Heavy Discipline

With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms—Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes—And The Insect People of Minraud with metal music. Nova Express 112 ~ WSB

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Until day four of mona foma I was ignorant as to the existence of Psycroptic. It has been a long time since I have seen a metal band play live. Needless to say I no longer make the scene metal-wise.

But the great thing about festivals, about these sorts of anthology of acts is that one gets to hear things they did not know that wanted to hear. Even though I no longer make the scene, I still enjoy listening to good metal. To me it is one of those types of music that forces you to move. Metal is still the best fuck off to parents and squares everywhere music, to all authority!

The band had just started their set as I walked up the street towards Macquarie Wharf. Louder and louder the music rumbled and echoed, calling to me. I was a bit wary when I walked into old MAC2 warehouse cavern with a tech-death metal playing. But I chose to keep an open mind. I wanted to judge the band on what they are trying to do, not what I would have liked them to do. I am glad I did.

Before the end of the song I had moved my way to the front of the crowd and was, if not head banging, at least grooving in my own way. For after all were not the Sex Pistols a type of metal band?

Psycroptic is a Hobart band, they have released five albums to much acclaim in the metal community and have won an international fan base playing tech-death metal. I know this because after the show I was waiting in line for a coffee and spoke with a fan.

Technical metal refers to the technical ability of the musicians. The Guardian described this type of metal “death metal with complicated bits in the vein of prog rock.” This is not the sort of band where one can recruit a friend because they look the part, one has to be able to play their instruments. If technical ability is the key, then Psycroptic deserve their position as leaders in this type of metal.

Drummer Dave Haley first captured my attention with his relentless, powerful, driving drum work. Brother Joe Haley played guitar, and like his brother he played with a savage power and speed. A replacement bass guitarist was needed for this gig. He was introduced as Sam. Like the rest of the band he was a demon on his instrument. Thumping bass lines and jumping about with the best of them. Lead singer Jason Peppiatt rounded out the band. He strode about the stage exhorting his troops to battle, inspiring frenzy in band and crowd alike. The younger ones in the front rocked hard. Long Lacedaemon hair giving them strength. The singer reminded me a bit of Brad Pitt in the movie Troy. And to my drug addled rock and roll fantasy mind his death metal screams and wails echoed down the ages the screams of the Danaans before the walls of Troy. The angry refusal to follow those who are your inferior. Screaming out the pain, horror and sorrow of ten years of futile war.

Screaming and hollering the rage and energy of working people.

I still have problems with this type of music -- but to have been there, to have been in that moment, I would not have missed it.

Dream Factory Manifesto

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How can we speak of a dream factory?

Socialism?

Capitalism?

Classless Society?

What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.

What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.

Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.

Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?

Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.

We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.

Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.

Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.

Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.

Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.

Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!

I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.

Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.

He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.

No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.

Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.

Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.

Do not be wishy-washy.

If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.

If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.

To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.

Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.

A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.

Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.

To understand Nature's hid causes

Happy, who had the skill to understand
Nature's hid causes, and beneath his feet
All terrors cast, and death's relentless doom,
And the loud roar of greedy Acheron.

I know that I am getting old by the fact that I listen to Radio National rather than JJJ. Apart from making me feel old I have to say the I do enjoy listening to RN. In contrast to television, radio seems to have more time thus allowing a broad wide ranging discussion of events and ideas. Unlike some sections of our society, I am also quite happy to listen to ideas that are different to my own regrettable and hackneyed notions. Indeed hearing the other voices often forces me to perform a revaluation of my thoughts, my values. Sometimes I feel I can quite happily ignore the other ideas, sometimes I am compelled to modify what I currently think, and on occasion I am forced to reconsider and to abruptly and firmly change course. Without doubt this is a good and mature position to take, and more importantly it shows that democracy, being synonymous with diversity, is something greater than the puerile shadowplay of media regurgitation, party politicking or mindless voting between Shem and Shaun.

So a few days ago I was listening to RN. Between cooking dinner, and responding to the endless chatter of three young children, I heard an interchange between an interviewer and his interviewee that gave me pause. As part of a broader conversation of some French intellectual (whose name to my sorrow, I did not catch, I plead in my defense that

I am getting old, and suffer in a minor but still inconvenient way from industrial deafness) calling for a 'temple' to be constructed by and for atheists. Whether this may or may not be a good idea, I am not in position to say. It did bring to mind images of the Culte de la Raison (Cult of Reason) during the French Revolution. What did get my attention was the general and rather casual agreement to the idea that Atheism is always a negation, is no more than negation. This is considered to be common sense, but is, in truth, a cliche, a triviality raised to heights of a profundity. This comment is what forced me to my keyboard.

At first glance it may seem that atheism is in fact a negation, and this my more pedantic readers will point out can be clearly shown by the use of the Greek prefix a-, which of course means no, or not, or even without. One does not have to dig too deep to grasp that this prefix connotes negation. And everyone agrees quite clearly that atheism means without God. It therefore then may seem obvious that Atheism is a negation. However to my mind Atheism is in reality not a negation, but rather an affirmation, and it is Theism that is the negation.

What does atheism affirm? In a word, humanity. All that is solid melts in the air and we are forced to confront the reality of the cold wind of outer space, and of our singposted world, and of uncaring nature. In such a universe we are alone, and naked and scared we must comprehend our smallness and our frailness in the face of almost infinite emptiness and disdain. To my thinking, and I this will not true for all atheists, it is this lack of an afterlife that has made me less, not more willing to support; for example, war, punishment, violence. Indeed atheism makes me cling more closely to my fellow, as Doctor Who would say, stupid apes. This lack of belief in an aftelife has made me less likely to join in the periodic frenzy of demagogic vengeance. I am not able to proudly wear the tee shirt with the lovely slogan 'Kill them all, let God sort 'em out.' While it is equally true that not all theists would endorse such a slogan, this is not the place to argue this point.

In a world where God does not intervene in history and human affairs we are left to our own devices. We are left to figure out for ourselves how the world works and what is the true history of the universe. In the days of the ancient Greek natural philosophers there were those who noted that Ethiopian gods had black skin and curly hair, and so asserted that if cows had a god it would look like a cow. Some of these thinkers were able to approximate the correct size of the Earth. Some of these thinkers could see that the fossilised shells found on the tops of mountains proved what we would later call evolution. How bold were these thinkers, who mocked the polytheism of their day, compared to some of our current fundamentalist thinkers who make a show of public piety, and who view fossils as tricks of God (or the Devil) to test our faith! What an absurd idea that God would plant false evedince in the ground as a joke, as a 'pop quiz', and how difficult to have a rational discussion with such thinkers.

To see professional athletes and entertainers publicly thanking God for their good fortune seems to me to show a remarkable lack of balance concerning the role of God. While millions of children die needlessly every year, it must be the height of arrogance to think that God, rather than saving these poor children, thought it best to make sure an over payed individual received even more accolades and success.

To stand on our own feet and to see the world as it truly is, is the affirmation that atheism stands for. To assume that there are no interventions in the natural world and human history by God, has allowed us to move from the medieval slumber that was the Age of Faith, has allowed the phenomenal growth in wealth and longevity that we enjoy today. Knowing that it is penicillin, which was investigated and discovered and produced by real living humans, rather than prayer that will cure illness is the affirmation that atheism gives us. Knowing, in broad strokes, the way in which life in it's dazzaling complexity developed is the affirmation of atheism. Knowing that there is no God to stop the sun and make it dance in the sky, but rather that all stars are formed from the gravitational forces within interstellar clouds of dust and organic compounds is the affirmation of atheism.

It would be pointless of me to try to prove that all scientists are without religious faith. But it would be equally foolish to try to prove that even the most religious of all scientists does not 'suspend belief' while working in their laboratories. That is to say a scientist can not, after testing various compounds on the stereotyped guinea pig, affirm that it was prayer that cured the cancer.

And it would be foolish of me to say that all atheists are lovely people who would never harm a fly, or that they are able to free themselves from superstition and generalised human stupidity and greed. I can however happily say that when I see the world around me, when I look down the microscope, or I look upwards through the telescope, I see not God (nor Gods) but rather a rational unfolding of physical laws. An unfolding of not only rational laws, but also the creation of a vast co-operative conversation across national borders and across time, which I can comprehend, and be swept up in, and hopefully extend. When there is posited a god who intervenes at random moments in history with unexplainable miracles this rationality falls apart, and I no longer have the ability to grasp the world as it truly stands. This falling down of rational understanding and co-operative enquiry is the negation that theism gives us.

Aristotle once described the good life, the life of virtue as being friendship and the desire for knowing. This is the affirmation of atheism that I affix to my banner. All we have is each other, are hands and our brains. The search for love, and the questing after knowledge are the only worthwhile goals of life. I can love my family and my friends, I can love the other, I can seek to extend creativity and my understanding of the world without having recourse to any sort of God.

I want the grandness of my world, of my universe to be teeming over with life, change, and constant contradiction. This is the affirmation of atheism. I can not, even with the strong religious upbringing that my parents gave me, see theism as being anything but an attempt to stultify and proscribe, to say that this is how it is and how it must be for all time. This to me is negation of the wonderful, terrifying, surging struggle and contention that is our universe.

I am (hopefully) not so blinded by my atheism to not understand that many great scientists and artists have been deeply religious. I only have to look at the work Mendel did with his pea plants that helped us understand genetics. But I think that most people would agree that both the original Miletian revolution in science, as well as our more recent scientific industrial revolutions sprang from an impulse to try to understand the world as it is, with no dependency on divine intervention, to see and grasp the world as the endless unfolding of rational, understandable physical laws. In his recent book 'The Swerve' Professor Greenblatt argues that the Renaissance begins with the finding of one of the greatest works not only of materialism and atheism, De rerum natura or 'On the Nature of Things' by Lucretius, but also a great work of art, full of passion and compassion. In this work Lucretius argues the classical atomist view of Democritus, Epicurus and others that the world is made up of matter in motion.

And it is this desire to understand the world, this fount of human genius that has created this world we now live in, this world of computers, and medicine, and space travel and more. I despair that this world is overrun with shallow moneyed interests who seek to make only profit. But I also hope that one day we can understand that humanity is on the cusp of a brave new world, if we can survive the next phase of history. A world where energy is seemingly taken from the air, where things can be brought into being as if by magic. A co-operativly built world of superabundance were we can move beyond the sordid quest for cash and reputation. For my childrens sake I wish to move into this world where, as Aristotle might have said, we are free to investigate the only things that matter, friendship and the love of knowledge.

The motto comes from Virgil The Georgics Book II and can be found here http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/georgics.2.ii.html

Phoibos - the bright one

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Number 21: Apollo

O bright one! 
The swan beats 
time with wide wings, 
And
Loudly sings 
of you 

and settles 
the river bank 
beside
The ever flowing
River 
           Peneios. 

Of Thou;
The sweet sounding singer 
carrying  a clear toned 
lyre

First and last, 
Always 
She sings. 

Hear my rejoicing 
In you,
             Master.
 
I appease you with song.

Straight away I liked the image of the swans flapping wings to bring about a successful landing on the river bank. Singing and keeping time with wing beasts. All in honour of Phoebes Apollo. Phoibos, the bright one. Who was, in revenge for a mocking Eros who was bragging how he was a better shot with the bow, was shot by an arrow of the butt of his humour. Apollo fell in love in Daphne, and like the equally cursed Kassandra, she scorned him.

Daphne, fleeing the lust of Apollo, prayed to her father, Peneios, one of the potamoi. The Potamoi were the 3000 river gods, sons of Oceanus (Okeanos) and Tethys (Tethus). In a short sighted attempt at protecting his daughter, Peneios turned her into a laurel tree. The laurel became sacred to Apollo.

I could not refuse myself the small echo of Heraclitus, in describing the Thessalian river bank where the swan settled.

Hear my rejoicing 
In you,
             Master.

This line caused me some pain. The word in Greek is Anax.

Anax is from an earlier word wanax, which is found on Mycenaean inscriptions, meaning Lord or Master. This word can be found in Homer, and is used to describe Agamemnon, anax andron, leader of men. (Iliad 1,442). Xerxes and Darius are called Lord King. In the tragedy Persians by Aeschylus line 5 we see anax Xerxes basileus. This word is also used in sense of master of the house (oikoio anax); and in a descriptive and telling Homeric simile from the Odyssey (10,216) 'As when the dogs fawn about the lords during a feast.' All of this seemed to me to show a hierarchal relationship. So, as I was forced by dictionaries to choose between lord and master, I chose master. Lord, while fitting, and being the more traditional translation, had a Christian connotation that, for various reasons, I was happy to avoid.



Master has a brutal simplicity, or if you prefer a simple brutality, and this simplicity is able to quickly describe the master/servant relationship of the Deathless Ones (athanatoi) with the Brotoi, the Clots of Gore.

Pleasant enough it is in our easy chair to, while glowing in opium dreams of Swinburne or the more austere Nietzschian tumult, to romanticise the relationship the Greeks had to their gods. To the Deathless humans are mere playthings. Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth, he brought forth as a conspirator Momus, a scoffer, the personification of reproach, blame and disgrace, or spoke to Eris as the personification of strife. Or maybe it was Themis. It all depends on what you read and take to canonical. Themis being one of those untranslatable characters. She is a Goddess of Order, of 'Doing the Right Thing.' In the Cypria it is the pity that Zeus feels for Gaia that is the origin of the Trojan War. `There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth, and Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the world. And so the heroes were slain in Troy, and the plan of Zeus came to pass.' And Plato agrees `That it is Zeus who has done this, and brought all these things to pass, you do not like to say; for where fear is, there too is shame.' Regardless of how it was brought about we can clearly see that the Gods are only to happy to commit any number of crimes, murders, rapes, kidnappings etc using humans as toys. Leaving a trail of abused and broken mortals in their wake.

Like all good tyrants the Gods cheat when it suits. In a musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, Marsyas had played Apollo to a standstill, with Apollo playing the lyre against the flute of Marsyas. Apollo fearful of losing to a mortal challenged the satyr to play his instrument upside down, and then again while singing along. The flute playing satyr of course could not do these things. Apollo celebrated his victory by flaying Marsyas alive.



So quickly we move from the epiphany of the wide winged swan to the ever present threat of instant death, for the Deathless Ones will brook no insolence. They know their power and are not afraid to use that power, depending on the whim that strikes. Leaving the author of this hymn to beg for the attention and pleasure of Apollo. Like the Homeric fawning dog at the banquet table hoping to appease the master, and so gain a crumb of affection or dinner. Much like the members of the 99%.

Or said much much better than I ever could - Rilke First Duino Elegy (coincidentally) Duino is just outside Trieste where Joyce was living at the time.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

Kubele

Here we see Cybele (Kubele) being pulled in her cart by lions, in a image taken from http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Cybele.html

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Hymn 14 to the Mother of the Gods

Sing clear tone Muse, daughter of Great Zeus.

Sing the mother of all
Mortal and immortal.

She is well pleased with
The rattle of seistron
The clashing of shields
The wail of flutes, the cry of wolves
The roar of bright eyed lions
Echoing across wooded mountains.

Rejoice in the goddess and sing your song.

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The Mother of The Gods. Identified with the Minoan Rhea, and the Greek goddess Gaia, among many others. A complex series of tales and rituals surround this goddess. She is the source of the extraordinary poem by the Roman poet Catullus, a powerful work that talks of the frenzied rituals of the goddess, and the remorse of the self castrated acolyte.

Cybele seems to have existed in the pre-historic bronze age eastern Mediterranean region, and extended across most of the cultures of the time. Even in Rome, where she was brought during the Second Punic War (about 204 BC) to fulfil a Sibylline prophecy. This was seconded by the oracle at Delphi. As the Romans defeated the Carthaginians, it must have been true.

As a goddess of ecstasy the Great Mother existed across much of Bronze Age Europe, only to be overthrown by the Sky King Gods. With a series of names and attribute, she is far too complex a deity to discuss successfully on this blog, I will leave the discussion here, and leave any more research to the reader. Remarking only that the pathway from a primitive communist, matricentric society to our present patriarchal existence could only have been physical violence.

War and Anti War

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I was reading an only moderately interesting book about the Trojan War. Among the cliches of a conflict of cultures and the battles of East and West, I came across some good quotes from out of Homer.

So like a good little geek, I had no choice to look up the original, and make a stab at translation. Mucking around a bit with what I ended up with, lead me to this two little pretend imagist works posted here.

These lines are Odysseus speaking to Agamemnon. Things are not going well for the Greeks. Odysseus lets his captain know that this is the lot of soldiers, and they will have to fight until they die. He seems to be pointing to the cruelty of the gods and their callous disregard for human life. Maybe we can see the gods as standing in for the historic and economic forces in our lives, and how it can seem to the unexplored mind that war is natural and a normal part of life.

When in fact we all know that it is possible to end war.

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(Iliad Book 14.86)

This Zeus has assigned.

We are to endure,
From insolence
Into grey age,
Painful war,

Until we perish.
Everyone.


In this second quote, Odysseus is even more clear as to who should wear the blame for the war. It is clearly the work of the gods, and Zeus in particular. He seems to see the war as a toy of the gods, and the death of the many as being of no importance to the deathless ones.

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(Odyssey 14.235)

Along this hateful path
Far sounding Zeus
Led many
Knee bent men
To their death.

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The image depicts the battle about the body of Patroclus, and is from a greek vase. More can be found here
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/BattlePatroclus.jpg

A free and frank city

The Suppliants: lines 399 - 408



Herald:

Who is the ruler of this land?
To which one shall I announce
The proclamation of Creon?

He has mastery of the lands
Of Cadmus, since Eteocles
Died under the blows of his own
Brother Polynices, outside
Thebes of the seven towers.


Theseus:

You begin your tale
Falsely, stranger,
Seeking tyrants here.

Not for us the authority
Of one man, rather we are
A free and frank city.

The people rule and are ruled
In yearly turns. And what's more wealth
Will not grant you the most, for even
With the day labourer are they equal.

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Theseus killed the Minotaur. He became one of heroes who brought the Greeks into the light, into the world of the city.

I was struggling my way through the final chapter of "Politics in the Ancient World" by M.I. Finley, when he quoted from the Euripides play "The Suppliants." Anything to have a break from the arid style of the former Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. And anything in these dreary days of apathy across the Angloshpere that speaks to progressive ideas is a boon.

Knowing that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and with more enthusiasm than fluency, I dove into an attempt at translation.

I used ruler as opposed to tyrant in the first line, as I wanted to see this brief exchange as a critique on our own democracy. Euripides himself was both a supporter and critic of democracy. This is as it should be, criticism and self criticism. I thought it was important to use the world frank to describe the free city of Theseus. The phrase in the original is eleuthera polis, which means free city. I thought I had to go deeper, as it seems as if free is a heavily loaded word, one which means many different things to different people, one that over the years has lost some of it's lustre. A few of the synonyms for eleuthera included free, liberal, open, unencumbered, open to all, as well as my final choice of frank. One of the positive features of Athenian democracy was the idea of frank speech, even if only in theory. A citizen who was to speak before the assembly was expected to speak truthfully, including being truthful with themselves. This what is meant by the motto "Know thyself." How much this was actually followed in daily life I dare not say. Australians only have to look at their own mythology of mateship and the fair go to make their own conclusions as to how moderate and self aware the Ancient Greeks really were.

Beyond the 'woolly' idea of being able to speak frankly in the assembly, this simple exchange allows us to sneak a peek between the curtains, into a window on Athenian democracy in action. The people rule and are ruled in yearly turn. The citizens are expected to rule, to take an active part in the actual running the government, as well as debating and voting on policy and strategy. Ruling and ruled in turn. Beyond what we learn from Euripides, we know that Athenian democracy included payment for work done for the state, as well as the use of lotteries to allocate positions. Citizens were questioned before they took up their appointed roles, and reviewed at the end of the yearly appointment. We also know, if only negatively from the constant complaints of the literate aristocrats, that democracy in Athens was for a time extended to the lower classes, the rowers and the day labourers. Side by side with the well born the day labourer was expected to speak, and his speech was expected to be heard. Again as to how equal the assembly really was, I dare not say. It does seem as if the sheer expense of the political contest, as well as the large size of some electorates, act as a ration card for political activity by the great majority of people. Lotteries also seem to have an advantage, in that it would be harder for positions to ossify, as they do in our current regime. Lotteries and fixed terms form all positions would end the idea of people being in parliament as a career.

With the current impasse in politics in the West, any idea that extends the ideas of democracy is worth thinking about and discussing.

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Pic from: http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/gallery/theseusminotaur.jpg

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Another year over, a new one just begun. A new year of blogging and poetry.
As one gets older one gets to indulge in rounds of 'I told you so', as if
any sane person needed to be told that, for example, invading Iraq was not a good idea. And this rapidly turns into schadenfreude, or to use the term that the Philosopher would have used, epichairekakia. Yes, I do confess to a feeling of delight watching politicians and sundry hob knobs twisting in the wind of historical necessity.

Long term historical movements bring the greatest amusement, for example the turmoil of the Catholic Church, as years of abuse come to the fore. The long term 'blow back' caused by the US supporting Muslim guerrillas in Afghanistan. And then years later to see these groups fight the Amis to a standstill. This is the type of schadenfreude I enjoy. The unrolling of history.

Petty? Maybe.

Cruel and unfeeling. Never! Any feelings are always coupled with a deep sadness for the terrible loss of life. Any feelings always burn with angry at the terrible lies and distortions, the steady loss of our freedoms and rights, and the stupid complicity of all of us.

So I write poetry and do this and that about my life, working, raising children and so it goes. When a young lad I wished to be a published author. This would be a good thing, or so I thought. Now I look upon the rows of shelves in the markets, and at all the books published, I am glad I have never carried through with this dream. I can blame no one but myself for any failings, indeed I do not blame anyone for my not being a successful author. One would think that the sheer volume of works produced each year would allow for one more book of poetry, or one more small novel, and if I really wanted to go down this road I could very easily.

A half assed internet search gave me a number of over 500 000 books published in the Anglosphere, which turned out to about 1440 books a day, or one a minute! And so much just overwhelms and drowns us in a sea of market based editorial self censorship. Corralled into a particular form, typecast and constricted suffocatingly tight of mind forged manacles. Even the authors who are interesting and thoughtful, are they serving a need for the elites, acting as a 'safety value' of dissent?



Of course leads me into this blog. I have a need to write. It is almost like a disease. Even though I may not be very talented, and often I am unable to properly express the ideas bumbling around my noodle, I am still going to write. In this I want to follow a line of ephemera, which is why my external contact is via this blog and more importantly poetry (open mic) readings. This generates feelings and thoughts of immediacy and inevitable transience. The poem is written, and maybe it is read aloud and maybe deposited onto this blog, and then is forgotten as I and all things around me move, which brings us to this effort...

And so this poem is a welter of pretence and derivation. The title and first line allude to Villion, Shakespeare and Hopkins. Two sections concerning my back yard, nauseous with a sense of place. The first is daytime the second section is night time. And the two sonnets hinge on an unwobbling pivot, a half emerged quote from the Phenomenology, included in it's entirety.

Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

---

Eager morning, wide couple colored sky.
Matrix of cloud and pure sun massy blue.
Sparse white cloud tea rising morning, my eye
Scans and prowls damp landscape of dawn break dew.

Shadows of clouds and glittering sunlight
Compete and tumble across the distance.
Dull shadows of gray clouds, of middling height,
Obscure ridgeline farmland of shadow dance.

Garish sun reflects the water surface,
Bouncing, redoubling the burning glow.
Ninety two million miles of empty space
Birthing energy so that all needs grow.

Write what I see just beyond my window,
Recording can not be, to truth, a foe.

Into the dark, past split wood stacked three tonne,
High pressure clear night, bright Venus shining,
Pouring ash the turned earth garden begun.
Sea birds and lap wings calling combining

Far off single dogs bark and howl, I close
My eyes and listen to the songs of the trees.
Grand murmuring sonatas. Winds compose
Long slow songs of history and unease.

Epics written across a thousand years
Sung one thousand rustling chorus leaves.
I listen the songs my eyes fill with tears,
The outer space wind, my heart grieves.

Everything. The Earth, the Sun, the Moon moves,
As careful standing on the one spot proves.

Fish That Fly

An old poem - a response to the idea of the of Intelligent Design. there are atoms and and the void. the world is matter in motion.

---

& sum creatures
Look about the world
One thousand loveless eyes
& sum creatures
Without effort
Effortlessly
Turn shit to soil.
And some creatures
Grow larger fabled
Unforgiving elephant.
Rain forest of love.
Fish that fly birds that swim
Ours a remote world is.

& she spoke her building hands
Spreading across the table
Each of us we age we grow

And the infant desires to nurse
And the infant desires love...
Love a rain storm of love
Now clear clear jet clear
Night is upon us.

Yet another failed poem

Sent this off to a contest for Father's Day Poems. The structure is more Tonka than Tanka, as the third line is not a pivot for the stanza, and the number of beats is not 100% in the 5-7-5-5-5 schema, but pretty close. I tried hard not to create the image of victimhood. Leading into the unknown forest, it is up to us to find a way...

---

A Lesson Learnt

Drunk and abusive
Our Father disrupted
Our childhood
Abused my mother and sisters
Shattered our sense of self.

With my own children
I remember and have learnt
All a man can do
Is to break the cycle.
Of domestic violence.

Vastness

Nature is vast
Feeble we are.

---

The photo is from NASA site

---

Vast this intricate imaginary.
Pale this insignificant vessel.

How much like nothing
This single self
Of species being.

To understand and grasp
Tallow seep into the pores
Invasive of dark corners
Generations.

Low ground dicksonia cover
Damp temperate rain forest
Small shoots of bright green
Where the leaves echo the boughs
And the boughs repeat the leaves
With a swimmingly mathematical
Percussion of endless pirouette.

On the frippery slippery
Sea side slope the rocks
Are rolled smooth and cold
To the touch salty to taste
Rounded and silent millennia
Abstracted to novel designs
For new ways of seeing
And translating the world.

And the young ones argued
With their parents. If you
Wish to live your life as
Small ones, as timid mice
Who jump in fear and tremble
At all that is new and different
Than that is your own look out.
We however we wish to raise
Our children to be expansive.
To not live always in fear
Or petty hatred.

A feeble speck on the heaving
Ocean, or as Algy said, the Great
Sweet Mother. Posturing
Pretence of the city dwellers
Urbane struggling for reception.
As if nature is something to be
Overcome, or something that must
Be bettered. Something must be added
To make nature more enjoyable.
Thou hath conquered and made the world gray.

A shiny dead fish under the surface.
Wasteful.

Pulses of overnight rain
Tattered shattered clouds
Toying moon near full mother
Mosquito coil smouldering
Sub tropic memories.

Misty muddy toes in a tidal pool
Tiny fish scooting, the children
Laughing chasing learning.

For over three billion years
For over three thousand million years
The silent microbes built alone
The earth the very air we breath
The vast towers of iron and steel
All and more made of silent
Process progress.

Cyclone

with the kids at the beach, thinking how full of crap are the theists. how bereft of
imagination are there small brain pans which can not conceive of millions and billions of years of evolution slowly twisting turning the world into the one we see now. the grandeur and the depth of the universe, the smallness of our existence. am i to really belief this is only 4000 years old? but how can one argue when it is of course satan who planted fossils to cause us to doubt.

---

Low tide as clouds of sand rise the wind
Whirling across the face of the beach.
Dripping of wet sand warm from my hand
Clear green soda bottle transparent waves
Roll swell and fall onto the slabs of black
Basalt millions of years ago laid down.
High tide and I recall a childhood tale
From Flinders earliest fossils found
How the thin fingerling of cyclonic
Rains sauntered far flung Carpentaria
Down the rising gulley wadi dry creek bed.
Crashing the water flows over the rocky
Tableau blocks, actualises countless
Tide rolling and surging back timeless
Tiny rivulets of miniature fractured waterfalls.
Constant like this for millions of years.

IWD

Next year marks 100 years of International Woman's Day. The text of the poster says:


"8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery
and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!".


From a recent report by Australian Bureau of Statistics:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show that while woman have taken on more paid work, they still do about two thirds of the housework, while men do two-thirds of paid work.


or as was written in 1844

"The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women's progress towards freedom, because here, in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation."

From the Sydney Morning Herald today:


In a separate study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Australia lags behind countries including Rwanda, Sweden and Cuba and is on a par with Afghanistan, coming an equal 32 in the percentage of women holding lower house or single house seats in parliament.

---

Forest Of Error

wrote this a while ago, at least two years ago. for a project which was alas absconded. so out of a perverse sense of fun i 'ave maria druggt it outta those jaws of dem serial mice, and 'ave plug plonkt it down here for all to enjoy

---

Halfway through this the journey of our century
I found I was estranged my way
Hard against a misty wood glum
I stumbled slumbering

Not with God
Or angels or daemons or 
Satan or magick or Buddha
Or Yoga or Zimmermann

    The wind sang to me...
    With Avarice has
        No one a painted
        Paradise

Not for their eye nor heart
Nor mind nor soul

    CONTRA NATURA

Corpses alone
Are brought to banquet
With Avarice

And all along the wide 
Fine road is now over 
Grown darling buds 

Vampirism
Chewers of Flesh
Gnawers of Bone
Dispensers of Life & Death

They mock and flog
    The OTHER

And i am all alone in
This spreading oscura
Alone this wide cold
Universe of nothing
But nothing - endless
Cycles of Nothing

Houses of whores
    Of pink brick 
    Golf course roos false
    Collanades & meat four
    Times a day (or more!)

Out with piggy wives
Clutching forks and knifes
To eat their bacon

    And 51% of people
    Surveyed are not wiling
    To pay any more than 
    A tenner a month

Never gets any better than this
This is as good as it gets

Ratcuntprickdog
Costellohowardr
Uddbushblairpu
Tinpalin

And they wonder why
The young have no 
Respect

Wars and rumors of wars
Matthew 24:6
And the blood up lust 
Of the non combatant


    And i am alone
    This spreading wood
    Of mine olde 
    Glum gloom

        And the wood dissolves
        And i stand at the gate
        Of a great city

At this great city
Stinking already of
    Greed and Death.

The Aboot

The scarab is the rising sun.
As WSB says - once one becomes one whose head expands, and the cut up method is applied directly to brain, den furniture summer times comes earl well gushing wise inn. dissa one was ywrit served a copra yearns ago. agony, and now seams more kneaded.

---

Abort the abbot about NOW.

The internal interval of the integral
Integer (digit insertion) --

And how bored bone she stood stand
Stock drip drab still earing
A fainting swooning swan lub dub
From the Lord Kelvin plutocrat
FROM HELL
Or this pitter patter of
FATHER


Debilitatingly boren
Abound a browned
Boreal forest of
Bubbling methane bog
Tyger sorrel soup sup
Orbit
Obit
Mob gym gun dodo doco
Spinish dock DUCK.


My stoma ache
Be horn dance piping
The hokey pokey
And my nik nak neck
She be cloak clocked.

Same sex marriage laws

In response to the weak attempt by the ACT government to pass
legislation to create equality in marriage arrangements, and Kevin
Ruddocks threat to overturn the legislation a day of action was
planned. So we went to the rally held in Garema Place at 13:00
Saturday Nov 28.

Mourning of Intoxication.

Dawn of Father Light, restraining corrupting.
Night brings only shades and our imaginings.
'Tis the wide son of the further that breeds crimes.
'Tis the desiccating sun that is our times.

Dawn Kouros embodying light and reason
Well proportioned, naked, the despotic pose 
Becomes freedoms step, a motion forward. 
Weight on both feet,
Rigid arms straight down, 
Hands into fists clenched.
Like the young recruit fresh faced, no body hair,
Without fear marching into battle, the first time,
So Apollo Kouroi straight ahead looks
Into the future, into history. With dawn
Comes the armed brotherhood,
The Rule of the Father.
With the evening comes love 
And the bosom of family.

Up with the six A.M. kids
Eggs coffee a soiled nappy.

At night the pool extends to the verandah
The hard vane trauma of firtoomunch wotka.

Dog barking, magpie swooping
Hazy smoke, smokie hazing

Dust storm of inconsiderate drivers
Road side fresh five ybuck fruitiers.

Crimson red carre pechschwarz carre
Grunanlage publick park car
A white truck, a motocykill.

Battle swap, petrel sanction, varchar wishie,
Washy restaurant, Icy higher, furniture
Swap sharp az god in dandy is good az new.
Medical clinique, apothecary,
Spawning returning goods, eclectical
Grounds for divorce droning across the back
Blox of bel canto, pitiless infanta
Protesting the hari whipping window 
Upon the open weir a hoarse an iamby
Kinny kinnt kin all tight top curled wooly.
Dear telephone tower principessa tour.
Rocky Point parks constriction construction.
Puffed out shirt sales on the Lake of Artifice.
Trailing personal trailer load becomings.
Crane and wight and read all over. Fair off
Arod the bank of sluggish light and earning
Spill away fooky craven members sty.
The rest indies fail falling on a green
Gabba one chained pop top humid swinger
Tweedy yearns inna sweep cleaning row now.
Popping huevos rancheros splatter oil.
And then he, and then he, and then he said...
Tirty tree degrees already. Get it?
Frijoles refritos. Deep fried tofu.
Parlement parlez-vous of open green space
Mighty zonal tuba mirum mighty
Trumpt blast and triangles, plucked violins
Strings of gutted canine black as your hat
Dig doggie dog long side bitey bite machs.
Color full grate feetie and them have formt
Round and round and go around again about.
Psalm three retort public park land and hand.
The Artes Centre slouching haggling miners.
Tin red lead bauxite hard water carne wash.
One da hell de krista kollage. C.C.
C.C.C.P - dunna tempt thieves. ((or rapist)
Walking home the police advise; (walk in pairs,
Stay in the light, avoid paths with heavy growth,
Keep your hemline just below the knees.)) 
Don't take any wooden nickels. Keep an eye
On your drink. Alert not alarmed. Blame the victim. 

---

A series of speakers spoke about the recent laws passed in the
ACT. Laws that, while mild in themselves, have caused both the Liberal
and the Labor Governments to use the extraordinary powers the
commonwealth has over the territories to repeal the legislation. So we
are of course then faced with the very unedifying spectacle of
watching the Labor Party (once a member of the Socialist
International, once a leader of the non aligned pact) siding with the
Christians to repeal laws and curb human rights within the ACT.

Dies Irae

Kevin Ruddock has aligned himself, and therefore the ALP, with not
just Christians of any old sort, but the most vile type of Christians,
the ones who use the 'Word of God' to oppose the rights of others. The
type of Christian who is happy to see women die rather than have
abortions, or even contraception, the type of Christian who would
rather millions of children in the Third World die of easily cured
disease than have one blow dried hair on one perfumed Christian head
upset. The type of Christian who is happy to find forgiveness in their
heart for the assorted adulterous liars, pedophiles, confidence
tricksters, war mongers and out right hypocrites, who happen to be of
the same faith, while the poor child forced to crime or drug addiction
by soul destroying poverty (the type of poverty Jesus urged his
followers) and alienation should be dealt with by the full weight of
the law.

These are the same type of Christian who allow years of sexual and
physical abuse against children to pass uncommented on, but feel that
their morality is being attacked when two men or two women chose to
marry, and so will organise as a political force to oppose the rights
of those unlike themselves.

Kevin Ruddock and his pals line up with the insurance companies and
finical institutes to fleece countless homosexual couples, so that
even after the finality of death the greedy will attempt to steal the
funds of the deceased, and the deceased can have one final humiliation.

Or maybe Ruddock, and his illustrious predecessor John Coward, are
caving in to the terrorists. For if the terrorists so 'hate the
freedoms' of the West, maybe it is a good strategy to lessen freedom
and even to curtail rights in some instances, if only to keep the
terrorists from launching attacks on our soil.

Or maybe it is just simple fear and bigoted loathing that motivates
such activities.

Lacrymosa

A series of speakers discussed various issues and problems raised by
the legislation and the various parties responses. Amnesty
International feels that marriage rights are a human right. I have no
reason to disagree. A speaker from Gender Agenda spoke about the
problems that all marriage laws face, first and foremost in Australia
begin that there is no legal definition to define a Man or a Woman. A
member of the local Quaker groups spoke movingly about equality that
ended with an epiphany on her fathers death bed, that in the end all
that matters in this world is love. Trust the Quakers to say the right
thing, after all it takes them 100 years to make a decision and when
they do they are 100 years ahead of society. There were several other
speakers, and i must apologise for not noting them in this essay as i
had to attend to my three young children.

So to all the religious out there who will be appalled; I was in fact
thinking of the children, as I want my kids to grow up full of an
actual love, not blindly informed by the everyday hatred and narrow
mindedness that is palmed off as love in our current incarnation of
Christendom. Rather the type of love that knows that if Jesus were to
return, he would not be a well dressed bourgeois, but rather he would
be the ragged hobo that so many walk past and over holding tight to
their wallets, muttering 'get a job' under their minty breath, he
would be close to the hookers and junkies and AIDS sufferers. The
Others that those who falsely masquerade as Christians feel the need
to, at best, ignore and to mock and humiliate as a matter of course.

Anything that can extend human rights must be seen as a positive, as
it extends democracy, and the extension of democracy benefits
everyone, even those who abhor democracy. Indeed one of the hallmarks
of our current age is the suppression of democracy, mainly in the name
of security, but parallel with that there has been going on for many
years now a bald faced full frontal attack on all aspects of working
class culture and identity. Only by pushing the bonds of what freedom
and human rights are will society progress.

If my neighbor wants to marry a lounge suite, how could that in any
way affect my love and familial relations? If my neighbor marries one
of his or her own sex how is that even my concern? The only reason to
deny same sex marriage rights is outright bigotry, or if one is so
insecure about their own relationships that they feel the need to deny
others the same rights. And when governments make bigotry policy we
can see why the One Love group seeks to make 2010 a year of action.
And when governments make discrimination law, we must support this and
similar campaigns, as it will only make our world more luxuriant and
better for all.

Hephaestus

Hephaestus, the greek equivalent of vulcan, was the 'god' of technology (if such a thing can be spoken about). he worked with fire and metal, and made a great many fabulous things, including some robot helpers. he worked with his hands, and was lame. he was rejected by his parents. i thought to myself, is this a way of seeing our relationship to technology? all this working of metal and etc has made us lame, unloved, unlovable. following on the poem pretty much wrote itself....

---

Hoplites. Attic black-figure lekythos, 510–500 BC, found in Sala Consilina. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lekythos_hoplite_Petit_Palais_ADUT01575.jpg

---

Cunning limping god, born without fire
Borne without father, aegis riding sky
Who brings life along the surface of the
Sea, aegis riding sky holding storms.
Unloved son thrown from the heavens.
Forced to forge the manacles to confine
The fire sharing mild of light. Forced to
Wed the copper eyed lover of laughter.
Unloved child, cuckold husband. Thrown
Down from high, falling full nine days
And at the windy time of the of ninth
He landed alone an unknown island.
Into the world, cast aside his parents.
Born by no father he was abused by
Dread son of Cronus, false fabricator,
Suckled of the goat, fed honey from bees.
Storyteller, inventor of lies. 
When he landed, shattering his legs,
At the going down of the sun, and the 
Spreading into all places of shadows,
At the windy time of the day, after his fall,
At the meeting of women, his wounds
Were tended with virtuous plants,
And his pain was eased. All the night
The hoplites, danced naked, clashed shields.

        The rock flamed and made liquid magic.
Thin arabesque of gold and silver,
Rings with sparkling precious stones,
Tendriled undulating arm bands
Of sharpest copper and shiny bronze,
Chains of purest gold as fine as spun 
Silk and worked with tender scenes,
Gold as if from hay spun into threads,
Terrifying neck piece of power and diadem.
To bejewel his wife. Countless vast 
Spears and arrow heads of dread orbit
Flew deadly true, chains and locks
Equal revenge and justice. The red hot 
Metal into the icy barrel plunged. 
The steady rhyming of hammer blows.
Painful memories. Legs broken and swollen.
His feet back to front, his mothers taunts.
Nine years cared for nine years in healing.
Cunning limping god of roaring rearing flame.
Lame and hunchbacked the forge, with anvil
And adamantine hammer, that forged helpers 
Of metal uncomplaining to assist his work.
The clear uncaring flow of heat and sound
And constant pain made him halting and 
Slow of speech. Those that scorned him
Despised not his creations. But with gold
And precious things he fashioned a cage
Of mind forged manacles, down the ages.
        
        Over time, over time, over countless sleeps...
The few grew, more and more, over time,
Became many and put nature on the rack.
Tore out the smoky secrets of the caverns,
Mocked the sun and sky and moved them
In portion and rank. The technique passed
Down and over the generations. No longer
Divine, no longer sacred, known but a few.

        And this new extracted knowledge spewed
Wealth and greed, mendacity and ignorance.
Towered cites grew and spread, tendrils
In all ways and time, an incessant hum.
Until even the far off terrible mountains
That border Sinia have become polluted
With the detritus of a restless knowledge,
That knows no soothing slumber, no holy
Days for home and meditation. Only more.
The busy hum of children men and women
Flitted across the lonely Sahara dunes,
The cold windswept plateau of Tibet.
The rough groans and piercing screams
Of trucks and chain saws echoed the giant
Tower trunks frail wild rain Amazon.

And so the gods retreated, turning their backs
On nature, on history, and on the logos.

Even the fiery mountains have grown cold.

Fragments

A series of short sharp little bits of poetic fluff. Written quite a while ago. I am estimating they are at least 15 years old. Was doing some tidying, and was able to fit these onto here. Which is handy as I am working on something which takes a lot of my time, so I am not really making any suitable new poems. Lucky I was able to pull something out from the vault.

---

Nothing.
As insubstantial as a monsoon.
Naive,
And as obsessive as a child.
It rains.

In our way of life
Even the lame, the obese,
The disfigured, have their place.
If only as the butt of jokes.

The hot summer nights
Drove the man
Who could hear the bats
Insane.

The evolution of the sexual act.
From the one celled creature,
That moved away from itself.
Two lives come together.

The symbiotic creature
Painstakingly eats solid rock.
Slowly spreading, unfolding ,
All mud and culture.

Nothing.
As insubstantial as a monsoon.
Naive,
And as obsessive as a child.
It rains.

The Child's Memento Mori

There is matter in motion.

---

The Argument.
    The worms crawl in 
    The worms crawl out
    They crawl in your eyes 
    And out your snout.


Stilted over night intimacy white rye seed
Wry white fluff swirling and flurrying 
Telopea parks bench of cold hypothermia minus three.
Woke with the taste of disputation in my mouth.
With clear sun burning mist, legendary ham fisted
Intro slaughter starter, walking lame, fog rising
Cold or wet, tired you bet. All I'll soon forget.
Beach mommy beach mommy beach cheery mom bomb
Withered echos of the panting summer killing drought.
See how path, beaneath the trees, is still wet.
Once the trees are gone, that's it, all she wrote.
The withering shall enlarge.
And my feet be too big bedwise 
Sew eye dig me some talkin to the sun
And I 
      Dolt like disa way you got things done.
Only the universe full of outa space
Dint never ever talk back.
Beach Mommy Beach Mommy. Beautiful. It's a cycle. 


NON ESSE:
         I am left alone on my own.
The flowers of disappointment blooming 
Bud blood insatiable Gorgon. Outlandish.
Scared children huddled wooly foolish down.
Sob sob sobbing. Dig dig digging.
Beach Mommy Beach Mommy Meach Bomby.
Jump spring clap clap jump. Beam Mayhem Comb.
And the spring springing sprung out door
Of happy dancing flipping children.
Spring jump clap jump. Beach mommy, Beach mommy.
If I seem broken and blue, walk on by jump spring.
Dark slack black ringlets shimmering
Bounding cool Christmas jazz night lights. 
Left alone amid the limitless of time and
Expansion. I am alone. Across countless 
Generations there is only one. Ever. Alone.
More precious than all other things, more precious
Than gold or emeralds. Greater than greed
For things, is our uniqueness, our collaborative
History. There is no god. There is no rebirth.
No resurrection. No reincarnation.
Only accidental bringing into being
And dispersal. No gods parcel out 
Justice, no rewards nor punishments.
The spiral tongue of the butterfly.
Wanted Julio's slimeskin a vent.
Doshed as a law liar. We sprayd rifle rounds
At a cool blunt of cold smooth marble to mark 
A statue. Colourful beetles of poison crawl
Around and about and under out caverns of 
Mounding handmade vanilla home bean. 
I scream about shattered ice cream. 
Larva that chews living infant eyebones.


Clay clay clay. Beach Mommy Clay Girls.
Clouds of butterflies unroll coiled 
Tongues, absorbing minerals. Coiled
Prehensile tail. Gray and light and scattered
Blue slate gray curtains falling rain - windy
Mountain rains. And my wife and children
Have to go fly, non est. Holiday borderlands
With Robby the peg and some faceless others
Curdle hurdle the windy hills and Robbi
Must visit some brand of specialist quackster.
I started the scent of disputation in my mind.
Wild wind whipping, tree bending, lip chapping
Football weather. Jump spring clap clap jump
Clay girls oee clay girls oee. Necklate?
Ancient civic honour swept rightless oi polloi.
We argued, my eldest and a friend of hers
Abort nothing, about how much heatache  shrieks
In the grand earth quake stream of Karmic justice.
I felt embarrassed, lieu i had lost control.
No justice. Non ens. Heavens. The young Mother
Who allows herself to die, who is allowed 
To die to bring forth her child. There is 
No special place in heaven. There is drear waste.
The child busted at teh first, the husband,
The parents, maybe siblings orphaned.
A family, extended, destroyed, all at once, all
For naught. There IS NO SPECIAL PLACE in heaven.
Only corruption and decay, flesh rotting past
Of the no longer loved actress. Peeling paint...
For saintly sainted souls jumping beach martyr.
Jump jump clap spring jump clap flip and feet 
Landing sort of blue weather of bright sun
Olive shaded gum leaves down faced the blue
Emptiness of nothing but space in all directions.
For all time. Rock drive drill home.
Dancing tall spirit of grape and the spirit
Of rich loam capture spin shining sun ball
And turn all that into this. Sad slow wild rides
Of wild scheming, grave her forth dreamt
Of the one dog chewing on the other.
Hag skin blood mouth hanging, so unleashed to end
One weak of giving away. Clay jump girl spring.


Well I'm be damned here comes your ghost again...
No est; nothing. Ourselves alone. No eternal 
Life. And so within more than five billion
Years we pass some sixty or so years.
Disawon disawon. jump clap jump spring.
Cause I need some of that vagueness now.
Gas bagging shooting shit passion time
And old black jazz many to a type and the 
Other cat nameless, faceless was bald
And sweaty. Latter I watched these eyes
Of jazzman shades. I hipster headed watched
The gaudy vested day glo council workers
Footpath fixing with instant fast bitumen. 
Clap clap flip flap. Jump and spring worms
Crawl in and the worms crawl about and out.
And that is all, passing by the homestead
But the once. In all that time and space
We are nothing. Life is a precious accident,
Each one equal and unique. We have ourselves
Alone this world to organise and band together.
And moribund dead christ chewers balk at 
The immenense distances of time and space.
Fearful they retreat and i larf. "No i do not",
I laugh agin and sign, "I do not feel the need to
Respect your fiend who lives amid the clowns."
Just substance, and a ritual of tears and dirt.
And all the organs rotting safely underground.
Gut no need for 'em, but selfish take 'em.
I awoke with the flame of discouragement
Ringing across my long dead child ears.

All there is; is expanding friendship and 
Forging our minds in all ways. This love
Of friends, of human thought stands astride 
The infinite. All we are, are plans of
Love and friendship. Rock drive drill hammer.
Paving warm too and fro they ramble warm
Frothy beer into the windy process gutter,
Maybe groping along lines of grouped stars. 

The Starvation Army

The salivating army doles out
(So so sad) poor chook chook feed 
To all the free cluck cluck peepole.

Furious Orlando (king of this island of flours)
With a click and a stroke 
Of his tutu pigpen is a-macon
Such Christian chair a tree ill regal.
And the pissy peon smurfs cuddle
Up with such pow pow power
Sifting through the lies

Knowingly
Finding the ones to best match
Narrow prejudges

He said She said 
Down by the sea sure