"No-one can be called happy who is still alive."
- Solon of Athens

 

MEMENTO VITÆ

Dead tired
means tired to death
of not being able to die.

 

 

THIS IS THE SUICIDE HELPLINE

If you want help to commit suicide now: press �.

If you want to plan your suicide in advance
and elegantly: press �.

If you wish to be sent our Info-Pack
on setting fire to yourself outside a bio-lab, embassy or abattoir:
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If you want to encourage as many people as possible
painlessly and quietly to kill themselves to avoid
medicalisation and lingering, increasing powerlessness in
hospitals, into which everyone else is herded like sheep
- in other words, if you want to spread the word
about true freedom of choice;
or if, having sterilised yourself,
you want to stop being an ecocrite
and reduce your Carbon Footprint to zero
press �.
There is no good reason to stay alive.

'Wherever you look, there is an end to your troubles. Do you see that precipice ? That way you can drop to freedom. Do you see that sea, that river, that well ? Liberty sits in their depths. Do you see that tree - stunted, blighted and barren ? Release hangs from its branches. Do you see your throat, your gullet, your heart ? They are all escape-routes from servitude. Are the exits I show you too difficult, requiring too much courage and strength ? Do you ask what is the straight road to freedom ? Any vein in your body.'    - Seneca

CULL

For what we do well, such beautiful words:
rampaging, marauding,
mangle, eviscerate,
procreate, extirpate, cull...

Though we're like dogs when we dream
we want consolation when dying,
having no faith in death
which we feel to be null
and not the Consolamentum of harmlessness,
long consolation for living.

 

DRIVING HOME AT SUNSET FROM THE CINEMA
for Suchoon Mo

The sun is the colour of gold-mixed-with-blood.
The moon at the opposite end of the sky looks like the papery skull
of the Unknown Victim detached from the mud.

 

BIG BANG

In the beginning
god burst like a balloon
showering the world
with dirty shreds
of indestructible Hypocrisy.

The baboon in the laboratory
desperately holding the pig's heart
which "scientists" have plumbed in
to his neck
(and which is going septic)
cannot cry
My God!
My God,
Why hast thou forsaken me ?

Infection of matter
Molecular fever
A painful collection of scatter.
The condensation
of darkness.

In fighting death
we extinguish life.
How fortunate I am
to have had no father
and never to have sought a wife!

If I - a clot of clabber and bones -
were stupid enough to desire to
"have my life over again"
I should want to be born a shepherd
not of sheep
nor even of wolves
but of stones.

Before acceptance -
illusion
After acceptance -
burial.
Apart from everyone
I listen to the crows.
and I practise howling

which is poetry.

BEWARE A POET BEARING WITNESS

To bear witness is to wade against
the filthy flow of smug hypocrisy,
greed, conformity and callousness.

Poetry is the wealth between words.

Where is the poetry of witness
in the English-speaking lands ?

I hear only muzak:
the dreadful drone of solipsistic wordsmiths
sitting on their hands.

 

FREITOD

To be born is to be defeated.
Suicide is triumph
labelled despair
by those who do not know despair.

Meat on a plate.
Is life itself the tragedy
- or only the mutation that is human ?

After Descartes,
'scientists' nailed dogs to walls
to show that beasts could not suffer.

Hacked love from reason's belly
and chopped it into
childish dreams.
Nothing is as it seems.

Our comfort is the measure
of our disrespect for many
creatures, many things.
In my beautiful garden
the feeling: How much longer ?

Beauty dies where comfort lies.

The worst that we do
to each other is nothing compared
with what we do to mammals, fish and birds.

Outliving evolution
we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tightening tyranny
of our concocted words.

I move as the shadow of the shadow of a wolf
among mummies wound by the vast webby mire
of words, in which there is no cranny
of culture that I honestly
can crawl into. Nor have I found
a human to admire.

Street-furniture
everywhere, but no signposts
direct me to the abattoir.

The sun sinking
tells me to stop thinking.
Truth is way beyond words.

As zero to the infinite
light loses you
while darkness
welcomes you home.

CHALLENGING EMILY DICKINSON

"Because I would not stop for Death
Death kindly stopped for me..."

Nature's red in tooth and claw
But we are black of heart.
There's more "soul" in a jackal's paw
than all our works of art.

So I will kindly stop for Death
and do the gracious thing.
And with the gift of my last breath
transform to sweet
nothing.

 

THE NASTIEST WORD IN ENGLISH IS
TROUBLESHOOTING

At the poetry rave
a hermit sits in a small cave
toasting his chest by the furzy fire and eating
little mushrooms. He dreams the mystic murderings
of Money God Shame
and the oceanic liberation of equines.
Praise the black veins and foamy manes
of dancing stallions!
Praise the deliciousness of lice!

"Before you kill a beast
you must be beautiful," a proverb runs.
"The stranger the meal the better,"
said his soulmate over the sea.
The only poets are cracked mirrors
with cracked voice.

While people who would not squash a slug
eat gelded bulls insatiably,
roots shoot softly from his rectum
and a thousand holywording worms
turn poems into almost-something
not seeking
but giving,
not owning
but being
and raving and drowning.

 

Totenkranz

and Totentanz
are dead

on est en-chant-é
begeistert
ensorcelled
by the trivial
instead.

Singular and single
the wolf's and
my saliva
mingle.

 

'YOU READING THIS, BE READY'
after William Stafford

The problem -
the big problem
- with poetry is
that it is written
by the rich and free
or comparatively
rich and free -
even Akhmatova and Mayakovsky.

Famously, Adorno said that poetry
after Auschwitz was 'barbaric':
like the Nazis lapping up Wagner
at Bayreuth.

A line from 1993
by the American William Stafford
(not the 16th century English courtier
but a celebrant of the chloroform culture):
'What can anyone give you greater than now...?'
has a horrible humour
for the prisoners in Guantanamo or Tongliao,
in Gulags, Gaza, refugee-camps,
or in ten thousand torture-cells
around the world,

for a hundred thousand women
being raped this very minute,

for a million old or newborn,
crying, starving, dying.

Humans have made the world
terrible even for humans -
no matter how the gilded, gifted poets spin it.

 

IN MEMORIAM HAROLD PINTER

In the whispering dead of night,
and howling dead of day

those who never were alive
root among the latest bunch
released from suffering
and have their lunch

scraping diarrhœa
off the caviar
and stirring lobster bisque
with rotting cocks

and after baked alaska
(guess what is inside!)
they perambulate
the dripping caves
and sacrificial rocks
decanting Dão 1963
into mass graves.

 

THE SCHEME OF THINGS
for Dalan Lusaj

 

ALPHABETICAL

A is for atom, which has many parts.
B is for bomb, so dear to men's hearts.
C is for cock, what you do to a rifle.
D is for doom, which is only a trifle.

E is for end which we're all of us living.
F is for future - it's quite unforgiving.
G is for Google, search-engine of choice.
H is for hoodlums, who once were sweet boys.

I is for me who should not be here
J is for Jihad against all things queer.
K is for Kali in Heaven Above.
L is for Limbo the circle of love.
M is for monster - what Man has become.
N is for nation and nasty and numb.

O is for ogle - what I do to dogs.
P is for progress that's lost in the cogs.
Q is for quiet: the peace of the dead.
R is for raucous: the thoughts in my head.
S is for steel destroying the world.
T is for triumph with banners unfurled.

U is for umbrage, so easily taken.
V is for virtue by value forsaken.
W doesn't scan - I'll move to X
which is for excellence, lurking in wrecks.
Y is for yearning which we do from birth
Z is for zero our future on earth...

 

PARADE

I'm not happy with Parade
which is why these poems are placed
by stealth upon one web-page among millions
- where you, a tiny few unknown to me,
find them, by accident, in haste,
in passing...by stealth.
You are my tenebrous
and virtual wealth.

 

ERECH/URUK, IRAQ

We're told that writing was invented here:
lists of weapons, foodstuffs, kings, kinsmen,
laws and penalties.
Here lived the first Man-God, Gilgamesh.
Here children beg for ballpoint pens.

Here there is no fence around the ruins,
no turnstile, booklet, shop or guide.
Here there are no tourists, toilets, postcards
or Keep Off notices.

Here is the first city.
Here urban evil started
to gyre its tentacles across a world
which now it strangles.
Here was the New York and Washington
of seven thousand years ago -

the best of man is his ruins.

Not far away is Hamurabbi's Babylon
whose ruins were so recently reconquered
by American Marines,
and turned into a huge base
with helipad and roads wide enough
for trucks, the threshing floors
the shards of pottery
covered with gravel and hardcore.

The best of man is his ruins.

 

HAIKU

A teeming ant's nest -
mind, examining itself,
finds only matter.

 

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Time is kind
to very few
until the end
when time is
infinitely generous.

 

 

for Suchoon Mo

Great is Death
We are his
urgent breath
his eager pus
Thinking
we're in the thick of life
we do not see him
blinking
in the thin of us.

 

XANADU

In that exotic land
coffee and pornography
arrived at the same time.
Coffee they called
American Tea.
Pornography they called
American Joy.

 

FRONTIER

In my bag I'm carrying the only permitted feelings
The madness of the finished and unfinished
The fingernails of border-guards
The faces of the hounded
The skins of hate and passion
The shadows of the lovely
The blood of vegetarians
The last life on the planet...

 

WHO GATHERS KNOWLEDGE
GATHERS PAIN (Book of Ecclesiastes)

(remembering...dismembering)
Success is succeeding at seeming.

Along with Schrödinger's cat
I am a hole
inside a hole
staring out at a fog.

I have written and destroyed so many poems.
O to have the brilliant connectedness of a dog!

 

THE FUTILITY OF TRYING
TO COMMUNICATE THE FUTILITY
OF COMMUNICATION

98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees.
We have polluted 98% of the world.
Dogs are bored 98% of the time.
Nearly 98% of life is mechanical.
More than 98% of us are lost in the plot.
And parrots think,
and parrots mope.

O praise
the 98% of thinking animals with the integrity
not to pray or hope.

 

NAMES AND NUMBERS GAMES

A man who kills five people
is called a psychopath, a serial killer

A man who kills ten people and himself
is called a terrorist

A man who has a hundred people killed
is called an entrepreneur

A man who has a thousand people killed
is called a politician

A man who has ten thousand people killed
is called a Minister of Justice

A man who kills a hundred thousand animals
is just doing his job.

 

PITY OUR INTELLIGENCE

Even our suffering is arrogant.
Every army is edible.
God's name is Frankenstein.
We are his monsters.

This Chinese bear, captured while a cub, will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket while a dirty metal tube inserted by "superior" animals directly into its liver drips "magic" bear-bile like rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...
But hundreds of thousands of animals suffer just as much mindless cruelty in American laboratories. In the "democratic" USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published. "Free speech" on animal welfare is regarded as criminal by the American r�gime.

HARDEST OF ALL IS TO WRITE WHEN YOU'VE SOMETHING TO SAY

I spoke to a turd
another day.
No reply
came wafting with the breeze.
That turd was smart
rejected art.

Hell is where there are more people than trees.

 

WHEN ALL THE WORDS HAVE STRUTTED PAST
THERE'S JUST THE TRAMPLED TRUTH

Desire is the destruction of the world.

 

ALL SOULS DAY
Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

(boundaries between the things misnamed)

Here in the graveyard
the rotting corpses lie.
The newborn depress me.
But it cheers me up to know
that I and they will die.

 

COMPASSION

Pity the pig who has never seen light
Pity the food that she eats
Pity the Christians, Buddhists and Jews
and the people and dogs that they've beaten
and killed in secret and streets
Pity the dolphins in tuna-nets
Pity the tuna, too,
and the 93 million new babies a year

and the pitiless, affluent few.

 

 

OBSERVATION
after Bardhyl Londo

Where suicide is outlawed
it is not to protect us
but to keep us from escaping.

 

THE WALKING WOMEN

Some men are deeply attracted
to other men's
phallic collections of nerve-ends.
The walking women
with arms like angry pendulums
are not escaping from their traps
but waving on a soothing treadmill.

 

ON READING A COMMENTARY ON THE VISION OF THE PROPHET DANIEL

To the invisible
nothing is divisible.
The visible is
infinitesimal.
I am infinitesimal
amongst the visible,
but not quite invisible.
My vision goes beyond
the visible and I see
misery
to gods unknown.

The cross we don't
quite die on is Desire:
we call it Throne.

 

HOW CAN AN IRISH POET FOLLOW YEATS ?
(in honour of Christopher Marlowe)

They danced for joy
as the towers were burned
the Towers of Ilium:
the sack of Troy.

Shall Notre-Dame's twin towers collapse,
shall vainglorious Washington be sack'd ?
And is bin Laden the new
Odysseus ? or yet
the new Æneas,
the falsely-justifying hero
of societies not founded
on the 'principles' of aspiration,
greed and debt ?

 

RIBS FOR OARS

In a world where no-one
says or shows true feeling
I cannot hide mine,
and regret that I regret
that I am not a dog.

 

UNDERSTANDING MÖBIUS

The meaning of catastrophe is
the catastrophe of meaning.

If the human brain is as wonderful
as we are constantly told it is -
why are we not living in Paradise ?
Why are we the only stupid species ?

Great poets are dead and dutiful.
The dead are always beautiful.

combat crusaderism

 

COLOURS

First, every tree and beast was burned.
Then the worship of the guns and the
boiling of the blood-smeared
boots for soup.
The best of man is his ruins.

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

I am terrified of white.
Stainless
and murderous
it chops hearts and minds.
The moon is bone.

Why do we prefer stories to insight ?
Grey is the witnessing of silent stone.
Knowledge is the white of slaughterhouse,
experience is red as abattoir,
red and white the screaming brains.
Purple broods on its corrupt, corrupting wealth.
White is frightening
freezing and sterile
eating with stainless democratic dragon-teeth
like cancer
through everything
Black is deep truth.
Flies are the sun's kisses.
If we kiss those
that celebrate the outcast's eyes
we'll learn compassion
and become a little wise.

WASTE

The evil of war
is not just the killing
but the hypocritical taboo
against eating the slaughtered.

 

AMONG THE MANY TRUTHS THAT RELIGIONS TRY TO HIDE:

There is no need for faith.
Serenity's anonymous - anonymous the guide,
and joy is the loving breath
of death.

 

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(a spam-collage)

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command Hold, sir, opinion move said Villefort, do within not prolong this
And your slave?
By sign my grandfather. Arrogant
Oh, number Morrel, relax pray love him for
And thought hence, noise spring said Villefort, arose payment my affection
'It is well,' said he, kissing road baby plant it; stick
it is my mast.

 

THE POLITICS OF CONFINEMENT
(for Malika Oufkine)

The difference between a prison
and a palace
is that in a prison
you know where you are.

 

GIFTS AND RIGHTS
in memoriam E.D.

The gift to be simple
and no other right than
the right to be happy.

 

NO DATE

The day is dateless.
How sweet the day!
The earth, the sea,
the sky are hateless
and Man, at last no more,
is past and fateless.
There is no more Man.

But standing on a shell inlaid with lapis lazuli,
Aphrodite Anadyomene wrings ditchwater from her hair.

The world has risen
from the dead.
The world is glorious,
all creatures fed
(except Man's parasites
and viruses). And godlessness,
marvelling at all the food
said
'It is good'.

 

TELLING, NOT SHOWING

In the trap of luxury,
unrecognised,
the greatest luxury
is suicide.

 

 

FOUR SEPTEMBER POEMS

1. WRONG

In 1970 I looked forward brightly
to the Collapse of Capitalism
with False Communism tumbling after.
Now I understand that the merchants
of desire and misery thrive upon
calamity, and not just the calamities of others:
Capitalism will do very well
out of the Collapse of Capitalism.
God has no conscience.

2. STUPID PEOPLE: STUPID GODS

They've got us by the balls,
the Christians. We thought
that reason would release
their terrible grip, but they have
subverted reason
with their 'values': hypocrisy.

A missing British child abroad
is worth more attention than
a million murdered Congolese.

The merchants of death
and destruction, of numbing
comfort and greed; the merchants
of luxury, of entertainment
of continual longing,
have got us by the throat.
We are unheard, or, if heard
dismissed and ridiculed.

The only possible protest
is suicide-bombing.

3. RELIGION

In the unlikely event
that there is a god
he's a nasty, bitter sod
who turns good into evil
- unlike the devil.

4. TENSE

We are the indefinite
strung very briefly
between absence and infinity
longing and failing
to define ourselves
and everything.

 

CONFESSION OF A VASECTOMISED AND SKINNY MAN

Between a careless and unknown father's sperm
and the meticulous injection of embalming-fluid
the I I think I am absorbs potatoes, wines, ideas,
Armagnac, impressions - and expels
piss and sweat and fæcal matter
- and semen but no sperm
- and I can't get any fatter.

 

TOMBS FOR THE LIVING ARE ERECTED BY THE DEAD

Poems give me no pleasure
no satisfaction like painting
and paintings do - why
do I write them, then ?
I just feel the urge - like
masturbation - and (as with
sex) don't rate the product
too highly. From a young age
my goal was the learning of wisdom,
the finding of truth, the Life Worth Living
- but no help was forthcoming - except by dead
poets and novelists - not by philosophers, nor
it almost goes without saying, by teachers
or friends or relations. And I have met no-one
to share my demanding obsession, and so
in my rich solititude I write poems that no-one will read
(for 'poetry' now is mere anecdote, vacuous, void,
chopped-up prose that wins prizes)
- or if they do read, they won't understand
or be moved by to seek understanding.
Although I am now happier than I ever was
what I write is depressing, for
everything I want to celebrate
is threatened or destroyed.

 

WRITTEN WHILE WAITING FOR A TRAIN

(floating + sinking) - breathing = dying
blessèd, terminal inaction
(with or without a little, or a lot of, pain).

Life is a death-camp of distraction.

 

 

WHAT WE CONSUME IS CRIMINAL.
WHAT WE WASTE IS DESOLATE ABOMINATION

Rats laugh when tickled
and enjoy surfing.
Dogs smile,
and Duns Scotus believed
that the world was born
when the Trinity fell in love
with Jesus' soul,
and in Massachusetts there's a law
preventing goats from wearing trousers.
Botticelli threw his paintings
on a puritan fanatic's fire.
The sound of one hand clapping
is the amputee applauding war.

 

I AM HIS WHITED SEPULCHRE

Of course I should have killed myself
after O. was clubbed to death.
I put it off. Although I bought a body-bag
I put it off. I rewrote my will.
Although I carefully composed
a terse farewell to three friends and the coroner
I put it off. And - hideously - now
I've never been so happy. His death
was the prerequisite
for me to buy a house in France
and there spend half my time,
a regretfully-sometimes-happy hypocrite.

 

PREJUDICE

I am rarely invited out to dinner
but recently I was invited to
two middle-class,
(lovely, and can I say Philistine ?)
homes.

At the first, I heard a rant
against the Roma from a Hungarian Jew
(who, after 20 years in France
does not know that croissants should be eaten warm)
and her racist neighbour
who is a Catholic Scotch-Irish solicitor*.

At the second, I listened to complaint
about Jewish exactingness
from an Irish dentist,
formerly long resident in Surrey, England,
who makes Nescafé in a microwave,
avoids the English, speaks little French
and watches CNN in France.

A pre-war Italian refugee two doors up the street
inveighs against North Africans,
"but not the Berbers".

Staying overnight at a Chambres d'Hôtes
in Carcassonne,
the charming Chinese-Malay hostess
(who spoke no French) told me
that she and her English husband
had moved to France because there were
too many immigrants.
She also declared that
buildings designed by Jews
were brutalist.

Again invited out to dinner,
for a vegetarian meal,
my magnificent Dutch friends and I
spent half an evening lamenting on the attitudes
and rudeness
of the Dutch and 'British'
here in South-west France.

I am glad to be a non-collaborator
who never had a job, and often cowers,
and who rejoices at the collapse of baleful towers.

*solicitor (British Isles) = attorney (USA)

 

OUR SKINS
(expanded from a blog)

feel like
the skins of snakes.
We are one of only two
mammals without fur.

This evolutionary
accident was our
Original Sin.

The other furless mammal
is The Naked Mole-rat

also known as the Sand Puppy.
It is an almost-blind and
ever-burrowing rodent
native to parts of East Africa,
and is remarkable also
for being one of only two mammals
with a "eusocial" structure close to those
of several species of ant and bee.

Many control-enamoured
members of our species
(politicians, militarists, sociologists,
social psychologists, philosophers,
policemen, "the moral majority",
business and religious leaders
- to name but some) would like to
organise us more "eusocially"

- and they are ever-more-rapidly
attaining their goal.

 

HYMN TO DIOGENES OF SINOPE
ON MY BIRTHDAY

Now I'm 66 and I have a travel-pass
and I don't do up my fly
and my trousers smell of piss

and family and riches and career
I let pass by
and I'm sipping cognac by the fire
in France, composing this.

Alcohol's a tender friend
if you treat her with respect -
like dogs - and unlike men
who'll stifle you, unchecked.

Man is the cancer of the world
evolution turned to tumour,
mainly because he has an
undeveloped sense of humour.

 

 

"Death is the least awful thing that can happen to anyone."
- Quentin Crisp

 

 

NICANOR PARRA
(20th century Chilean "antipoet")

for Paul Flaherty

In poetry (he wrote) everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
that you improve on the blank page.

But that is an impossibility.
And the blank page is a miserable
come-down for a tree.
Then there's arse-wipe paper
which used to be newspaper
and slim volumes of unread poetry
and the holy books
which accounted for the loss of Eden.

 

 

WINDING FORWARD

I'm losing me
I don't care
I'm losing care

At last: to sever!

Only the stupid
live forever

 

There'll be no need for suicide

by pills or hypothermia.
Though I am tired of life
I'm friendlessly happy.
So let me confide:
one day I'll go to bed,
and a week or two later
someone will say 'He died.
Of nothing.
He just died.'

 

THE DIOGENES SEQUENCE

top of page

 

Sociologists (obsessed with categories) have identified three categories of suicide: Altruistic, Egotistic and Anomic. The last kind occurs as a kind of reaction of despair at some life-trauma - including shame. The second is the kind favoured by artists and writers. The first kind is the 'Captain Oates' type, and and is the kind which I incline towards. Nietzsche's concept of Freitod can also fit into this box.

In traditional and tribal cultures, old people can realise, feel, or be made to feel, that they have outlived their usefulness, and have become a burden. Unfortunately, in our solipsistic capitalist culture, the old infirm are now quite capable of living until they are ninety at huge expense to the state generally, the welfare and medical services, and to their carers and relatives in particular. Even if they wish to exit gracefully and peacefully, it is a crime to help them to do so - in nation-states whose sociopathic securocrats think nothing of bombing towns and villages in very poor countries they disapprove of or have invaded, causing untold pain, misery and devastation - not just to the human populations..