Marcel Duchamp;

long before anyone else
he was the man who
made his success
by taking the piss
out the art market.

I Put My Trust In Ruins

of faiths and religions,
my trust in them is
that they are ruined
-foundations for societies
that will always be shadows
of the projections they
were intended to be.
Never to be completed.
I believe in ruins.

A Bhuddist Fell

into quiet conversation with an atheist,
who was desperately keen
not only to be accepted in his belief,
but that he should be accepted
purely on his own terms.

After some time the atheist's arguments
grew circular and repetitve.
Tired of being urged to convert,
the bhuddist fell quiet.
When finally he was asked for his thoughts
he replied 'My friend let us meet in my next life,
If then you are still an atheist,
let me remind you of this time-
it will help you recall your previous lives'.

At this the atheist fell silent,
the ardour of his belief faded
in recognition of a circular
otherness, beyond himself....

Intelligence And Mistakes

'Intelligence is less to make no mistakes,
but seeing how quickly
you can make them good.'-Bertol Brecht 

The Never Ending Cycle Of Urban Violence

"Don't Blame us for being violent towards rioters 

we learned how to be violent from television"

The Jargon Kings

Investment bankers
are the lunatics who obscure
themselves and others with their jargon.
Their high finance life styles are their asylum,
They are the ones who turn government
into self-government for themselves,
hiding how what it is going to cost others
is accepting a contrariness beyond belief.

Is Coca Cola The New Satan?

Given how drinking it gives so many

diabetes, and so many other diseases,
then we don't really need to ask to find out.  

Time Is Life Divided,

life is time counted out.
When we are with people
we like, then time,
like well received good
intentions, is beyond measure.

Morning Coffee That Is Too Strong Can Have Deleterious Effects

Kierkegaard knew this state very well,
he found that caffeine was what put the fizz
into his writings, in the one-man debating society
that was his study as he simultaneously wrote different texts.

The Happy Are Truly Invisible In Their Happiness

When I was young I was treated as if I was invisible,
until I was old enough for family and my teachers
to pretend to have to take notice of me,
to let me know that I had a future
as long as I did only what they wanted.

I did what they wanted until the instruction
ran out, after which nothing happened
several times over. Visits to the job centre
were like season tickets for some
never-ending run of 'Waiting For Godot'. 

Behind their desks, the staff were busy
pretending to engage with callers-in,
and pretending to being human

whilst wishing they were not there.

Now I blog, and my voice, is the page.
My statistics tell me of my audience.
Invisibility is integral to the territory.

I am happy that I make nobody jealous.
As my best friend said when he first met me,
'The happy are invisible in their happiness'.

When Uncertainty Is The Best Certainty

Modern scientific thinking
seems so Fundamentalist to me
that I can only liken it
to be hardened sclerotic thinking.

It echoes the win-lose logic
of the Old Testament-where with certainty
the major and minor prophets won the argument,
because as they wrote they locked the readers
of what they wrote out of other, unrecorded, histories
-without us ever realising how typically alpha male
writing that creates blinkered thinking is.

I am just not macho enough to use words
like 'delusion' or 'phobia' about others unchecked.
Every day I thank my maker for the uncertainty
and creativity, in the days through which I live.

Goodbye Kim Jong Il

May your son, your chosen successor
Kim Jong Un, make it his gift
to the world be that he chooses
to be the last hereditary dictator,
of which there have been surprising many.

If I Am To Be Reincarnated, This Would Be My Preffered Shared Experience

What could be sweeter and more tasteful?

In My Youth

I voluntarily read George Orwell's
'1984' five times, to comprehend
how mass-produced unhappiness
could be refined into normalising addiction.

My parents had demonstrated to me
that well how cynicism drains the esteem
out of belief such that I did not know how believe it.
Thank you George, for proving to me how it was done.

The Reliability Of Second Hand Hope

The older I get the more I prefer
to rummage in charity shops,
to find the thing with a limited life
that I believe that I can extend
which feels like it was meant for me.

I trust the charity shops more
than I trust the lotteries and lies
sold by governments, which promise,
but then defer, an instant transformation that never arrives.

Overselling Will Have It's Consequences

Hope deferred used to be said
'to make the heart grow sick'*.

Now we call it advertising
where when it's repetition makes us ill,
it's content still makes for nostalgic social history.

*Proverbs ch13 v12

Thrift Vs Easy Money

I was as surprised as everyone else
when the economy that I depend on
melted, from overheating. 

With hindsight the sign that something was wrong
came to me when thrift shops first accepted credit cards.

Thrift and over-easy money will never co-exist for long.

Irrational Hopes

The irrationality I prefer 
is less the will of humans to err,
and more the grace I cannot explain-
that draws success out of failure.

'Finish Your Cocaine Darling.... ....Before It Goes On The Ration Book''

The Most Reliable Gift A Man Can Give Yourself Throughout The Year

Apologies to any women viewing this
for the lack of information for them
at the very least they should feel free
to practice their own version. 

Occupying Armies

do well to disguise,
and keep as a constant surprise,
both for themselves and for others,
how control makes us remote

from ourselves and each other.

In The New Modern Sabbath

Lawnmowers will chorus mechanical hosannas
and the poor will trade the little they have
for equally small gain, less expenses, 

on open air market stalls,
where half the aim is conversation.

The only sin, from which to repent, will be true rest.

The Vagaries Of Diplomacy

In the early 1970's Zhou Enlai,

first premier of The People's Republic of China,
was asked his opinion of the French revolution.

His reply was “It’s too soon to tell”.
What was then seen as being far sighted,
for being a comment on the year 1789
was actually a reference to the Parisian
student revolts of 1968.

As he never said
'Diplomacy is being misunderstood
to good effect by other means.'.

Patriarchy-The Gordian Knot

which among other catch 22 situations,
supports a law in fundamentalist Islam,
whereby when a woman is raped
she has the choice of being stoned
as an adulterer (for failing to stop her attacker
as if she were some sort of heroic soldier),
or being forcibly married to her rapist,
because in his lust he thought he was right.
Even though he was blind and deaf
to how she was the property of her family,
and even if she were not then consent
was hers to offer or refuse on her terms.

The way to a woman's heart
is not through her cunt,
and it has nothing to do with religious legalese,
patriarchal culture, militarism, or male paranoia.
But old lies will persist.

Every day I find more reason
to be be happy to be gay,
or at least extremely un-patriarchal.

If I Were That Handsome I'd Have An ipod Too

Until then I am going to have quiet, 

are at least relative quiet in my ears.

The Degredations Of Education

When Eve was tempted by the fruit
from the tree of knowledge
Satan's aim was to teach her and Adam
the novelty of built-in obsolescence.

Many teachers in many schools
have been teaching the same lesson
ever since, without admitting it.
What pupils learn makes them obsolete
for employers who want more work
for less pay, and say they deserve better.

The Revolution Will Be Advertised

Raising Awareness

is a phrase used by small l liberals
who say they want to change
the world, but when action
is required to confront taboo
they shrink away, for wanting
to appear to be inclusive, thus
they refuse all confrontation.

Passivity of speech
makes them passive of action,
actively wasting life and choice
by going through motions
in order to change nothing.

Conviction always carries costs,
that sometimes convert into gains.

 
Passivity will always turn cost into loss.

Television

-the medium which claims
to calm it's audience
by fidgeting on their behalf,
without ever leaving them calm.

Atonal Cheap Entertainments

In another depression long ago

Noel Coward quipped about
'the extraordinary potency of cheap music'.
In the present recession, and in preparedness
for the next, I will remain tight lipped
at how recessions normalise
the potency of atonal cheap entertainments.

The Richer The Country

the more opaque it's media will be.
Vested interests will seek respectability
at the expense of integrity
whilst talking down to the voters,
that they claim not to.

The core of Capitalism
is about yoking private vice
with the shrinking ghost of public virtue,
the better to normalise a corrupt future.

Pain For It's Own Sake

The piety of sadism
makes forgiveness
the road less mapped
and less well travelled.

The Acme of Human Evolution and Technological Advance

A Seascape by L.S. Lowry

The Apocalypse

is a subject on which I rarely reflect,
as it is written it is a confusing story.

But it is clear enough to me
that the global arms industry
will make The End Of Everything
the biggest bang humanly possible. 

Moments Of Truth

always present themselves
as tragedy; comedy is
the reassuring vanity
of finding mirth in loss. 

Adaption Is For Other Species

The exceptionalism of Evolutionary Theory
is that the species that devised it,
and has the greatest faith in it
denies it's corollary; their own extinction.

Alpha-Maledom

The modus operandi in humans
(but not in animals) that maintains
the need for scapegoats,
and the loss of consent
to prove how right it is,
particularly in cases of rape.

'Never Divide The Dead'

Stalin said, of the Soviet victims of the Shoah,
denying survivors any sense of what they survived,
whilst he in his turn uprooted the many tribes
of the living from their lands they belonged to,
to further sustain his empire, beyond his lifetime.
Averaged out, he killed a million citizens a year
through out the twenty five years of his Czar-ship.

Thought For The Christmas Sales

Because whilst the shops fill with tat to buy
to 'celebrate', we still have to explain why
our planet is dying, before it explains
it's forthcoming exit, taking us with it,
with weather we can't deny is toxic.

Easy Steps To Avoid

The road to Hell
starts with the path
of least resistance.

Like every other journey,
it starts with the first step.
Unlike other journeys it gets easier....

'It's Wasn't Me, It Was Them Others... '

Family are the people we expect
to argue and fight with each other,
over how much more irresponsible
other people are, than they are.

Uncertain Endings

When prophets
tell of disaster due,
they never know the time
in which it will come true.

Edward Bernays Would Be Proud

of how today's media describe nation states
 in such triumphalist and existential terms
-particularly during currency crises.

The emotions that the journalists invoke
to describe their country deny the gravity
of the inhumanity with which we expect to win,

Steve Jobs

made the world a push-button place
for the worlds richest citizens.
For a time he made doing nothing more
than lifting a finger, get them further
than they had ever gone before.

His achievements and death
will mean nothing to the poor

-for whom the physicality of work,
food, and shelter always meant more
than they could put into language.

Wars Are Like Jokes

Both need good timing
and positive humour
to please their audience
and hit their targets.

The Sin

The sin of Adam and Eve was
somehow believing that they owned
the garden they lived in, in their own right
when really they were always guests
paying rent in kind through their labour
of  naming all the animals.

Grow Old With Me...

The urge to breed is much more
about taking the waiting out of wanting
of another person, who later we want
to take care of us, than we are prepared to admit.

Gradations In The Absence Of Peace

Capitalism is war by other means,
because it is about competition,
where the longer Capitalism goes on,
the more it defines perpetual instability.

The ultimate in instability is open war,
where there is always money to be made
from distortions in demand and supply.

War makes money a most powerful weapon.
Capitalism and war are two sides
of the same, forever spinning, coin.

Weather Report

Expecting Jesus to come back
is akin to the hope of lightning
striking twice in the same place;

it has happened more rarely in the past
than it was hoped for and predicted.

The Piety of Sadism

is what turns pilgrims into tourists,
vocation and charity into consumerism,
and empties public ritual of meaning.

It hollows out martyrdom, 

which was a catalyst for change
long after it happened
into mere sadomasochism,
a perpetual mutuality of suffering.

It makes death as a sacrifice seem meaningless.

Sadism's gift, or curse,
is to normalise selfishness
to the point where to call sadists
animals is an insult to creatures
who are selfish within their means,
but are never as pointlessly cruel
as human beings are to each other.

Unmemorable Product

Being human is about producing
unmemorable memorabilia
in the pursuit of amnesia,
to pass the time more easily
than it does when we remember.

Seeing And Not Seeing

Faith; the fetish for the unseen
and the non-corporeal
where we seem to be blind 
to what is in front of us.

The Formula For Aspirituality

Man + machine = man detached,
drifting from his origins, nature.

Inheriting The Means For Division

Where there is a will
there is often a wilfulness;
material gain fits very well
with inheritance
with it come the means
with which to divide others.

An Agnostic Writes...

In my first language, English,
I am secure, I understand and talk
with equal assuredness, I even swear.

In all other tongues, like those of angels
and prayer, my words will falter,
but my thanks are sincere.

Addressing so certain and unknown
a cause as the intelligent nature
of the world surely requires humility.

The Lords of The Universe Contemplate The World Recession

My Shadow Self,

like other people's shadow selves, will be competitive.
But in myself, for having less than many others,
and for sharing the less that I have, it will always seem lighter.

Nothing Ever Happens In The Present

The present passivity of hope deferred
and then obscured beyond recognition
is the religion of the 21st century.
Nothing ever happens in the present.

When The National Dish Is The Language Of The Menu

'You never Know it might be the effect of their pioneer history. All that rancid belly of pork which frightened them off food, and made them think that anything that you could actually taste must have something wrong with it. Sometimes the only way of identifying the food in America is by eye, rather than palate. It has to be food shaped. Where has all the flavour gone?

One theory is that it has been syphoned out of the cuisine and put on the menu. There your hamburger is a Kingburger, a Bulgy burger. A Hugeburger, is not cooked, but  smoked oh so slowly over crackling hickory logs prior to nestling within, being cuddled between, or indeed graciously amassed upon, two  super-soft bake oven baps and served knee deep in sweet mustard sauce.

That is why when it arrives, piping hot, from your hosts genial charcoal heart, I should  say hearth, it tastes of nothing. Drowned in rhetoric, the flavour dies. The national dish of America is the menu.'

-Robert Robinson on American cuisine

Transparency In American Politics

The bullet-proof glass
in front of the podia in the stadia
where The President speaks
are as transparent as America ever gets 

about it's gridlocked Politics.

Unseen, it shields the human behind it
from the the potential for bullets,
whilst supporting the many divisions
that spread though language.

Hope Deferred With Vincent Van Gogh

The joke being that if he were alive
how would he hear after mutilating his ear?
And if he were dead they were inattentive... 
The bleakest fact being that in his lifetime
Vincent sold one painting, to his brother Theo
who died six months after Vincent died.

Terrorism Is....

surrealism through violence,
assisted by the media circus
that misquotes the source
in any story it tells us.

The Personal Pronoun Of Lack Of Choice

When I was a child there was an 'us'
in which the 'them' mattered more,
and we all knew it and denied it.

There was a 'we' in the crowd
that I had to follow, 

that over-ran me
and left me hollow.

There was 'I' too, but it was one
that I was never allowed to be, 

until long after it could be counted.

Fish For All ?

Socialism was the belief that everyone,
man woman and child, merited their fish,
and there are enough fish to go round
if/when we all shared what we had.

Capitalism says that men should
compete for rods to be sufficiently proud
of what they possess to do each other down
and do down what they aspire to,
through pride in their own rod.

Christianity is the hope, against all realism,
that the sea is blessed with enough fish
to make the species that uniquely believes
it has a soul, when other species do not,
present itself as modest, to any soul who enquires.

Sexuality And Relationships; The Menu/Guide

Where even when we understand the choices
and the different labels, and learn to not judge others
we can't change what our pasts have made us,
when the labels were different.
What we can do is use the menu/
the implement guide to seek out
that empathetic partner for life.
Though even there we may seek
but still not find them. 
 

Darkness In Deed And Word

An innocent sounding lie,
however well intended a ruse,
will always blacken what it touches,
just as surely as the hit
from a fist will form a bruise.

The main difference
between them is one of speed,
the bruise will be immediate,
the blackness from the lie
will show itself much slower.

A Gwen John Painting

See another Gwen John (1876-1939) painting here.
I like this painting because it is a landscape
that has little sign of human life in it.

A Long Gone Presidential Candidate Wrote

'As Long as there is a lower class I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element I am of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison I am not free'
-Eugene Debs 1855-1926*



*four times charismatic socialist candidate for the president of the USA.
At his peak in 1912 he polled 6% of the popular vote, 900,000 votes.
The last time he ran for president he did so from a prison cell for his
'espionage and sedition' towards the end of WW1, in which he, like
thousands of others who were caught up in the loss of civil liberties,
he was also barred for life from voting. He won 3.5 % of the vote.

Long Before Prozac There Was Quilting

and it was a far more productive way
for women to keep calm than medication
decided by male doctors ever could be.
In more recent times women knitted socks
for charity in lieu of personal achievement.

 

The Father Of Perpetual Infant-asy,

Sigmund Freud, never saw his mother naked,
he merely imagined that he had seen her that way.

When he imagined that he saw his mother
naked he imagined he was aroused by the scene.

What he imagined, for his never actually seeing it,
became a collective fantasy, beyond all counting.

For A Tidier Life......

'Laughter and tears are both responses 

to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, 

since there is less cleaning up to do afterwards'-Kurt Vonnegut

Misdirection Made Personal

Education; how to squander
and divert the energy of youth,
and infantilize future adulthood
the better for advertisers to exploit us.

After Nearly 800 Years

of The Chinese using gunpowder
to ward off evil spirits,
Chairman Mao changed the script
when he said 'Political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun'.

But the makers of guns have more power
than their holders. 

Now, like all previous empires,
manufacturers fight wars through trade
-evil spirits for export-to create
a new, more spiralling, dependence.

The Oddest Defence Of Prostitution

You are ever likely to hear is.... 

'Prostitutes are not paid for having sex,
they are paid for leaving afterwards.'-Charlie Sheen

But then the depths of his evasions
about living the high life went rather far.

In his accounts 'friendly entertainments'
were how the eye watering costs of sex workers
got written down, whilst in the meanwhile
he denied to himself that he was HIV positive. 

Entertainment Vs Irritation

'Seeing a murder on television can help
[you] work off one's antagonisms.
And if you haven't any antagonisms
the commercials will give you some.'
-Alfred Hitchcock

The Life We Turn On And Off In The Corner

'Television is more interesting
than people, if it were not
we would have people
standing in the corners
of our rooms'-Alan Coren

A Self Portrait by D. H. Lawrence

Self portraits were not the only paintings he painted.
In 1929 he put on show in a private gallery a series
of paintings that were as sensual as they were primitive
in the techniques with which they were painted.
Ninety years on, what remained of the original
paintings was shown again to a more sympathetic response.
Please read about it here.

Choice in Disbelief

'When I told the people of Northern Ireland
that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience
stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God
of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants
in whom you don't believe?'-Quentin Crisp 

The Evening News

is when presenters
and say 'Good Evening'
and proceed tell the public
who it was not so good for.

National And Personal Delusion

Long before Rohypnol created amnesiac victims
of sexual assault absolute power, self censorship,
and corruption to the point of total misinformation
have made people yield and submit just as effectively.

The Easy Life

The road to Hell often presents itself 
as the path of least resistance,
how else would it appear to so attractive?

Language Inflation

Any advertising man will tell you

that anything that is worth selling
is worth even more when it is oversold
and they should know, by how much
they oversell themselves and their industry.

The Secret Of Happiness

is knowing our own transience-
that is what makes for the lightest,
and most powerful, self renewal.

Caution; Journalists At Work

The tabloid press are seen as benign,
but their agenda was always
to reinforce the immobility
of being born working class
and having low social status. 

The Life Beyond Contemplation

We all consider suicide
at some point in our lives.
But actually taking our lives
away from our being overpowered
by others takes a courage
that goes beyond contemplation;

it requires acting faster than you think.

Indirect Language

'Euphemisms are unpleasant truths
wearing diplomatic cologne'-Quentin Crisp

Out Of Scale Thinking

The more the amount of money
that is thrown at us,
the less we understand
how its value is sustained,
compared with the value
of being a good neighbour.

You Can't Be Too Thin To Be Spiritual

Incredible? Man 'Survives Without Food' For 70 Years

Indian doctors are studying a remarkable 83-year-old holy man who claims to have spent the last seven decades without food and water. Military medics hope the experiments on Prahlad Jani can help soldiers develop their survival strategies.
The long-haired and bearded yogi is under 24-hour observation by a team of 30 doctors during three weeks of tests at a hospital in the western city of Ahmedabad.
Two cameras have been set up in his room, while a mobile camera films him when he goes outside, guaranteeing round-the-clock observation. His body will be scanned and his brain and heart activity measured with electrodes.

"The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water," said Dr G. Ilavazahagan, who is directing the research.

"This may help in working out strategies for survival during natural calamities, extreme stressful conditions and extra-terrestrial explorations like future missions to the Moon and Mars by the human race."

Since the experiment began on April 22, Jani has neither eaten nor drunk and has not been to the toilet.

"The exercise of taking this yogi under the medical scanner is to understand what energy supports his existence," Dr Ilavazahagan added.

"Jani says he meditates to get energy. Our soldiers will not be able to meditate, but we would still like to find out more about the man and his body."

Jani, who dresses in red and wears a nose ring, grew up in Charod village in the Mehsana district in Gujarat. He claims to have been blessed by a goddess when he was aged eight, which has enabled him to survive without sustenance.

The Taste Of Lost Arguments

When courtesy sours
from politeness into deference, 

extracted through implied threat,
then however logical agreement
might be, it will always taste of humbug.

Humility Through Learning

'Just because some of us can read
and write and do a little math
that does not mean that we deserve
to conquer the universe'-Kurt Vonnegut

The Currency Of Being And Thought

St Paul said that 
'the love of money is the root of all evil.'.
His opinions on the practical uses
for money went unrecorded. 

He would agree with me
that the distance from 
'Evil be to him who evil thinks'*
to simply 'Evil be'
is shorter than we think.

Gloria Mundi Sic Transit.

*HONI SOIT Q MAL Y PENSE in medieval French,
it was inscribed on pre-decimal, Carolingian, coinage
£.s.d. in the United Kingdom since the middle ages.
On the 15th of February 1971 decimal coinage
became the currency and the phrase rarely appeared again. 

Car Crash Turbo-Poetry

The car crash economics
of Cynics Inc,
fuelled by self belief
and schadenfraude,
howl against the laws

that they have not yet bought
and corrupted.

The best the poor can do
to confound the fears
in which the rich invest,
is to endure, and not riot that often.

When The 'Almost' Speaks Most Loudly

As a non-member of a non-society
whose most dynamic industry 

is producing evasions of being,
may is I am almost glad to be here?

Wherever 'here' is...

Lights On, Nobody Home

Because with city life the people reflect
the absence of presence of where they live.

Do I Want To Meet Reality Today?

With solipsism we act, or we don't act,
as if our thoughts are our greatest strength.
Sometimes we might be right. 

Whatever we do with our solipsism
it  can't withstand a meeting with reality. 

Clear Directions

"The Clearest way into the Universe

is through a forest wilderness." -John Muir

Life In Blameland

The fall; the presumption
in the hindsight of faith
of a once unmeasurable
prelapsarian utopia?

Or Satan's literally once
only closing-down sale
of universal innocence
to the most cynical bidder-himself?

The choice is ours, as long as Eve
and women-kind do not take the blame
for us having choices we are saddled with.
Women-kind are half of human kind
thy deserve better than being blamed
for something for which there is not the evidence.

Pigs And Humans; An Orwellian Comparison

George Orwell wrote,
somewhat reductively,

'Advertising is the sound of a stick
rattling inside a swill bucket'.

Sadly, his quote demeans
the sensitivity of pigs.
Though it is accurate
about the vast expanse
of human passivity.

Consequences

Thinking the unthinkable is all very well
but undoing what should never be done

will always lead to the road to hell.

Where Does Theft And Violence Start?

If 'Shopping with violence'
accurately describes looting,
then how much more at peace with the world
was the process of making the goods
that eventually came to be stolen?
 

Identity Crisis Solved

Though since you are seeing this on a screen
then who is watching you?

Reform Through Consumerism

In the midst of a riot
the Sky News reporter
shouted at the looter
'Where are you going
with that television?'

The looter replied
'I am taking it home,
to 'believe in better'*
through watching
Sky satellite news.

If they show this clip

we will both be on it.'.



*Sky's advertising strap-line.

Edgar Alan Pooh

Putting the menace of E.A. Poe
into the innocence of childhood,
where it already more present
than we realise.