Memories are snares
The past can’t be lived again
Hope’s for the future
Wednesday 30 October 2019
Tuesday 29 October 2019
Haiku #272
Shun your bed for dread
Sleep’s ruled by a blood-drunk Queen
Whose world thrives on screams
Monday 28 October 2019
Sunday 27 October 2019
The Aid Parade
The only times I receive a call
Is when questions vex or a sudden
Need for a shoulder or a wailing wall.
If I hear naught, I will surmise
That friends’ lives are on a rise,
Which will come as no surprise
For we can’t all live ‘neath a pall
Nor can we all be ‘bout to fall.
Saturday 26 October 2019
Tuesday 22 October 2019
Monday 21 October 2019
The Noble Art of Cutting Red Tape
Holy fucking puss-buckets!! With the stream of rhetoric that I just called forth to get my drugstore to release two prescriptions a mere two days early, I could have settled the Suez Crisis! And then the Nobel Peace Prize would have come to ME instead of to The Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson! Shit! I should be sent to the Middle East, where my words would make ragout of the brains of the warring parties and so bring a state of calm to that most annoying contested little sandbox!!
Sunday 20 October 2019
Friday 18 October 2019
Thursday 17 October 2019
Monday 14 October 2019
Monday 7 October 2019
Fear, Meditation and Poppies
It’s weird and I don’t understand it. I can go for days (weeks? I doubt weeks) living in this box with the closest thing to human contact being the voices that sing to me out of my computer but then, with no warning, a feeling of solitude hits me like a pyramid dropped on me from out of low Earth orbit. It brings along a trailer filled with the threat of panic. I know that’s what I would have to deal with if I can peek out from under the pyramid. That is what opiates are for: they wrap you in a comfy cushion that insulates you from everything uncomfortable. Just lean back into it and soak up the total lack of…well, anything that might cause you pain or fear or the problems that come with being a social animal without a society to belong to. And that society can even be just one other person. I guess that all I’m doing with this perambulating paragraph is using a whole lot of words to describe and define “loneliness” and its potential terror and, therefore, its danger. Yes, when you are of a certain turn of mind, opiates keep you safe. Safe from what, you ask? Safe from yourself really, because if you don’t have SOMETHING to kill the loneliness and the fear and the fear of loneliness, all you have left is the ability to kill. If you lose control of whatever mechanism you have to suppress your feelings. It’s feelings that are the real danger, once you have stripped away all of the layers of its disguises. Opiates are painkillers and what is pain? Pain is a feeling and quite possibly the purest and most basic of the entire range of feelings that you can experience (and if you can’t experience something then it certainly is not a feeling, or a problem for that matter). All of those “centring” exercises? They are all designed to purify your consciousness and to leave only your ego, your YOU, free of distractions. Distractions that include feelings. That centre you aim for IS the essential “you.” Do you think it’s a coincidence that the parts of the world that developed meditation are also parts of the world where opium poppies grow? I think not.
Saturday 5 October 2019
Thursday 3 October 2019
The Verse’s Curse
Do you know how poets die?
(Trick question: as all know
The ways are legion in
Which we go.…)
So, does the Lamp of
Death, with spectrum wide,
Shine its nightlight in
A multitude of
Brilliant hues, illuming
Every cranny, leaving no
Nook in which to hide?
A special shade for every
Soul,
A custom colour for you all?
A brilliant grief, decorous
And discrete, leading
Each wan’dring ghost
Clear through the
Devouring night
With Death as guide,
Who calmly waits in that
Elsewhere, where once-live
Eyes are so surprised
To find filled a-brim
With fields of light,
So blinding bright.
So, how do poets die?
I ask since I suspect
But do not truly
Know, yet I’d speak no
Lie if I should say I
Think I do know why.…
Would I guess true
If I assumed that you
Know of Norns, who keep
The measure of all lives
Whether spent in
Labour hard or in
Lordly courts as bards.
There, poets rage and write,
Frayed, flayed, aether-fuelled,
The Muses's serfs.
And should a Muse tire
Of its tool, into its
Dreaming ears
The Muse will
Hiss and whisper,
A weird of words to
Gull the poet, all
Unaware and unawake:
Naught but a fool to fall
Far down the well found at
The root of Yggdrasil,
Full-filled with dark
Depressions, from where
Echo still those killing
Whispers, sonic toxins of
The Muse who once inspired
The poet of whom it tired.
Now the wretch is fed
His last suggestion:
"Put down your pen, your work
Is done.…well, mayhap after one last
Act, after which we Muses
Swear and vow to fix your
Works amongst the words
Of the sages of the ages.
All you need do is
Make some room, leave
A place open at
The sage’s table for
A fresher pen in
The artist’s den.
Step out now from
The Grand Procession;
Your rôle is done in
The poetic succession,
And I grow glum and
Of you tired, Sir Versifier.
So, like a witch at work
Upon some mixture,
I’ll bring to boil the pot
Of Time and from its froth
Conjure forth some newborn
Tool for the endless line
Of puppets who do rhyme.
Now leave us please,
Disappear.
The Norns have cut
Short your time and
I’ll no longer you inspire.
I suggest that you give up,
That you give in
Before your rhymes
Become your crimes.”
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