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from
BOOK IN PROGRESS:
SUICIDE FOR NON-BEGINNERS
by
Anthony Weir
mainly in reverse order of composition
(final addition 2nd March,
2001 - with continuing revision)
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Each dawn the human mind is dark
with something more than night.
"Death is the
least
awful thing that can happen to anyone."
- Quentin Crisp
"No-one can be called happy who is still alive."
- Solon of Athens
SUCCULENT CHILD
Owned by the State
Herded by parents
and teachers
and examiners
and doctors
and police
and social workers
and other children
and almost everyone
into the auction-mart of marriage
and the abattoir of employment...
6th AUGUST 2000
After Hiroshima
all beauty is unbearable.
Light is the condensation
of darkness.
THE HAPPY PESSIMIST
I love to hear that man's works have been destroyed
by earthquake, flood or hurricane
and claimed back by the teeming void.
All man's works are wrung from pain
- and all his secrets are the same.
A GOOD TIME IS NOT AS GOOD AS NO TIME
November 2000
Culture is crime
Is cancer
of the soul
A crying hole in its covered-over darkness
Is the manifold and fast-decreasing
means of coping with
the guilt of human consciousness
Is the voice of my eyes
before the eyes of your voice.
Because time is the food of time
(so many forms of time)
death is the most modest
mode of transport.
At our heart is nothing
as we snatch remaining scraps
of life from the shit and trash
that we have made out of Earth.
Every city is evil.
PROGRESS...
...is progression of madness.
In fighting death
we extinguish life.
GeNOME
Humans are too clever
to understand that their intelligence
is their stupidity
and
Nature's mistake and misery.
A POEM ABOUT NOTHING
Before acceptance -
illusion
After acceptance -
burial
My dog and I
are awake together
both
dreaming
of
bones.
COMPASSION
Pity the pig who has never seen light
Pity the food that she eats
Pity the Christians, Buddhists and Jews
and the people and dogs that they've beaten
and killed in secret and in the streets
Pity the dolphins in tuna-nets
Pity the tuna, too,
and the 93 million new babies a year
and the pitiless, affluent few.
THE POET ALIEN
Down to the plain of prose
I fell from the sphere beyond poetry
where the light and the dark were equal
and nothing in rows.
THE TERRIBLE PARADE
Every minute of ever
y day
for nine years
they bombed The Plain of Jars
without even declaring war.
And still, every minute of every day
terrible atrocities are wrought
not only by Americans.
Every time I turn on a tap
or my computer
a piece of world dies.
CONSCIOUSNESS, THE COMMON MADNESS
In the Virtual Gulag
we are always - even in our wars, carnivals
moonshots and museums - always mourning
consciousness, being human,
our capture by the sheer grotesqueness
of Normality. Only deserts will last,
and time, the prison as inescapable as the word
preventing everything from happening at once,
is God,
is Love,
is Self,
is Pain.
THE FUTILITY OF TRYING
TO COMMUNICATE THE FUTILITY
OF COMMUNICATION
True poetry is to prose
not as dancing is to walking, but
as going on a pilgrimage is to
running for a bus.
There isnt much of it around.
Truth is not a dancer, but a leper
at the gate beyond the honey, the money,
the glamour.
Truth is a stammer, not a song.
The world and all things wonderful
go wrong.
.
THE PROBLEM OF SUICIDE
is that by the time
it is absolutely necessary
you are absolutely incapable.
PORTRAIT OF St AGATHA WITH CREDIT-CARD
UPON WHICH RESTS ONE OF HER AMPUTATED
BLUE-VEINED BREASTS
Passing between The Slaves of Glory
Tabernacle and the vast, last fast-food
outlet, still considering
the irredeemability of Man,
I, who only twice brought stinking beggars home
and have aspired to kiss the sores
of dogs, felt the packaged-stupid
God put his product in my mouth
And in that little
delivered-moment of Gods fun
I recognised the dark side of the moon
to be humanity,
and consciousness to be
the dark side of the sun.
CHRISTMAS AND EASTER POEM
The world's report is blemish
upon the blemish that calls itself
"The World"
not tyranny of consciousness
rotting before it's ripe.
If the "Holy Innocents" had lived
most would have composed another
ugly mob. Some would have kept bees.
If Jesus had not been stoned to death
(or throttled by his disappointed followers,
or even crucified)
he might have saved the world by planting trees.
POETRY READING
Just another little organ
of the Great Conspiracy:
poetry as pathetic part
of the entertainment industry
keeping us from questioning
our words, ourselves, our species
- life itself.
Is
Life worth living ? No -
not as long as people say
it must be so.
Full moon above the council tip:
Rubbish displays intelligence as trash.
A POEM DEDICATED TO THE VAST TRANSNATIONAL
MEDICAL-PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
Through language we lose
our innocence,
our animal integrity.
Through knowledge
we become ever rougher,
unworthy to kiss the quiet
intestines of quadrupeds.
After Descartes
scientists nailed dogs to walls
to show that beasts could not suffer.
THE PERFECTION OF RUINS
Normality
:
at the same time an easy trick,
a crime and an incurable disease:
Knowing how the world works
makes you sick.
Borage flowers
once floated in the wine
we drank to douse
the falseness
Now Honesty and Thyme
and Borage plants have multiplied
amongst the ruins of my house.
To be proud to be a human
is to be a stupid devil.
The older the colder
the wiser the sadder
the fewer the words
the bleaker the level
as we find out that we cant move
from the bottom of the ladder.
Man in a shower:
his only reality
the removal of reality.
HAIKU
Polluted stream: the liberation
of having nothing to hope for.
Relentless blue skies;
the smug sameness of hundreds of haiku.
Sex-change operation -
but no surgery to alter my species.
Fantastic Offer -
Western Values
(happiness not included)
.
Dawn in Liverpool:
between the two cathedrals
Hope Street is empty.
AS WOLVES ARE SQUEEZED IN
DWINDLING WILDERNESS THE
WEREWOLF AGE GAINS
HORRIBLE MOMENTUM
in memory of
Vasko Popa
(1922-1991)
For wolves who, like us, are caressed
by the ocean before they are born,
to live is all threat and hunger and flight
and reduction.
They don't expect
to know what is happening, don't
require explanations from demonic
fractals of consciousness, just know
that the world is shrinkingly
full of danger and guns
and hatred and traps.
Thus wolves know everything.
ON THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER
Love like life is death
Unfinished
Life like love is living
Unbegun
A piece of world died
as each of us was born.
The quintessential English
word to end all:
TROUBLESHOOTING
IF YOU WANT
TO BE HAPPY, STOP
WANTING
On my way to the light-switch
I fell down and whined:
O Kali, O Shiva, O doctor! I want
to get rid of my mind.
Here's money
for the abortion-solution -
'nor can there be work so great'.
Let the unwanted implant detach
and float away down my gut
down a sewer, through the tide
with all the other disgusting
human pollution.
PLEASE REPORT TO RECEPTION
Expensive pot-plants in hospital
and healthcare foyers
die from neglect.
Some of us are docile enough to go
to those places willingly.
DEAD TREES IN A GRAVEYARD
For mind hurts.
And people are only as good
As the trees they have planted.
Mind hurts and comfort destroys
and each newborn baby demands
a few hundred trees to be cut now
and again and again.
And so depression:
unprepared awareness
of the truth that is not beauty,
the truth you have been made unprepared for,
that you will want to be
talked back from,
drugged out of,
electr
oconvulsed away
from.
For what is the truth ?
Felling and selling,
drilling and killing;
dead trees in a graveyard;
things and rotting fantasies
and people worshipping fantasies and things.
For truth is knowing
that to be human is only to crave
congratulation for being human.
For truth is the terrible
window looking out from the debility
of shame at being human.
For depression is the truth beyond
enlightenment: rational inconsolability.
FOR THE DOG THAT I WORSHIP
HEAVEN MIGHT BE A SLAUGHTERHOUSE
Those who invented God
had no more compassion
than those who claim to love him.
The more universal
and omnipotent the god
the meaner the mind that worships.
A mind that worships itself
is merely entranced.
The mind that worships a flea
is pretty advanced.
THE INVENTOR OF SLAVERY
"I am always sad, and I always know why."
JEAN GENET
quoted by Mohamed Choukri
Because all gods are now bred in gulags
wisdom is the slaughterhouse,
and knowledge is the scrambled
brains of screaming pigs.
Thus,
gasping in the bloody air
of mindful cruelty
in which we all are illiberally hurled,
I fight for breath
to curse the hatefulness of being
human (all too human)
and want my lungs to stop
- for worse things than mere death
await me and the whole wide world.
THE 108 DELUSIONS
OF WORLDLY DESIRE
After power
there is only boredom
like the long worms
that crawl
out of every bodily orifice
the cockhole
or the corner of an eye.
Canine and capitalism:
the best in my life costs the least.
The only God is Dog and there
are wonderfully many.
THE TRUEST DISSIDENCE IS GENEROSITY
Flies are the sun's kisses.
If we kiss flies
that celebrate the beggar's eyes
we'll find compassion on his lips.
Beggars are the only human
heroes - the only wise
- unhumbled by their own eclipse.
FOR THEY ARE
Short straws in my long beard
The urine to be drunk on rising
Holes in the moneybag
Tombstone-lichens
The hopelessness of hospitals
Depraved experiments
Screaming rust on the cages
of laboratory animals
Limbs mashed by landmines
The oppressive presence of absence
The despair of asylums
Dead fleas from the Angel
Vomit on in-trays
Frightened albinos
Decaying slaughterhouse-concrete
Maggots on bones
The drowned smells of psychiatrists
And the fæces of the teaching wolf
Solar eclipse:
it is rare that a sister
blocks a brother's light.
PARADIS DE LA GRIMACE
For Jesus paraded
into death, or allowed himself
to be paraded, or allowed himself
to be so important
as to be reported
as having been paraded.
And after Lazarus
we should take note
that dogs in their eloquent humility
and divine biliminality cope better than we do
with the world that we
and Jesus have degraded.
POWER IS LOVELESSNESS
I understand women who
for a little fumbling of unfelt affection
endure the violence.
Three of the most charming
people I have known
were butchers.
BOMBAY CAFÉ
NOTICE
SORRY
NO TALKING TO CASHIER
NO SMOKING
NO FIGHTING
NO CREDIT
NO OUTSIDE FOOD
NO SITTING LONG
NO TALKING LOUD
NO SPITTING
NO BARGAINING
NO WATER TO OUTSIDERS
NO CHANGE
NO TELEPHONE
NO MATCH STICKS
NO DISCUSSING GAMBLING
NO NEWSPAPER
NO COMBING
NO BEEF
NO LEG ON CHAIR
NO HARD LIQUOR ALLOWED
NO ADDRESS ENQUIRY
no kidding
Meat on a plate:
is life itself the tragedy
- or only human evolution ?
"HUMANITY"
Correction:
For
"soul"
read
"sold"
.
FIRE AND ICE
First, every tree and beast was burned.
Then the worship of the guns and the
boiling of the boots of men for soup.
The Angels tears have wept for six
millennia, yet the flames of Hell rise
higher than the hairy, leaping
Keepers of the Beard.
Wolves are the Brothers
of Beyond, and on my tiny ledge
I am frozen in and out
at the soulless worlds edge.
DAISIES ON THE GRASS
Three out of every four Americans
(93% in the Bible Belt)
believe in Angels.
Angels are kinda mystic.
They drink heavenly Pepsi
And are sexless but not genderless
and make believers
Spiritual
and almost
Artistic
.
SUICIDE FOR NON-BEGINNERS
For I will die anyway
Better to die sooner in chosen
conditions rather than later
most probably in pain
in hospital powerless
with tubes and no animal connection
no tenderness, no cuddles
and no music to help you detach
from a world half as full of music
as of din and blare and moan.
For the moon is bone:
skull image of starvation
whimpering to the blood
drenched earth.
Fifty-five thousand American soldiers
were killed in Viet Nam. A hundred
thousand killed themselves
after returning home.
For we long to thrash the stars. The sun
is glory from the barrel of a gun.
Frantic beneath a waning moon
life is only a phase.
STALE GRANDEUR OF ANNIHILATION
For I am awake among the overfed
sleepers of Hell: for truth is the stair
descending to despair
and rising thence to more abysmal truth.
For just because I'm dying doesn't mean
I'm dead.
And where
are the killers of the pain of consciousness ?
For beauty dies where comfort lies.
For I am exhausted by the fight.
Why am I struggling to compose the poems
that nobody else
seems to have the guts or perception to write ?
DREAM OF DICTATORSHIP
¿Es la vida una corrida- o una mala poesía?
DECREE:
That the Plazas
de Toros should be
kept religiously
empty, unstained
by blood or women's underwear.
Bulls, like true poets and flamenco
musicians, are born
and degraded, not trained.
FOR TRUTH IS NOT BEYOND EXPRESSION
- ONLY BEYOND ACCEPTANCE
and as a truth becomes acceptable
it turns into a lie
to stifle the world's screams.
We are as we are
in our greedy cruelty
because we have hacked
love from reason's belly
and chopped it into dreams.
GREAT TECHNOLOGY
PITY ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO USE IT
Let's clone Jesus from the DNA
secreted in the Turin Shroud.
Clone the Prophet from his beard.
Clone the Buddha from his tooth at Kandy.
Clonings like that won't be allowed:
They'
d rather clone policemen,
civil servants, yesmen,
top executives and revered
athletes. No Kafka. No Khayyam. No Gandhi.
And certainly no Chief Red Cloud.
THIS IS THE SUICIDE HELPLINE
If you want help to commit suicide now:
press
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If you want to plan your suicide in advance
and elegantly:
press
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If you wish to be sent our Info-Pack on setting fire to yourself outside a bio-lab, embassy or abattoir:
press
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If you want to help someone commit suicide:
press
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If you want to encourage as many people as possible
painlessly and quietly to kill themselves to avoid
medicalisation and lingering, increasing powerlessness in
hospitals, into which everyone else is herded like sheep
- in other words, if you want to spread the word
about true freedom of choice:
press
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If you want to write positively
about suicide
please contribute to
the Dissident Editions website.
NOT A GUILLOTINE, ALAS, THE DRASTIC
BLEAK PORTCULLIS DROPS THROUGH
MY HEART
Camus declared that
the only real philosophical question
is the question of suicide
.
All the insoluble problems of humanity
result from having failed
to answer that correctly.
Among the good reasons for killing oneself
is the sad awareness of the impossibility
of killing everyone else.
Remaining perfect,
my dog failed to see
two butterflies on his bone.
TWO TANKA
Street-furniture
everywhere, but no signposts
direct you to the abattoir,
all the brave animals...
...and the world
overrun by cruel cowards.
Our comfort: measure
of our disrespect for many
creatures, many things.
In my beautiful garden
the feeling: How much longer ?
THE CAR OF JAGERNATHI
(or THE TOTALITARIANISM OF CONSUMER-CAPITALISM)
"Money can only circulate freely in the realm
of continual disappointment."
-
Hakim Bey
The Sufi Malamatis
led sinful lives
so they could worship God
without expectation of heavenly reward.
But we lead sinful lives
because the only other options
are unprepared-forms of suicide.
The worst that we do
to each other is nothing compared
with what we do to mammals, fish and birds.
Outliving evolution
we are all
idiots-savants
stupefied by the tyranny
of our concocted words.
This Chinese bear, captured while a cub, will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket while a dirty metal tube inserted by "superior" animals directly into its liver drips "magic" bear-bile like rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...
"UPRIGHT MAN SEEKS DIVINITY
THROUGH INFLICTING PAIN"
(Derek Walcott)
Everything we do is vaunting
wanting and wanting is addictive.
All this attention-jumble
when all we need to know
is how to flow
beyond our presupposing arrogance
through which we see only
our own shadows and the distended
flickerings of our cowboy
science projected on to babbling screens,
refusing to understand that we cannot
become happy by what we can get
but from all we can get rid of
all of us kings and queens
over Nature, lording it soullessly
greedily, cruelly
always creating evil to praise
and devils to worship.
So the children sleep
and sleep, while in their heads
the sores of consciousness erupt
through ego to destroy the earth.
The children sleep
each in the private, final deep
of unmentionable solitude
even before birth.
A peoples virtue once was poetry.
Now it is credit-rich banality
and false celebration of mere celebrity.
In that ubiquity of bleakness
I move as the shadow of the shadow of a wolf
among mummies wound by the vast webby mire
of words, in which there is no cranny
of culture that I honestly
can crawl into.
I have never met
a human to admire
.
TO A NEWBORN CHILD
I will not wish you wealth
but immunity to the doctors
the teachers and parents
that all pose a serious
problem for your spiritual health.
Heroism
is terrorism
of the self
by the self
for the self.
MEMORIAL HYMN TO
DIOGENES OF SINOPE
Dogs are our souls.
Consciousness is mere complexity
of joined-up holes -
a rotten shroud
of overweening cruelty.
Dogs are our beaten,
starving, tortured,
pampered souls.
THINKING WITHOUT LANGUAGE
All water is holy.
Animals are too clever
for words.
MANKIND, THE ROTTEN IDOL
Because we love to do and hate to be
we hate "as if" and live in want of
everything to be as we desire.
So we shall leave
nothing except the breakdown we have made
through wanting the pathetic order that
our chaotic minds run riot to achieve.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE IS,
OF COURSE, THE SERPENT
The stupidest beast
inventing a god of blame
expelled itself from the Garden
of Eden,
which it is now succeeding
in turning to Hell
for all the uncursed creatures.
Self-portrait in the Garden of Eden
ABSOLUTE ENLIGHTENMENT
The best way to
let go
is to
go
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