only good property
is the property nobody wants.

PERHAPS

words corrupt
everything they seem
to describe.

PERHAPS

you are an egg
waiting to be hatched.

PERHAPS

the madness
of mass-murderers
is unexceptional.

PERHAPS

even the brightest
of us do not know
what to do with
our intelligence.

PERHAPS

to call someone 'negative'
is a fairly negative thing to do.

PERHAPS

only beggars
are not corrupt.

PERHAPS

all frontiers are sordid.

PERHAPS

our minds are ruled by stories,
and perhaps every story is false.

PERHAPS

the process of embalming
starts soon after birth.

PERHAPS

the brain and the heart
are houses without air.

PERHAPS

for those who are into self-harm
and guilt,
Jesus is a Godsend.

PERHAPS

more love is involved
in planting trees
than 'having sex'.

Why do human babies cry ?
PERHAPS

because human life
is such an outrageous
imposition;
or because human consciousness
is a kind of
continual drowning...

PERHAPS

I am
a bubble of being
outside the bubble
of breeding, of meat-
eaters - almost
a ghetto of one.

PERHAPS

knowing
is just another form of
having -
a substitute for
being.

PERHAPS

the more that humans achieve
the emptier they become.

PERHAPS

apart from our turds
(which dung-beetles like)
and our corpses
(which vultures value)
and our blood
(which nourishes leeches)
and our bones
(which dogs love to bury)
the only good thing that humans produce
(and which few other animals appreciate
is music.

PERHAPS

Grace
is stone, fur, fruit
catastrophe.

PERHAPS

God is disease
of idea.

PERHAPS

God is a tree.

PERHAPS

life is
the cheapest thing on the planet.

PERHAPS

the only freedom from
is the freedom from desire
(including the desire to live)
- and the only freedom to
is the freedom to die happy.

PERHAPS

religion
is Jihad
against sanity.

PERHAPS

Original Sin
is taking yourself
seriously.

PERHAPS

terrorism
corrupts terrorists
just as consumption
corrupts consumers.

PERHAPS

the only desire
not trivial
is the desire for death.

PERHAPS

the world is turning
into desert
and cities.

PERHAPS

we are encyclopedias
of emptiness.

PERHAPS

'intelligence'
is just a fancy word
for 'pathological cunning' -
and against it we
and the world
have no defence.

PERHAPS

life
is a knife
in dying air.

PERHAPS

dissidents
are just the few and only people
who dare - or bother - to think.

PERHAPS

war
is peace on the rampage.

PERHAPS

what unites most people
is the refusal to see
the pity of things.

PERHAPS

memories
are the scabs of consciousness.

PERHAPS

truth
is something more lost
than gained.

PERHAPS

music
is in the instrument not made.

PERHAPS

for a dog
god also is a smell.

PERHAPS

oil, not tears,
issues from the eyes of Islam
(which perhaps is pissing blood).

PERHAPS

every institution
defeats its purpose.

PERHAPS

you are truly alone
when you have no-one
to say Good-bye to.

PERHAPS

God and Love
are disease
when joined together.

PERHAPS

evil prospers
because comfort corrupts.

PERHAPS

the Garden of Eden was
WILD.

PERHAPS

passion
is the friction
between doing
and being.

PERHAPS

death
is the
Museum of Enlightenment.

PERHAPS

'enlightenment' is just an
extreme form of resignation.

PERHAPS

children are ruins.

PERHAPS

of all renunciations
the most difficult is grief.

PERHAPS

this European culture that we treasure
is just the gulag of our pleasure.

PERHAPS

the secret of life
is to hate it
and be happy.

PERHAPS

death is the greatest gift to the living.

PERHAPS

housework
is better done in the dark:
it's so much easier
and leaves the day free
for sleep or the tending of plants.

PERHAPS

the same is not so true for sex.

PERHAPS

as rare as the Unicorn
is the believer of good faith.

PERHAPS

the stupidest thing
about The Only Stupid Species
is that, unlike really
successful animals like rats,
cockroaches, spiders
and many other beasts
of true distinction,
we have dread
and refuse to eat our dead.

PERHAPS

depression
is a trick
of consciousness which
we take too seriously.

PERHAPS

God has a terrible defect:
like Stalin, He hates intellect.

PERHAPS

rot is not death
- but life everlasting.

PERHAPS

marriage
is an early symptom
of senility.

PERHAPS

'empowerment'
is just an easier kind of
enslavement.

PERHAPS

everything human
is corrupted with desire.

PERHAPS

only through grief
will happiness emerge.

PERHAPS

in wishing the worst for humanity
I wish the best for the world.

PERHAPS

to be single is not a curse
but an accomplishment.

PERHAPS

it is way too late
for us to have a future.

PERHAPS

it's not 'love'
that 'makes the world
go round' -
but the seizing
and abuse of power.

PERHAPS

those who most complain
about rain
are those who are trashing the planet.

PERHAPS

the meaning of
catastrophe
is the catastrophe
of meaning.

PERHAPS

humility
is really knowing
that you are
the only kind of animal
that sneers.

PERHAPS

real people
don't shave.

PERHAPS

true intellectuals
have no friends.

PERHAPS

life is a foreign language.

PERHAPS

death is a smile.

PERHAPS

we each live in a nutcracker
between the outrage of employment
and the insult of entertainment.

PERHAPS

religion is
more an attempt to
justify the unjustifiable
than to explain the inexplicable.

PERHAPS

love is
estrangement's
distorting mirror.

PERHAPS

description
turns 'reality'
to 'fiction'.

PERHAPS

a true atheist
is truly hard to find.

PERHAPS

to loaf
is the secret
of life.

PERHAPS

Western democracy
is the dictatorship
of hypocrisy.

PERHAPS

the morality of conformity is immorality.

PERHAPS

the poetry of government
is the fear of revolution.

PERHAPS

if 'Free Spirit' came with a T-shirt
there would be no T-shirts.

PERHAPS

truth is the first casualty of culture.

PERHAPS

what for you is squalid and nasty
is the beauty of my life.

PERHAPS

between the breeders and the homos
and the home-owners
are those who
might be the
independent few.

PERHAPS

money makes no-one happy
because it is only a means
to the impossible satisfaction
of infantile desires.

PERHAPS

happiness is unconsciousness,
and the nearest thing to happiness
is an erotic dream.

PERHAPS

Zen is
what you're sure
it's not.

PERHAPS

the purest poem
is the humble
mumble.

PERHAPS

in a society
where nothing true is valued
I am not worth knowing.

PERHAPS

my writing suffers badly
from my lack of imagination.
('All my words come back to me
in shades of mediocrity.')

PERHAPS

you write a poem,
stop. Then silence.
Perhaps the silence is
a better poem, and
the rest
(as Verlaine wrote)
is merely literature.

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"It is hard enough for me to remember my opinions - let alone my reasons for having them."
Friedrich Nietzsche

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