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from
BOOK IN PROGRESS:
SUICIDE FOR
NON-BEGINNERS
poems for a later age
by
Anthony Weir
part two
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LIFE ITSELF A REFUGEE
Big
mess outside
big
mess inside:
the quail
dashes back
and forth
across the road
to its squashed
mate.
In the cave
of my brain
I pray
to the wall
and the rocks
and the rain:
cover us
all.
COLOURS
Blue passes for sincerity.
I worry about white.
Stainless
and murderous
it chops hearts
and minds.
Red seems like resistance
and purple broods on the melancholy of pleasure.
Black is deep truth.
Grey is the silent witness of stones.
Brown is beauty, dung, earth
in harmony with the green of Manless Harmony
and yellow is sunrise-eagerness
and orange is sunset-resignation.
But white is frightening
freezing and sterile
eating with stainless McDonald's teeth
like cancer
through everything
everything.
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.
THE WORLD'S BEAUTY IS DEFORMED
I understand women who
for a little fumbling of unfelt affection
endure the violence.
Three of the most charming
human beings 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 Khayyám. No Gandhi.
And certainly no Chief Red Cloud.
THIS IS THE SUICIDE HELPLINE
If you want help to commit suicide now:
press
.
If you want to plan your suicide in advance
and elegantly:
press
.
If you wish to be sent our Info-Pack on setting fire to yourself outside a bio-lab, embassy or abattoir:
press
.
If you want to help someone commit suicide:
press
.
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
.
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...
But hundreds of thousands of animals suffer just as much mindless cruelty in American laboratories. In the "democratic" USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published. "Free speech" on animal welfare is regarded as criminal by the American régime.
"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
back to
part one
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