from
DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR
AGAINST THE WORLD
by
Anthony Weir
published 1996
THE BEAUTY OF PERFECTION IS
ITS IMPOSSIBILITY BUT ANYTHING
IS POSSIBLE TO THE IMAGINATION
So animal and so benign
the Tygress is my sentinel
my balm of blessedness
my vigilance
the fur most exquisite
in her underparts
her eyes night-centred suns.
In her uninhabitable place
she wears a cage
of soft-edged dashing stripes
a moving maze.
I wear my beast-face:
for her desire
I am a gracious
Minotaur.
IN OCCULTATION
On the Turin Shroud
Which it is claimed
Our Lord was wrapped in
And retains His image
His clasping hands eclipse
His cock and balls
In holiness think the faithful
For comfort in loneliness
The least of misfortunes
Say I who sleep thus
and wake in occultation.
RUE DE LA PETITE TRUANDERIE
I would like a lover
who looks like my teddybear
who will ask me to do
what I want to do
and travel with me
to the inner and the outer.
As for sex
I have no preference -
but not many women look like my
teddybear,
though I saw a splendidly
hirsute lady in Paris.
MEAT AND MY MOTHER
My father Diogenes
who lived in a barrel
and barked like a dog
used to masturbate
in the marketplace.
He pissed like a dog
on offerings thrown to him:
meat
and my mother
whom he raped
like a butcher's knife
at a cynical
Christmas Party
giving her crab-lice
with his rushed sperm
and half a lifetime
of humble prete
nce.
THE QUEST FOR CONVIVIALITY
Many people look for
happiness
[and some for
‘
enlightenment
’]
who don't know how to like
their best friend.
THE EMPTY HOUSE
We are always having and wanting to have
more than that we wanted to have
and had not - so always we do
in order to compensate for what
others did or did not do to or for us
And we have no peace to be
may never have been at all
living our lives without being
always blocking each other
making war on ourselves, each other,
the world
trying to blot out the wanting
by doing and having.
We all move in the same mad direction
away from ourselves, away from being
ourselves, being animals, being voyagers,
being.
The smell of my armpit is ocean
In it I can learn to be.
Unhappiness comes
Like sperm,
from the pursuit
of happiness and comfort.
Reality is just
a little crack
in the façade
And the façade is full of cracks.
Control birth
Combat normality.
We are as sperm
swimming in
the rectum of reality.
Glory be to theft and kisses
Glory be to breath
Glory be to slugs and beetles
Glory be to death.
Buried down deep or sitting above
The relation of pebble to earth
(which it was and will become)
is true love.
Mind activates awareness
Insight transcends mind
Wisdom's a puddle, decease is catharsis
We are most serious when we
wipe our arses.
Deep down
most of us are desperately superficial.
How can we think our way out of problems
when our problems arise from
the fact that we think?
(How do I fit the square peg of my
self-importance into the round
hole of my sense of futility, renouncing
both sadness and self ?)
Time is god, is love
is sightless, dumb
creates. destroys
and tells us only
that we are noise.
Enlightenment is
really loving, really knowing
who you really are:
an animal with pretensions.
TANTRA-MANTRA
Once you have understanding
throw that understanding away
and look for a new one,
like breath after breath,
for having is clinging.
True happiness comes
when you no longer hold on to happiness:
for the spirit needs desolation
as much as the body needs death.
THE GREAT ATTRACTOR
Only 10% of the total mass
of the once-expanding
now-contracting Universe
is matter. The rest
remains ineffable, in occultation.
As each of us crawls helplessly
back and forth between our ears,
on a planet spinning on its axis
and revolving round a sun revolving
in a galaxy which hurtles at six hundred
kilometres per second to the black holes of
the Great Ineffable Attractor,
we think we are important
and live as if we were immortal.
And we predict that the duration of the Cosmos
will be another 15 to 20 billion years.
SUPPOSE ANYTHING, BELIEVE NOTHING
If men could only feel
their cocks were feminine
and reality as just a crack
the world could almost be
the paradise it was.
The animal garden
Is now a murder-hole.
Language was always the Labyrinth.
Civilisation is striving, spurning
starving, burning
mass graves and marble tombs,
wonderful wine and no-one to drink it with
but the Black Riders
the achievers, civilised dealers
in death, machine-mad
half-controlling the machine.
They are the forms of desire
(suppression of grace, the soul's death)
stencils of men,
power-bleak, power-black
teeth in the maw
of perpetual war
against Nature and grace
as the planet of pain and vainglory
hurtles through space.
MIDNIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS OF AWARENESS
Wisdom is the road to wisdom
The dust upon the road is love
The road is made of dust
Is unimaginably short
Wisdom unimaginably brief
Deep upon the road love lies
Burying the corpses of the almost-wise.
On the edge
between pettiness and glory
I walk in sleep
surrounded by
the unknowable on the unknown
boundary beyond which all is radiant
dark
and I not yet
a selfconsuming spark.
A PATH IN THE GREAT WATERS
Between the sleeping and the dreaming
Lie the ocean and the boat
Between strange and stranger shore
A timeless flood, a floating door
A ferryman, the ancient guide
Manifest dream-master
Mythic, ithyphallic bride.
I am the dismembered masker
Orpheus come like ore
In the dazzling dark
The teeming maze of the mine
To drink the piss of the Minotaur
Though dreams like myths and stems entwine
We dream apart
Each drowning as we grasp the door
Abstract as thresholds
Scattered in the ocean's roar.
Farouche
Mr Pussy
the pansy painter
cuddled and kissed
a lion-tamer
who never had cuddled
a man before
but wrote his
address on a
cubicle-door.
AS A DREAM OF A NIGHT VISION
Because I look from outside out
terrified to look from inside in
I seem to come to life through burglary.
Puppet deliberately tangling my strings
so as to have to cut them,
I might thus fall from
rôle not to reality but grace
belongingness beyond longing
affinity beyond sex
conviviality beyond consumingness
of fire where spiders burn
and webs transmute to puppet-strings.
Because I take and take to things
things which I make magically
execute me
and I am only questioning and doubt
looking ineluctably from outside out.
TOUCHING BOTTOM
In the silence of eventless
solitary days lurks wisdom
somewhere. I am waiting in the muddle
of waiting for wisdom
for illumination like a turnip-lantern
for the ghost of an answer
to the unanswerable riddle
Waiting for my lover
dark enfolding infinitely-gentle
Brother Death
The great cuddler
The great cuddle
At the last breath.
Where KILL is more acceptable
a word than FUCK
people force their children to accept
unhappiness as a treatable condition.
HERE NOW, IN THE JUNKYARD
OF REALITY
The smell of death
is a lover's smell:
unchaste, alone,
I'm perfumed by
magnificent disgraces.
When day is strange dream
Divided by night
Its time to extinguish the light
And dance in the odorous places.
POEM ON St VALENTINE'S DAY
Soul resides in hair
and fur and feather
scale and leaf and earth.
Soul is part of sap and rock
and blood and water.
Soul inhabits empty spaces -
not brains nor hearts
nor tongues nor mouths
nor eyes nor faces.
Soul resides in fur and bushy places.
CULTURE IS THE VULTURE
THAT RIPS APART THE HEART
Every day that passes
spurn the middle classes
more and more.
I never
lock my door.
EK STASIS
In the soulzone
Conscious in the
Ancient armpit
Of the Unconscious
At every moment
And the beginning
And the end of time
Any tree is more wonderful
Than any work of art
And all that matters
Is awareness
That nothing matters
And fulfilment is
To fall apart.
In Siena
On Tuesday
I stole
Panforte
, postcards & calendars
Ate too much ice-cream
and strolled to the Asylum
where I saw marvellous ceramics,
and, after modestly mentioning
my disabilities,
was invited to come and make
permanent use of the splendid facilities.
It is quite difficult
to like human
beings
when you're quite sure
that you don't like being
human.
CONFESSION OF A FAILED ABORTION
In the absurd
eventuality of re-incarnation
I should be desirous
of returning as a bower-bird
or a retrovirus.
I am open
like a wound
that smiles
and kisses with
its tender edges
knives and thorns
and air and flies.
RENOUNCING SELF-IMPORTANCE
Beggars
are
the
only
heroes.
TO
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
I
mourn in anger the fall
of Lucifer
who was the first political
prisoner.
All this mess
is made by prisoners
of consciousness.
BEACHED
The sea constantly
ceaselessly conjugates
the verb
to murmur
sometimes very loudly
sometimes so quietly
that it's barely a rumour
And the white juices
flow
from black forces
below
and it conjugates
to murmur
lovingly and cold
cold and passionate
violent and cold
So we are told
who only dream the sea
desiring it dreamingly
seeming to be awake
and just out of reach
on the small fragile beach
where the
shadows flap and shake.
IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO FIND
THE REAL THING
I had a friend
who had a friend
who had a stone
for a friend,
for a teacher:
a master
of silence.
Words are
the darkness speaking as light
pretending that comfort
is other than night.
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send your praise, too!
