Furrowed message

Eyebrows talk sideways

Miss remarks I'm making

With uneasing proficiency

It cuts you see

Gives me legitmacy

Small sacrifice

This pain in you

Furrowed message

Eyebrows talk sideways

Miss remarks I'm making

With uneasing proficiency

It cuts you see

Gives me legitmacy

Small sacrifice

This pain in you

The civilising impulse

To break what is new

Make it safe to consume

Endow us with novelty

Without social penalty

This -dear friends -

Is progress

The civilising impulse

To break what is new

Make it safe to consume

Endow us with novelty

Without social penalty

This -dear friends -

Is progress

Wanderer

The wanderer's ways belie his dreaming

That coasts scar his eyes, mountains his sleep

Feet tired for walking

He'll rest where he can

Shuttered eyes, stirring breeze

Origins as bleak as future

The walk grasps and lets go with each boot-imprinted mud, sand or purple-budded branch broken on the heath.

His mouth pursed speaks loudly to any encounterer

Explains perfectly why he's here:

"The road goes and with it go I. Your houses are cess-pools of stagnated ways. Give me the air which is nothing. Patch of bracken to put this head on. Anything to say or shall I move on?"

Desperate ways have we know but nothing of the shame simplicity brings.

Wanderer

The wanderer's ways belie his dreaming

That coasts scar his eyes, mountains his sleep

Feet tired for walking

He'll rest where he can

Shuttered eyes, stirring breeze

Origins as bleak as future

The walk grasps and lets go with each boot-imprinted mud, sand or purple-budded branch broken on the heath.

His mouth pursed speaks loudly to any encounterer

Explains perfectly why he's here:

"The road goes and with it go I. Your houses are cess-pools of stagnated ways. Give me the air which is nothing. Patch of bracken to put this head on. Anything to say or shall I move on?"

Desperate ways have we know but nothing of the shame simplicity brings.

4pm

Breakfast done

Wondering when

Change will come

4pm

Breakfast done

Wondering when

Change will come

I keep running out...

I keep running out...

I am the drops of

Undreamed hope that'll

Drown you if

You'd listen

I am the drops of

Undreamed hope that'll

Drown you if

You'd listen

Wipeout

Falling wastes crash unendingly

Tear drop begins descent

Falling wastes crash undeterredly

You’re unleavened

Unsaid

Casted marks and plush asunder

Faced with no doubt splendid blooms

You mix the castes in putrid pastry

Rotten thread rotten loom

Figure in your wideout misstery

You’ve flagged

Gotten rad

Dead soon


{an ode to G7 ministers}

Wipeout

Falling wastes crash unendingly

Tear drop begins descent

Falling wastes crash undeterredly

You’re unleavened

Unsaid

Casted marks and plush asunder

Faced with no doubt splendid blooms

You mix the castes in putrid pastry

Rotten thread rotten loom

Figure in your wideout misstery

You’ve flagged

Gotten rad

Dead soon


{an ode to G7 ministers}

A love poem

Love is not a piranha fish

It has much longer gnashers

Made of corn and disaster cane

And welted banana flashes

It ties and grips and doesn’t move

Or freely when it’s fine

Otherwise parched and lucid

Painful, failing vine.

Love cuts without rhythm or blade

Needs barely want excuses

But excuses for time the deeper cut

Love demands

And loses.

A love poem

Love is not a piranha fish

It has much longer gnashers

Made of corn and disaster cane

And welted banana flashes

It ties and grips and doesn’t move

Or freely when it’s fine

Otherwise parched and lucid

Painful, failing vine.

Love cuts without rhythm or blade

Needs barely want excuses

But excuses for time the deeper cut

Love demands

And loses.

The road's going on an African trip

Odia Ofeimun, Nigeria

"Song"

The road's going on an African trip

Odia Ofeimun, Nigeria

"Song"

Summer Ones You Win

Grey spider-light dawns beginning of Summer’s blessing

We are naked on the red sitting room carpet

Open curtains daring early rising neighbours to see...

See innocence unfurled

Washed of itself and smelling of come

My back on carpet,

Your back on carpet

White ceiling greeting rising breath

A look to you

Brown eyes at me

Warning

This may not be it

Heaven wrecked your body

Cast curses on breasts, thighs

Puked up so some rare mortals

Could taste

Tongue tip angelic fles

Cold eyes bake 4am

Goose pimples provoke

Stroked

Sips from a glass

You gasp as cold drops down

The inward curve of your thigh

Cooling it

‘Love comes here not often’

You look away

Calling

For a time this couldn’t be true

Back of fingers roll shoulder, elbow, hand

Fingers reply in faint recognition

Though tender, substantial

Gaze that this time it could be

Gaze and look for nothing

Gaze than what is offered

Gaze

I curl you in purple fleecy nylon gown

Grey blanket round us two

Gaze

Head yields to my shoulder

Barest incline

Before you realise this is too much and pull away

---- pssst! - this follows this - see how the ball goes round? -----

Summer Ones You Win

Grey spider-light dawns beginning of Summer’s blessing

We are naked on the red sitting room carpet

Open curtains daring early rising neighbours to see...

See innocence unfurled

Washed of itself and smelling of come

My back on carpet,

Your back on carpet

White ceiling greeting rising breath

A look to you

Brown eyes at me

Warning

This may not be it

Heaven wrecked your body

Cast curses on breasts, thighs

Puked up so some rare mortals

Could taste

Tongue tip angelic fles

Cold eyes bake 4am

Goose pimples provoke

Stroked

Sips from a glass

You gasp as cold drops down

The inward curve of your thigh

Cooling it

‘Love comes here not often’

You look away

Calling

For a time this couldn’t be true

Back of fingers roll shoulder, elbow, hand

Fingers reply in faint recognition

Though tender, substantial

Gaze that this time it could be

Gaze and look for nothing

Gaze than what is offered

Gaze

I curl you in purple fleecy nylon gown

Grey blanket round us two

Gaze

Head yields to my shoulder

Barest incline

Before you realise this is too much and pull away

---- pssst! - this follows this - see how the ball goes round? -----

Responsibility

As if in reply I read this in Kahlil Gibran's 'The Prophet' today:

And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.

The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,

And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

And still more often the condemned is the burden-bearer for the guiltless and unblamed.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.

If any of you would bring judgment the unfaithful wife,

Let him also weight the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.

And let him who would lash the offender look unto the spirit of the offended.

And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the ax unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;

And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.

And you judges who would be just,

What judgment pronounce you upon him who though honest in the flesh yet is a thief in spirit?

What penalty lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit?

And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor,

Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged?

And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?

Responsibility

As if in reply I read this in Kahlil Gibran's 'The Prophet' today:

And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.

The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,

And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

And still more often the condemned is the burden-bearer for the guiltless and unblamed.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.

If any of you would bring judgment the unfaithful wife,

Let him also weight the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.

And let him who would lash the offender look unto the spirit of the offended.

And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the ax unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;

And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.

And you judges who would be just,

What judgment pronounce you upon him who though honest in the flesh yet is a thief in spirit?

What penalty lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit?

And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor,

Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged?

And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?

I spent a time like this two years ago

When street corners became closest friends

Obsolescence staved off by continuous wandering

Seeking in the cracks of the next cobble

The dust to change my course.

I spent a time like this two years ago

When street corners became closest friends

Obsolescence staved off by continuous wandering

Seeking in the cracks of the next cobble

The dust to change my course.

Freewill demystifying

Cyclic geometry

Find ourselves so ensnared

Great miracle ball of freedom

Let me find in you

What needs to be seen

For freedom's exile

Ruins days that I withdraw by

Echoing deeper into cavernous excuse

Of seclusion

I'm fading

Help me glow

Freewill demystifying

Cyclic geometry

Find ourselves so ensnared

Great miracle ball of freedom

Let me find in you

What needs to be seen

For freedom's exile

Ruins days that I withdraw by

Echoing deeper into cavernous excuse

Of seclusion

I'm fading

Help me glow

Alistair Cooke and the Human Situation

The below passage has been grinding in my head for two days. Once day for its beauty and two days for the depth of its message. To what extent are we to interpret occurences as a comdemnation of the world in which we live? Could Hitler have survived anywhere other than in a Europe that was ready for it? To subscribe to the argument, there needs to be an understanding of events in a complex cosmological web. How actions, intentions and thought bring about final occurences. It is a belief not unlike the Eastern view of karma, or Western idea of Fate - although dealt by a collective mortal hand.

Is it possible that Robert F. Kennedy was shot because America wasn't ready for the level of liberality he propounded? Sirhan B. Sirhan was thus the finger that pulled the trigger at the end of America (and the world's?) ill-equipped arm.

Could a man be allowed to commit such a crime in a society that could not in its deepest psychological recesses, tolerate it?

It's the opinion of this blog that Mind is not separate, nor belonging to any one individual. Though we may hide from our own scruples and indignities, unless honestly confronted, they will inevitably be brought out in the Mind of another.

A dear friend would draw sneers for suggesting we are responsible for Africa's poverty. I believe he was right. The Earth operates as a single mind, the most conscious aspect of it contributing inevitably to its least.

This is a subtler argument than tying world history in a relentlessly deterministic web. But the cause from the least of our minds must be the responsibility of all.

And respond in what way? - honesty, integrity, engagement, love, courage to fulfil these and forgiveness of others and ourselves when we err in these high aspirations. I do not write these things, they've been said by sages since year dot.

But Cooke here is explicit about responsibility for our own conscience, preferring a dispassionate view of events rather than interment in a cyclic whirr of laying of blame.

I'm sick of intellectual and historical depictifying "To what extent was x responsible..." (hence the question in this blog being on the widest scale possible - universal causality)

The only answer to which is "Completely" and at the same time "Not at all".

See what you think of Campbell's article. As always your comments are warmly invited.

Alistair Cooke on Robert F. Kennedy's assassination (from The Guardian):

There was a head on the floor, streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an iced cake....I heard somebody cry, "Kennedy - shot," and heard a girl moan, "No, no, not again," and my companion was fingering a cigarette package like a paralytic. A dark woman suddenly bounded to a table and beat it, and howled like a wolf, "Stinking country, no, no, no, no" at the placid television commentators who had not yet got the news.

Well, the next morning when I saw and heard the Pope in his gentle, faltering English, I still could not believe that he was talking about this squalid, appalling scene in a hotel pantry that I had been a part of and would always be a part of. I have no doubt that this experience is a trauma, and because of it, no doubt, several days later, I still cannot rise to the general lamentations about a sick society.

I for one do not feel like an accessory to a crime, and I reject almost as a frivolous obscenity the sophistry of collective guilt, the idea that I or the American people killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Francis Kennedy.

I do not believe either that you conceived Hitler and that, in some deep unfathomable sense, all Europe was responsible for the extermination of six million Jews. With Edmund Burke, I do not know how you can indict a whole nation. To me, this now roaringly fashionable theme is a great folly. It is difficult to resist, because it deflects an attack at one's own conscience to some big corporate culprit.

It sounds wise and deep, but really is a way of opting out of the human situation.

Alistair Cooke and the Human Situation

The below passage has been grinding in my head for two days. Once day for its beauty and two days for the depth of its message. To what extent are we to interpret occurences as a comdemnation of the world in which we live? Could Hitler have survived anywhere other than in a Europe that was ready for it? To subscribe to the argument, there needs to be an understanding of events in a complex cosmological web. How actions, intentions and thought bring about final occurences. It is a belief not unlike the Eastern view of karma, or Western idea of Fate - although dealt by a collective mortal hand.

Is it possible that Robert F. Kennedy was shot because America wasn't ready for the level of liberality he propounded? Sirhan B. Sirhan was thus the finger that pulled the trigger at the end of America (and the world's?) ill-equipped arm.

Could a man be allowed to commit such a crime in a society that could not in its deepest psychological recesses, tolerate it?

It's the opinion of this blog that Mind is not separate, nor belonging to any one individual. Though we may hide from our own scruples and indignities, unless honestly confronted, they will inevitably be brought out in the Mind of another.

A dear friend would draw sneers for suggesting we are responsible for Africa's poverty. I believe he was right. The Earth operates as a single mind, the most conscious aspect of it contributing inevitably to its least.

This is a subtler argument than tying world history in a relentlessly deterministic web. But the cause from the least of our minds must be the responsibility of all.

And respond in what way? - honesty, integrity, engagement, love, courage to fulfil these and forgiveness of others and ourselves when we err in these high aspirations. I do not write these things, they've been said by sages since year dot.

But Cooke here is explicit about responsibility for our own conscience, preferring a dispassionate view of events rather than interment in a cyclic whirr of laying of blame.

I'm sick of intellectual and historical depictifying "To what extent was x responsible..." (hence the question in this blog being on the widest scale possible - universal causality)

The only answer to which is "Completely" and at the same time "Not at all".

See what you think of Campbell's article. As always your comments are warmly invited.

Alistair Cooke on Robert F. Kennedy's assassination (from The Guardian):

There was a head on the floor, streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an iced cake....I heard somebody cry, "Kennedy - shot," and heard a girl moan, "No, no, not again," and my companion was fingering a cigarette package like a paralytic. A dark woman suddenly bounded to a table and beat it, and howled like a wolf, "Stinking country, no, no, no, no" at the placid television commentators who had not yet got the news.

Well, the next morning when I saw and heard the Pope in his gentle, faltering English, I still could not believe that he was talking about this squalid, appalling scene in a hotel pantry that I had been a part of and would always be a part of. I have no doubt that this experience is a trauma, and because of it, no doubt, several days later, I still cannot rise to the general lamentations about a sick society.

I for one do not feel like an accessory to a crime, and I reject almost as a frivolous obscenity the sophistry of collective guilt, the idea that I or the American people killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Francis Kennedy.

I do not believe either that you conceived Hitler and that, in some deep unfathomable sense, all Europe was responsible for the extermination of six million Jews. With Edmund Burke, I do not know how you can indict a whole nation. To me, this now roaringly fashionable theme is a great folly. It is difficult to resist, because it deflects an attack at one's own conscience to some big corporate culprit.

It sounds wise and deep, but really is a way of opting out of the human situation.

Work in progress

I am the parts life told me it couldn't connect

Delivered devastatingly to the shit heap and now your doorstep

Unabashed and shining

Nowhere for me to go.

Why not here?

Why not you?

Why not the arc of this spectra-coloured universe rippling through us again and again

Sluicing and destroying petty

The feller of all sanctity

Anathema of contrivance

Conjoiner of thrown out, bemused, fucked over

The real ones

Ones who have tried and know

Serial killer for your serial filler

So broken we put things back together another way

And just our being here frightens you

Our freedom, our inspiration

to resist and you think it's resistance

Not the unwavering all-quivering brush strokes

Emerging from nowhere, colouring without intention

Loki had nothing on this

Rainbow haired!

Galaxy mouthed!

Pure expression melting viper hatred

Miser headed blinking,

Disaster for your thinking

Moon headed,

Meadow costumed

We are the ALL SINGING, ALL DANCING scum of the earth

Up to rub your face in it

Show how dirty you are

Desperate in your veils

Believe you lucky in shrouds,

Never let go of a single precious thing

Unless at the bottom of a tub of alcohol

Who's your God, drunken atheist?

Sure isn't you, tortured in drudgery,

Pot-pourri mundane fuckery

Have you seen the sun lately?

Heard the inconsequential jabber of a leaf?

Revelled in pointlessness, dashed against its own rocks

You gotta go there to come back

Though most never do.

Worth it though, huh?

Schizophrenic suicide

over

the chance

that you'll never

experience

anything at all

Work in progress

I am the parts life told me it couldn't connect

Delivered devastatingly to the shit heap and now your doorstep

Unabashed and shining

Nowhere for me to go.

Why not here?

Why not you?

Why not the arc of this spectra-coloured universe rippling through us again and again

Sluicing and destroying petty

The feller of all sanctity

Anathema of contrivance

Conjoiner of thrown out, bemused, fucked over

The real ones

Ones who have tried and know

Serial killer for your serial filler

So broken we put things back together another way

And just our being here frightens you

Our freedom, our inspiration

to resist and you think it's resistance

Not the unwavering all-quivering brush strokes

Emerging from nowhere, colouring without intention

Loki had nothing on this

Rainbow haired!

Galaxy mouthed!

Pure expression melting viper hatred

Miser headed blinking,

Disaster for your thinking

Moon headed,

Meadow costumed

We are the ALL SINGING, ALL DANCING scum of the earth

Up to rub your face in it

Show how dirty you are

Desperate in your veils

Believe you lucky in shrouds,

Never let go of a single precious thing

Unless at the bottom of a tub of alcohol

Who's your God, drunken atheist?

Sure isn't you, tortured in drudgery,

Pot-pourri mundane fuckery

Have you seen the sun lately?

Heard the inconsequential jabber of a leaf?

Revelled in pointlessness, dashed against its own rocks

You gotta go there to come back

Though most never do.

Worth it though, huh?

Schizophrenic suicide

over

the chance

that you'll never

experience

anything at all