D I S S I D E N T

We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them.
- Albert Einstein

with a face as old as the dark that keeps it young
a tiger-dream pacing another cage before breakfast

Eros is the god - not of love - but drivenness.
When you wake up in the night
it's no joke having second sight.

Those crazy, corrupt - seemingly
immortal - religions teach that flesh
is weak, feminine and corruptible
like compassion
corrupting the mind
which is male like muscle
like penis
corrupting the soul which is male
and immortal
and immoral like god.

Even the poor in our society
have six times more
than it's sane to desire

And the rich everywhere
always
are wanting something for nothing.

The rose of awareness
The thorn of existence
Bewilderment's the stem of understanding
that man is the thorn
on the rose of awareness
and awareness is the aphid on the thorn.

Would I ever sell something
for more than I paid ?
There's more than a touch
of evil in trade.

a new version of a famous and much-translated Chinese poem by
Li-Po (701-762 CE)

I take my wine and glass out to the garden,
to drink alone among the flowering shrubs.
Where are my friends ?
I raise my glass, invite the moon to join me:
two reflections on the surface of the wine.
My shadow, too, appears to make a company of three -
then I realise the moon's teetotal,
and my shadow merely shadows what I do,
both of them silent - so I am silent, too.

Without the moon - whose light they say
turns silk rugs grey - my shadow could not have joined
our little party.
I start to sing...the moon begins to lurch.
I get up and dance...my shadow sways grotesquely.
While I'm still conscious we three are boon-companions...
and just a little later I'm on my own again.
They may be soulless, but my two pals
can be relied upon as mortals can't.
For sure we'll celebrate again, soon,
way out among the stars...

Seeming to live
and always taking leave and re-attaching,
re-inventing love and hate and obligation
we are shadow-beings, abusing reason,
talking of 'soul' and always beyond all consolation.

We talk of beauty, but what we mean
is sad adornment of the squalor that we make.
We talk of 'progress': our progressive
enslavement to comfort - no give, all take

from whom and what we crush for comfort's sake;
progressive dependency on rapine
and diminishment of the whole world -
we demi-beings of too much light
and chatter, infantile, unillumined, arrogant and fake.

On warm, still nights
I hear rocks groan in their sleep.
I am mumbling sadness
unable to love or to weep,
a perforated stone
windowing pain with words.

GAULEITER ALIGHERI

Peter of Morrone
who wanted only to spend his life in a cell
became Pope Celestine V
elected because of his saintliness.
He was so true and incorruptible
that, perceiving his incompetence,
he resigned forthwith:
the only resigning pope.

His successor put him in gaol
so that he could not be exploited by Dissidents.
And Dante consigned him to Hell.

When protestant king Henry of Navarre
laid siege to catholic Paris
to gain his throne of France

the starving dug up cemetery bones
to grind into false flour
to make fake bread
which of course could never rise

And a widow of the lesser
aristocracy
whose children died of hunger
roasted their skinny little bodies
and eked them out
over the following fortnight
and eking, eating, sobbed.

Twenty-two years later
the man who murdered the now catholic
and popular king Henri IV
was scalded and then ripped to pieces
some of which were eaten
by unknowns of a Paris mob.
This was not unjust, but some would think it cruel.

During the last siege of Paris
(which was in 1870) there were no reports
of cannibalism. But some of the starving
crept underground
into the catacombs and crushed
the fleshless bones they found
to make an utterly un-nourishing gruel.

"In the Republic of Ukraine
a man accused of killing a woman
and skinning her corpse
to make a brassière and shorts
told a court that
he did it to calm his nerves.

Police found dog skins
and a blanket made from mouse skins
in the 21-year old untaught-shaman's home.

To be human is to be a whimpering terrorist,
a hoplite of heartbreak trying to escape the frame,
each day pregnant with the guilt
of having woken up,
each day sewing up our minds
and faces to obscure our shame.

People eat meat as though
vegetables were rare
- as if we lived in cold palæolithic times
when there weren't even nettles or chickweed
- as if they were feudal lords
- as if meat tasted better than cellulose flavoured with blood
- as if it were not forbidden to photograph abattoirs
- as if cows had no sorrow
-as if we were only victims of history
- as if there were no tomorrow.

Does 'meet with me'
have the same relationship with 'meet'
as 'fuck with me' has with 'fuck' ?
Or is meeting me really like
meeting with an accident ?

The British Government papers
concerning Napoleon's life and death on
the island of St Helena are still Top Secret
and available to nobody but the Prime Minister.
How sinister.

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We do not breathe: the Earth breathes us
its throttling genius-animus
through lungs of light and landscape. Thus
because the world is more than human
we try to make it much less than world,
inhuman.

We are the governors, the cleaners,
bureaucrats, teachers, manufacturers,
scientists, shopkeepers, farmers, doctors,
bedwetters and the unemployed:
all spiritual wrecks for whom no breath
inhales the challenge of prismatic consciousness -
only challenges of infantile guns, jobs, status,
drugs, pain and sex...

Because, through our ungrounded imagination,
we have lost the landscape,
all that we have is loss
engorged with traffic.
We are slaves of desire who want result
without connection, the insane
prisoners of progeny, vacations and champagne.

I am just the box I came in -
shabby proof of mere existence.
When I was young I had no ambition
for money or for status:
foolishly, I had ambition only to be wise.

Words come and go like buses
Highfalutin' is one I don't hear now.
Wholesome is another.

When I was young
there was a word uttered
especially and deprecatingly
by men who were the age
I now am:
Newfangled.

Like progress, newfangledness is ongoing -
progressive - almost exponential.
It's overpowering.
The world of human beings is ineluctably in thrall to the newfangled...

All the American girls were interned in the zoo
in the Bois de Boulogne - isn't that interesting ?
So interesting for the mostly less than interesting
American girls. American girls are now
less interesting than ever, but much more interesting
than Irish ones, and less interesting than the frighteningly
interesting trans-sexuals who now are a zoo
in the very uninteresting Bois de Boulogne -
just as frightening as (but more interesting than) German
soldiers - and much more interesting and much less frightening
than American senators or American food
or American war-crimes or American war.

Miserable wars
if love is not the reason
Miserable wars

Miserable weapons
if they are not kisses
Miserable

Pitiable men
if they don't die of love
Pitiable

Men have killed
more women than men

The most miserable love
is fought for
The most pitiable kisses are weapons
and the most pathetic men
refuse to live for love without motive.

A COLD EYE

Wisdom is awareness
of the futility of communication
and the prodigality of the
communication of futility:
Wisdom is bareness.

Books are dead trees
and marketing and choked drains,
and poems are dead cells
from dying brains,

through whose intent, intention,
intentionality
the vivid randomness of life and nature
has been turned to death
by planned inequity and inequality.

FALSENESS CLOSE TO KIN

'For the coffin & the cradle & the purse
are all against a man.' - Christopher Smart

After three half-hearted, vain abortion efforts came
the mutual punishment of birth and the tight
pretence of my Adoption. Then you failed
to force me in the painful mould
of your own image, uncommunicating, cold.
Still, we have been faithful to each other:
rebel son and secret mother.
I'm getting old, and you're ever more stubborn.
You think that I have failed you,
and can't remember when last you ate.
We were hardly in each other's knowing -
now my half-respect for you has turned to emptiness
almost dispassionate.

IADURILOR: INFERNAL REGIONS
In memoriam Ion Caraion

The terror
Of error…
The error
Of terror…

The terror of seeing
The error of being.

Compassion is flame
and the ashes of the fire.
Compassion is crossed fingers behind your back
as your shoulders hunch like a crone's.
Compassion is the corpse buried in your eyes.
Compassion is the burying of stones.

LYCANDROPHILY

Like most werewolves I find very few
humans that I actually like.

Like most werewolves
I find only large quadrupeds and other
werewolves sexually attractive.

In front of the fire or out in the byre
we hug and caress and make slow,
impenetrative werewolfish love

And voluptuously ease into the even-
better, slower, many-times-releasing
ceasing.

CONSUMER

I went out to buy contentment
and came home with bulls' testicles.
I went out to buy transcendence
and came back with a mobile phone.
The vileness of money
is that it turns stupidity of desire
into virtue.
I listen to time coughing and watch
the wolf in the Institute being
flayed to the bone.

NO PITY FOR THE YOUNG

My foreskin is a
cap upon a pen that writes
unbridgeable sighs.

Most texts are greater than the writer.

BEING AND ITS EMBRYOS
for Malcolm

I have come here through the
continuing hug-famine of Ireland with
my portfolio of pleasures

to discover that so many people
are colourless attempt at living,
for we are bred for rapacity,
everyone criminal.
But when the fashionable
sun excludes you, I shall administer
my bony cuddles through the
breathless, fleshy night
knowing the unsensual, senseless
cruelty of light.

At the Conference of
Poetry Police
An observer who claimed
That a tree was worth
A thousand poets
Was declared mentally ill
And unfit to work at
The paper-mill.

BEAUTY AND DESPAIR

The forest's lovely, dark and deep,
But I, unlovely human, have pale and
shallow promises to keep
to well-kept humans.
There is no gain but hurt
as we turn the planet called Earth
to the planet called Dirt,
the planet of pain.
And we are vanity & all in vain.

Every girl and every boy
is born with and robbed of
the secret of joy.
And not a thing will satisfy
Because we all are cut away
from our innate capacity
to be appropriate, attuned.

Poems
are pus from that terrible wound,
wound of wanting, dark and deep.
The woods are lovely…We explain
and turn experience to pain,
turn pain to planetary experience,
and we are vanity, and all in vain.

BETWEEN THE CANDLE AND THE WALL

I walk among ghosts
for whom cleverness,
the lies of history
and education
are worth a whole world
more than wilderness
or mystery
or revelation.

FLAMES UPON THE NIGHT

Christians destroyed the Oracles
not because the Sibyls lied
but because the uncouth
New Testamenters
wanted The Good News
and couldn't bear the truth.

THE WHOLE WORLD IS A
HOSPITAL
In memoriam Osho

Connection is the door
to the perfectly gentle sore.
Religion is a luxury and not a leap:
"You need a Master when you are
asleep."

A PAGE FROM THE HANDBOOK OF HEARTBREAK

"Men have lovely bums," you said.
Yes indeed, lovely bums,
hairy bums…
and their hearts aren't far past
the diaper stage -
which is why I gave up
lust and rage.

Irish fields are bleak
even in summer when the grass is high for silage.
They are prisoners,
beaten up, interned behind barbed wire,
inside us, our fenced land, our property
- and we cannot shut it out.
Nor brick nor stone nor wool nor wine
nor fire nor electricity can keep it out
of the trampled, overcropped, exhausted
field of consciousness

where club and cleft stick,
man and woman
are seasoned by the sourness of centuries
thickening to peat above them and below
spring after ritual spring.
Gort - one of the Irish words for 'field' -
comes from the same root as Latin hortus
and English garth, yard and garden.
The Persian paradise
had prison-walls.

A garden is a shrine to tidiness,
a place for dolls,
fragile and cruel as its creators,
each one a habitat destroyed,
a wanton blasphemy of wilderness.
And wolves and bears have vanished
as the wilderness has vanished.

A garden's just a piece of tidy property
whence beauty, truth and toleration have been banished
into books. And books are dead trees
and marketing and choked drains,
and poems are dead cells dropping
like sleet from wintry brains.

BEING IS REDUCED TO WORDS
AS SPLENDID MEALS ARE
TURNED TO TURDS

We are too arrogant to learn
and what we must re-learn
is beyond speech.

The stupid don't know how stupid
they are, and the wise
try to cope with constant surprise.

LIFE

is profound shit.
The famous are into it
Deeper than others.

SHADE MORE THAN MAN

(click here for Russian translation)

My bones were formed by sorrow
as shrines are built by doubt
Sorrow of being
Doubt of becoming
Sweat upon sand
Tide in, tide out
Inevitable
invisible
shipwreck in fog
I make soup for tomorrow
lost like a dog
between doubt and sorrow.

TO THE GHOST OF WILLIE YEATS

Users of glass have no transparency.
Beyond the tombstone palaces of sensual delight
the ultimate sensuality
is dying. Can anything else we do
in the self-regarding Punch-&-Judy show
of psychoclastic Normality
be harmless - let alone be good ?
Words cannot be free
nor silence right...
I say to you: The only art
that's true is how you mould your heart.

TWO MORE PARIS POEMS

I.

In the Paris street
famous for at least 800 years
for comforts and deformities of flesh
a pretty, very sweet
and almost-fresh
young whore approached me:
I'll pleasure you
for just 100 francs, she said.
You have a tender face.
I touched her gently on the arm
and smilingly declined
her old recensions of the intimate
freak-show by which some choose
and some refuse
to propagate the race.

II.

In the Empire of Things
sellers are clones
of kings without counsel or freedom
or responsibility,
and buyers are thrones
of consumption and heartlessness,
hypocrisy, hygiene
and inhospitability.

MAN TO BOY

Pissing is plumbing and pleasure:
Let yourself go down the throat of 'society'
Piss on the unholy family,
progress, and the power-obsessed state
Point your willy at 'God' and let go -
and if, like me, you dribble, don't worry:
the stains and the smell will add to
the things you can do to keep
insane normality (a.k.a. morality) at bay.

THE ANIMALS ARE PERFECT

The animals are perfect.
We are frightful aliens.
The earth is just the launching pad
we're clearing for our take-off
to oblivion.

What happened to the world ?
People kept robbing it.
That's the price of beauty,
said the aliens.

A VOICE FROM THE MIRROR

I should say my heart was broken
if I believed in hearts.
I recognise the void within me
and despair.

Love is just as true as rumour
and healing death the shadow
of free, meaningless forever.

WHAT SILENCE MIGHT HAVE SAID TO SPEECH

Listening to the sperm die in my scrotum
and to the shedding of dead skin,
to the thickening of my blood
as I live out my minor malady of living
I reflect
that none is more suspect
than those who teach,
that to be single, solitary, is far
from being a punishment or prison,
far even from being a limitation,
but an accomplishment - a prestidigitation.
And sex
(a headless chicken,
or red herring in a cul-de-sac)
is as over-rated as a beach.

NINE SHORT POEMS

Normality's unknown
to dogs, unknown
to sharks and humming-birds -
normality is merely
to be defined by words.

The greatest mystery
of life for me is not its origin
nor end nor meaning
but people's relentless superficiality.

The people who waste the most water
are those who most complain
about rain.
(Taps drip unfixed throughout
vast regions of unceasing drought.)

In my Auschwitz
head are five nice Nazis,
four Jewish war-criminals,
three bestial anarchists,
a Jehovah's Witness
and six far-seeing
(and very sexy) Gypsies.

In Nation States
the breadth of human
(and therefore animal)
experience decreases day by day.
And so we blaze our way.

"Your poems are full of puns -
but words can never conquer guns."
"Very apt, and very true -
but what the blazes can I do ?"