Foreign Objection - A Log in my Eye

There is a nationalist obsession with the pure blood; tradition and flags – foreigners are to be distrusted, their motives are always a threat to the old status quo; send them all back to where they came from, black Paki bastards; kaffirs; queers; niggers, feminists; spics; liberals; wops; yids and infidels, stealing our jobs and our women, taking away what belongs to us.
It's ignorance that blinds us from the fact that we’re all from somewhere else; all descendant from some plunderer, some poor immigrant, some migrant worker, some colonial infidelity.
The empires rise and fall and leave us in their wake; washed up mongrels on some foreign shore, fighting to keep what we’ve stolen from the previous empire or seething with anger at what’s been taken from us.
History is a lie.
Geography is a lie – arbitrary lines drawn on the map of empire.
Call me a cynical monkey if you like, but the Twenty-first Century ethos seems to be that all this shit is okay so long as the market is fed, so long as the big pressure groups – Christians; Jews; oil barons; arms dealers and money launderers – cough up the millions required to elect the next president of the U.S. fucking A. An Empire in decline with its rotten underbelly unashamedly exposed for those who wish to see.
You’re deluding yourself if you think that payback is not imminent.
The colonies have had enough, they have always seen through your bullshit, now they speak out against you despite your punitive repercussions; they rise against you, they kick you in the balls while you protect yourself with a bullet-proof vest. And like all bullies, you yelp in surprise at the pain, unable to believe that action against you can be justified; you strike back with the force of your bully muscle, attempting to turn back the sea, to shoot the sky; and to justify your actions by invoking god’s backing – the same god you invented to scare and dissuade the uprising of your own poor and the oppressed before enlisting them in your crusading army.
We’re all from somewhere else – we’re all immigrants.

Bathesphere

Dali - Christ of St John of the Cross

The Minister stood before the crowded church, open bible on one palm, finger tapping the page.
The words delivered from his mouth were carried over the heads of the congregation by undulating waves of righteousness. Words that I found impossible to hold onto, slipping past my understanding like motes of dust in a sunbeam.
I turned my head slowly to watch my Mother’s enraptured face, hoping that the Minister would not notice my lack of attention. I wondering what she found here that made her so uncharacteristically happy.
I wondered if it were possible to be damned before you even grow up; I tried not to think about Hell and about dying, tried to move my thoughts away from the fear that welled inside my heart.
Returning my gaze to the front, I leaned forward on my arms and kicked my legs back and forth. I imagined I could see a blue aura around the young minister. My mother had told me that this man was a good man, a born-again. My Father had said nothing; I wandered if my Father too was damned for not attending church.

Hyperbarbaric Chamber

My gut is an empty space at my centre. It has been months since I last ate, months, and this hunger has yet not taken my life away.
How long does eternity take to pass? I lost count of the days a long time ago. The pages of my impenetrable bible are worn and browned by the grubby fingertips of minutes that pass in absolute isolation. Sometimes the words seem to laugh a me and my plight, sometimes they are meaningless tangle of sounds and shapes inside my head, and then I have to speak the words out loud in order to make sense of them.

They came down the black chain on eight legs; a caterpillar invading the rotten apple that constitutes my existence They were tense and naked; three men and a woman; they all but sniffed the air like wild animals as they clambered up onto the Aurora’s deck. I sniffed the air myself; I could taste the fear, fresh as the smell of earth, beautiful. They spoke in terse and monosyllabic bursts, in what I eventually came to realise was some unfamiliar dialect of English. Three men and a woman – even before the storm that sunk the Aurora, I had not seen a woman for months.

It is becoming more and more difficult to find a reason to continue writing, given that I no longer have a comfortable chair, and that the ink from the captain’s desk is returning to some previous form, tiny squid-like blotches that sometimes find some life to swim across my page.

Taking the newcomers for demons from some deeper level, I shadowed their movements around the Aurora. They searched the galley for food, rifled through the cabins to dress themselves in the threadbare garments vacated by my erstwhile and long-digested shipmates.
At nightfall, though it was not particularly cold, they lit a small fire in the kitchen, using the wood from the captain’s chair. They crouched around its light like a coven of witches in one of Mister Shakespeare’s overrated plays, muttering low in their strange accents with occasional furtive glances outward into the darkness.
The acquired clothing, while lending them a modicum of civility, failed to cover their fear and fragility. At one point she, the woman, looked straight at me, holding the look for some long seconds, as if unwilling to disbelieve that sense in her that knew she was being watched.
My bare feet tread silent on the rough board, aware of the location of each creak and squeak; I realised that these demons had entered my world and that it was I, and not they, who held the advantage – a strange sensation for a man of meek disposition, used more to doing the bidding of those who held power – father, tutors and masters all.

One of the men – obviously the leader, presumably self-appointed – spoke of the place from whence they had come. He spoke of magic and of gods and of imminent bloodshed sounding not unlike the sermons of my brethren in a life long past. He spoke of injustice and indignity, and strangest of all, called for a ballot on whether to turn back or to continue along the chain. One of the men professed his belief that they should return to the island, that things only get worse the further you travel the chain. The woman spoke forth in a manner I found quite unbecoming her gender. I believe she put forth the fact that even should everyone else turn back, she would continue down the chain. The man who’d advocated turning back, shrugged under the cabin boy’s nightshirt, his face resentful, his mouth remained shut.

The knives hung from my belt; no longer tools for the old chef’s chopping; hunger and self-preservation sharpened to a hair on tedium’s black whet stone.

Excerpt from 'Markov Chain'

Revolution Sale

The commecialisation of the word 'revolution' primarily with the use of Che Guevara's image has been covered extensively and eloquently elsewhere.
Refer in particular to the excellent post entitled La Revolution Mode d’Emploi by Dionysus Unemployed
I completed this drawing a couple of years ago in an attempt to give visual image to the subject.
She is lighting the fuse to the bomb on top of the pole and the sparks around the ignited fuse are depicted thus $$$$$$$$$

“A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.”
Fidel Castro

“Revolution is the festival of the oppressed”
V.I.Lenin

“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”
Che Guevara

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
John F. Kennedy

“Revolutions are always verbose.”
Leon Trotsky

“One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.
Frank Zappa

Prophet = Profit

We are led to believe (subconsciously at least) that Capitalism and Christianity are partners in the Western System. This may in fact be true, but the ‘Christianity’ employed is corrupt. The biggest problem with Capitalism as it stands is the fact that it is not based, in fact, on any sort of morality. If this were true, there would not be so much money to be made by evangelists (tele- or otherwise).
Pat Robertson’s Christian attitudes being a perfect example.
Capitalism works by buying up anything that opposes the system, cleaning it up, using the original ‘street cred’ to market it as a product and selling it back to the hungry consumer - rock’n’roll being a prime example (moral outrage is a great marketing tool for selling goods to the young, as long as you plank an ‘explicit lyrics’ sticker on the case).
The system requires cheap labour to produce the goods for the ever more demanding consumer who in turn will earn his money by less physical means as he rises up the ladder of ‘success’. Eventually the system, in driving down prices on essential goods (like food) will begin to consume itself – by which time the more affluent societies will no longer be able to produce these goods for themselves.
Is there any need for us to have a Plasma TV in every room (including the bathroom)? How many cars do we need in a lifetime? Is it necessary to super-size everything?
We need to introduce a social conscience into the system - and fast.
Perhaps the US and Europe should be looking to the examples being set by those South American nations that they have oppressed financially for so long.
Perhaps those citizens of the US and Europe should be doing some soul searching in order to leave something for their children other than rampant consumerism and system crash.
Change the system – raise your voice in protest.
If you call yourself a Christian, then do your Christian duty.
Change must start at the top; put aside the distracting issues thrown your way (Abortion; Stem Cells; Immigration) for now, address the big issues first.

A Gothic Observatory

Nocturne - Jean Miro

The night has a politics unrestrained, rawer, unneedful of the niceties of linguistics.
Night people show the true face of humanity, unsugared by charitable donations or moral issues, all faces stripped by the piranhas of alcohol and narcotic to the bare bones of our genetics, to float pale and gap-toothed grinning on the surface of night’s desires.
I love this taste of unseen forces doing their Darwinian duty, Testosterone fuelled male manoeuvring for easily charmed shallow female beauty – but I am only an observer; a selective agent here. I leave the herd to their hopeless dance toward a joyless future; they hold no attraction for me.
What I require is stimulation of a more specialised nature; something a bit more esoteric, intangible. Something that tingles on the edges of the synapses beyond the earth-bound senses of taste, touch and smell – although I will admit to a taste for blood.
I feel ol' Red twitch in discomfort; self righteous little man that he is – takes no responsibility for the true nature of things, but nevertheless with steaming showers in morning’s red remorse, will wash away the forensic evidence of our night’s activities. Likes to see himself as the innocent bystander does Red, but I know better.
It’s a rare and visceral poetry – to read the future in the inner workings of the human body – beyond surgery; cosmetic or otherwise – a place where only the strong will hold your stare; only the committed will take those extra steps.
I move through the Euclidian streets that mark Eden’s lower belly, leaving behind the sports bars where I took him to tease, past the nightclubs that cater for amphetamine and psychedelic hedonism, past the specialist joints where you wouldn’t believe the kind of shit people are into, past down-and-out end-of-the-line bars where even the hookers won’t park their asses, away from all of this to the singles bars where it all makes perfect sense.
It’s a delicious dance with the inevitable, diamond faceted intersecting planes of causality, courting the end of the world with a mind too fragile to take it. Melancholy has a new depth where only chemicals can deal a hand strong enough to equal the flush of sacred hearts, spades and the inevitable clubs.
My body is alive; I can see the muscles on my gut in my mind’s eye – defined and sexy – ready for anything; for the night’s unknowing; for pleasure wet and red.
Somewhere out here in Eden’s loving night there is a woman who wants me for her special moment; that moment when she can give it all, open that part of herself so neglected by others; someone who is ready for the sharing of intimate fluid. Mars reaches the parts that other brands dare not. I love this anticipation; this knowing; I feel my desire, as yet un-engorged, hanging in wait, its weight a pleasure in itself. Self-awareness is a beautiful thing when unencumbered by the conventions of sin and guilt; unanswerable to the petty rules enforced to keep the herd inside the paddock.
They say that power corrupts; bullshit, power is a means by which to satisfy the most primal of human desires: the desire for ownership.
And speaking of ownership; I spot Red’s car up ahead, the parking meter dutifully still showing 5 minutes even though it’s after hours.
You can tell a lot about a man by his choice of car. Whatever possessed him to by this clumsy family car with its cup holders and automatic transmission and white paint job?

Excerpt from 'Markov Chain'

What is it Good For?

The shooting started somewhere in the middle of the night. My sleep had been black and dreamless and I awoke in my trench, staring upward at the Milky Way.
The red streaks of tracer fire scarred the rectangle of sky above me like blood on black velvet. I prayed only that I would livelivelivelivelive. I lay still, mind and body transfixed with fear, the sound of gunfire immediate and real. I was unaware of my rifle, wrapped under the edge of the canvas sheet beside me and I was unaware of my boots that stood at the foot end of the trench – I could not smell the socks that I'd stuffed into them just before I'd fallen asleep. Somebody started firing mortars nearby, deep thuds of confident firepower, and I heard someone yell
“Friendly fire! Friendly fire! Stop shooting!”
I stared up eyes wide from my trench. The long rectangle of night that was my field of vision, lit up, bright as day and I watched the white illumination flare spiralling through the sky trailing its miniature parachute and leaving a tail of white smoke. The sounds of gunfire slowed to the sporadic before dying out completely, to be followed by angry recriminations as the two groups took stock of the fuck up.
I released the stale breath from my chest and tried to relax my aching jaw. I stood up in my trench, adrenalin pumped, Stupid arseholes, Stupid dumb Dutchmen. I hated this, this deep vein of stupidity that ran up the throbbing shaft of the military establishment. Why the fuck are we doing this?

Later I followed Terrance and one of the Dutchmen down to the river to wash. The water was brown and fast running and we took turns to stand guard while the others waded in up to their knees, naked in a gap in the reeds. After an unsatisfying bath we got ourselves dry and back into the dusty uniforms. I tired to shave using the stupid military issue metal mirror that hardly reflected anything except dirt.
We made our way back up the eroded red riverbank and I looked back as we reached the top. A white shirt floated in the water just upriver from where we had washed. A white shirt with air trapped under it. Air trapped between the shirt and the facedown body and as my mind snapped into focus I realised that there were two more bodies, naked, brown, face down. A breeze blew off the water carrying the sudden stench of carrion. The letter in my backpack burned deep and hard, Susan’s curlicued handwriting with little crosses instead of dots above the i’s, like the eyes of dead people in cartoons.

Acts of plunder and looting are natural by-products of war. When you’ve destroyed a town and brutalised its occupants, justifying acts of indiscriminate theft is easy. Our battery rolled into the shelled town late in the afternoon. The sunlight was angled low, harsh and red, and threw the bullet holes in the walls of the shattered buildings into sharp relief. The air reeked of diesel and death and the roadside was decorated with the occasional fly-encrusted corpse. I realised that the only Angolans I'd seen so far had been dead ones. I averted my gaze, not wanting to see those black ropes of dried blood the tied the bodies to the dusty earth.
One by one we climbed down from the vehicles and milled around, eyes everywhere, rifles at the ready. Somebody entered a building; its solid wooden doors blown open beneath a flapping awning. He returned to the glare with handfuls of worthless banknotes.
Inside a general store whose interior was carpeted in shattered glass, we found local cigarettes – weak currency for the lung’s desires.
I followed one of the Bombardiers into a two-story building, its front daubed with a red and black fresco of Che Guevara. We climbed the concrete stairs slowly; the air was decorated with the hum of one of the vehicles outside and the crunch of our boots on the rubble and glass, occasionally the radio would spew short terse sentences encased in static. At the top of the stairs we were confronted by a corridor with three doors on each side.
“You take the left Engelsman,” said the Bombardier, dismissively in Afrikaans. Early on in my military training I had learned that being called an Englishman by an Afrikaner was at best an insult. The Boer War had not been forgotten.
We moved down the corridor, cautious, quiet. The Bombardier opened the first door on the right and entered the darkened room. I followed suit on the left, rifle at the ready. The room was dimmed by ragged curtains that billowed slowly in the draft from the open door. Empty. I retreated and continued down the corridor to the next room. This room had no curtains but did contain a bed and a chest of drawers; both covered in dust and glass where the window had blown in. The drawers lay open like a broken flight of stairs that I climbed with my eyes to find the wooden box that lay on top of the chest. I could hear the Bombardier opening cupboards and drawers behind me in the room across the corridor. I walked forward and reached out for the box, my fingertips leaving four polished stripes across the dust on the wooden surface as the air behind me became solid and shoved me hard up against the chest of drawers. The sound of the explosion followed a split-second later, concussing my eardrums and leaving a high-pitched whistle in my head. Booby trap. I’m dead, I thought, but found myself clutching the polished wooden box to my chest as I struggled to my feet, blood copper in my mouth.
Deafened, I turned to see the door swinging back on buckled hinges. I walked back out into the devastated corridor where a gaping hole showed the inside of the opposite room. The Bombardier had been smeared across the concrete floor and left, along with bits of jagged metal and bone, dripping from the wall.

The convoy rocked and swayed through the bush, raising dust and diesel fumes.
Homeward bound.
‘You are now leaving Angola. Please drive carefully and thank you for fucking up our country’.
Strapped in the back of the mine-proof vehicle with the green rubber military headset hissing faraway voices in my ear, I flipped a card at random: The Fool.
I couldn’t get the image of the liquefied Bombardier from my mind. One minute he’s there - in your face, another stupid arsehole in this stupid army. Next minute he’s nothing – fuck all - smeared across the floor like road-kill. Would his mother be proud of him? Would she be proud to accept the posthumous medal awarded for bravery in service of the Vaderland? Would it be a comfort to her in the darkness of her grief?
Bullshit.

Bitter Oak Heart

At the south-east corner of the park there is a wrought iron gate coated with decades of green paint. It gives access to Eden’s overgrown and unkempt botanical gardens.
Un-signposted pathways criss-cross between tall hedges and under ancient overhanging trees; through giant bushes and verdant floral explosions. Leaves blow in the breezes that cool the summer bloom and insects whistle and click in imitation of wilderness.
There is an area on the northern boundary of the park; alongside the tall hedge of lylandii that separates it from the swishing motorway, where the administration keeps its botanical tools; seedlings; hothouses and gardeners. In the corner where they chuck the empty fertiliser bags and bits of rotten fence; there crouches an old well. The trees hang over and peer in to this nondescript hole in the ground, a hole that long ago gave up giving water.
The trees understand the process. They write their stories in chlorophyll and cover their tracks in bark. Unlike the foolish flowers, the trees don’t give their secrets away. They work in seconds that last days; in hours that pay heed only to the sun by day; and by night they blow the oxygen off their shoulders like dandruff; twisting and creaking a life in amber slow-time.
Understanding the language of trees requires that you sit still for longer than it takes to smoke that cigarette, longer than it takes for your ass to go numb and cold and the dew to settle on your pale skin and dark fringe.
The verdict handed down to my guilty contemplation is executed not in physical pain but in the rising of sap; the pruning of thoughts; the clarity of memory.
Sweet cedar or bitter oak, the taste cannot be expunged from the guilty heart that beats at my core. In my heart I rake the tell-tale leaves that surround the well, tend it like the groundskeeper in this cemetery of one; I can neither mourn nor forget. I have not been in the park for years; I am afraid of what I will find there.

Exerpt from 'Markov Chain'

Monkey Rant #73

If you piss in the wind the world will smell like urine.
Don’t let this monkey hear of your parochial squabbles, your talk of golf and other mighty conquests is meaningless until you can face back to the trail of dead species, raped cultures, extinct tribes and fallow earth.
Don’t tell me how great you are, how fast your car is, how tall your buildings are.
Dont tell me how your dick is longer that everybody else’s - don't ever.

What characterless noise you make as a species, what emptiness hangs behind your words and beliefs.
The noise you make is loud enough to enter and corrupt the souls of others.
You whittle yourselves thin with vanity or gorge on dead things - more than you need.
Your blood is of no more worth to you than urine; you spill it without regard to the carrion, the grief that you leave in your wake.
You scatter your demon seed with thoughtless abandon.

You bitter and twisted humanity, you ugly and carnivorous hoards, plunderers and rapist of the world's rich harvest, by your own hand you will pay for your ignorance, you have been warned.
You piss in the wind, you piss on yourself.

Dead Leaves

Take the only tree that's left
and stuff it up the hole in your culture...
I've seen the future, brother: it is murder.
- Leonard Cohen - The Future

The old cliche says that it is important to understand history if we are to avoid the mistakes of the past.
Unfortunately history is bent and moulded by the empires; facts hidden in a cloud of lies and twisted truth.
We are told to be proud of our nationhood; wave the flag for our culture of bravery and wonderful art; die for our country.
Don't be seduced by nationalism.
Culture is a living thing; it’s about what’s happening now; the only culture displayed in a museum is essentially dead culture.
Do not mistake tradition for culture; traditions are cultural activities that have been transformed, for whatever reasons, into rules.
Culture is what is happening right now – it’s alive.
Culture the digital voice of dissent that grows louder and louder.
Culture is hungry for change.
It’s our traditions that narrow our perception of the world, keep us safe in their familiarity, imprison us within their limitations - follow the rules and you won't get into any trouble.
The more diverse cultures we experience and absorb, the more open we are to new ideas, broader brush strokes; the light of shared humanity.
Culture is the detail, thought is the canvas
Don't get stopped at the traditional checkpoint where armed historians check your papers for traces of anarchy.
Don't make a flag of tradition to wave at the election of dead leaders or in support of global violence.
Wave a banner for thought, stitched it with support for the oppressed cultures and paint it with words that expose the Empires' historic lies.

Big Deal

If I were to exercise my right to fly; if I were to float up to the ceiling and look down from the point of view of the humming lights; this dancing crowd would be as a mass in Brownian motion, connected as it were, by deep links in the Medulla Oblongata, to the off-kilter thread that runs through the beat of the music.
And if I were to focus in closer I would be able to see the electrons dance around dangerous atoms, each in its own sphere of isolation, each predetermined in its course toward a decaying orbit of domestic duties for the crazed caretaker god.
And if I were to zoom away for light millennia, I would see that we are all just infinitesimally miniscule electric sparks between the motes of dust that constitute a universe that is falling from the dustpan of that god; tumbling fumbling end over end in a sunbeam whose dimensions evade the comprehension of our misfiring mite minds.

The Spoken Wood

There can be few men who have seen what I have seen. The branch that has formed in the sleeve of my missing arm has brought me sustenance. It is as if the scratching sound that constituted my wretched life - the sound inside my head that had been there for so long that I had forgotten ‘t were there -had suddenly been soothed with green sap. I am filled with the rapture of an ancient forest. The trees gaze back at my thoughts with something that resembles horror. New bark rubs coarse at my throat and speaks to me of time less frenetic, a journey less headlong, one that understands itself to be nothing more than the continuation of generations without self; without any need save to be; to most effectively reap the sunlight; to breath the earth’s future through green lungs of benevolence.
Despite the eloquence of all my past petitions, the intricacy of moral justification for all my depravity; the trees do yet welcome me into their botanic realm. I am belittled; awed; a mere husk of man before the immense power of this ghostly forest.
‘Tis a small mercy, this loss of God, for the wood lives a far more brutal morality.
‘Tis a torment that carries no less powerlessness than mankind’s toil beneath an inscrutable god; to be rooted in the seething earth whose unseen horror centres upon water; to suffer the passage of fleeting life forms in the upper canopy, or tunnelling insect invasions to the bark and core.
And ‘tis a cruel morality that leaves us, stranded as we are ‘twixt elusive water and unattainable sun; to witness the activities of man from this futile eerie.
And tho’ we creak and twist in protest, he heeds us not, this thoughtless creature hell bent.
And thus we speak through this particular man; once so proud to be a pilgrim and a puritan; once so quick to deliver judgement; to further the aims of progress with gunpowder and empire; he has no need now for those ornaments of civilisation – those beads and baubles so greedily hoarded – that which defined him as, above all else, a good man – a man of God.
Aye, driftwood on the shores of one existence, petrified in another.

Excerpt from 'Markov Chain'

Bad Moon

Lightning flashes across the other side of the city giving me a quick reflection of my face in the window.
All that electricity concentrated to razor’s edge; it amazes me that we are able to contain that potential for destruction in order to light our nights, to keep the wolf from the door; to extend our awareness to more than just the daytime.
It is only when the lights go out that we remember how afraid we are of the dark.
The night time is when the mind is most aware, alert to the sounds of the predators that lurk, freed by the imagination to wander unhinged in the loss of visual comfort - all that darkness out there.
There is no ambiguity in the night’s language.
The city too takes on another face at night; it watches, awakened from the day’s slumbering, paranoid, alert.
If you watch the city from up here, it all makes a kind of weird sense, a balance: Justice does not patrol the night with half the vigilance it deploys during daylight – racial minorities beaten with the nightsticks of self-righteousness, high contrast real-life drama under the spotlight from a news helicopter.
Yes, bad news for the night's victims; but the real bad news goes down in broad daylight.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage – call it what you want – real criminal activity, by day the camera crews cannot (or will not) get away with shining that bright light, in daylight we believe what we’re told by those in the know.
At Night we huddle together for protection from their own thoughts, afraid of what lurks there; by day it all goes smoothely, without fear; the pursuit of money as a means to power; Armageddon as a self-fulfilling prophecy, perpetuated by megalomaniacs under the pretext of god’s will.
And blood, when freed from the confines of the body, runs with the force deeper than mere morality and stronger than the moon’s gravity.

Victory in Fallujah - November 2004

Time

If I focus real hard from my eyrie in the green vinyl chair I can see minute cracks in the cream paintwork that form the clock’s face. And zooming in closer with superman-magnivision I can see the dark rays of time that leak through these cracks from the mechanism beneath.
Time, the mechanism that drives the world; that hums beneath the soles of my feet like artificial gravity, dragging me and everyone else headlong into the future.
I know the mechanism is a product of culture and of the collective mind; the colony of blind progress.
I know therefore that if I try hard enough I will be able to influence that mechanism, check its motion, causing the thin black hands to slow, and eventually to stop. If I tried hard enough, that is.
Alternately I could cause those spindly black hands to speed up until they blurred; the days, nights, months and years flying past. I would emerge from my stupor only when it was all over – when they had brought the apocalypse upon the planet, by hastening the Ice Age or by atomic suicide, by mass genocide or natural catastrophe.
I would emerge only when the end of the world was over. I would emerge into a world where people no longer cared how much they weighed, where woman no longer contaminated their bodies with plastic or were sold on night cream with anti-wrinkle hydrocermides. Where men no longer cared about proactive rear wheel steering or intelligent windscreen wipers, hard-on gigabyte Intel processors and liquid RAM chipsets, Bluetooth headsets and ergonomic aerodynamic breakfast cereal to keep you regular.
Where children are no longer born into the slavery of their parents’ evangelical pursuit of the mighty dollar.
Where the list of the hundred best everything is no longer important.
A time when people listen to music for the sheer pleasure without thought of what tomorrow’s big hit is going to be or whether TimeLifeWarnerEMI would declare record profits for the quarter causing the markets to rally after a day of sluggish trading with The DOW being dragged down by poor performance in the Tech sector.
A time ignorant of oil.
A time where the end of the day did not exist other than for the sun to set and nobody strove to be in the zone or sought windows of opportunity in front of which to hang curtains of satin cliché and lacy aphorism.
A time when The System had finally fallen - the revolution been and gone, by whimper or bang, by fire or by ice, with the survivors living in the moment; tomorrow too far ahead, today too large an obstacle, full of earthy needs – all the better to concentrate the mind.

Control Freak

Rules. Rules and regulations. This monkey’s had enough. Shit I’ve been sitting up here in the trees long enough, watching you perform you grunting act down below, you're disgusting and pathetic.
Down there sucking in your gut, drooling over your pornography, guiltily retaining your shit like it’s made of gold; sculpting your stinking excretion into rules and regulations.
Know what I think? I think you can shove three quarters of your rules and regulations back up your arse, that’s what I think.
The problem is that you’re so hooked on R&R that you forget what makes you tick, what makes you human; that thirst that can only be quenched by the overcoming of danger, that which makes you a man.
You men; with your fragile egos and deep vanity; ruled by the power of your sperm, and yet you deign to proclaim yourself superior to the rest of us animals – as if your DNA were whiter than white, above all that.
You neglect the duty of your species by deserting your children, proclaiming yourself a victim of feminism, of divorce, of bad luck – blame the system.
Rather than embracing your female counterpart as an equal, you convince yourself that you have been crushed by her empowerment. Don’t go blaming the women, they are doing their bit, it is you who must bear responsibility.
Take responsibility for your own life, rather than creating more and more rules – more rules for you to blame for their imperfection when they fail to bring your children home safely from the disco.

The Altar

The face of god looked down on the church of the petrified tree where a demon knelt in the black mud, the tears of his breakdown streaking silver cracks on the fragile surface of his face.
The face of god in the moon, its expression, as one would expect, was stern and indifferent, its eyes were cold as fish, and they watched wearily, as if unsure of the nature of their duty to this moment.
When last did god give wise council or order up a sacrifice, a child to be bisected on the alter of his wisdom or the blood of some lamb to paint the sky with the certainty and steadfast proof of his jealous power? How long since he’d lost interest in his toys? Minutes? Hours? Millennia?
The movement of the stars time-lapsed streaks of light across the frosty night, their fires long lost to the age of man that in Earth-time measures in blighted seconds, a cancer on the skin of her verdant green face.

Town Without Pretty

Being a tale of a town that wants to be a city.

Citizens bask in glory baptising
in the small town of Tranquility
in the month of downsizing
to a state of green humility.

And on canine crutches of anguish
tongues wagging with scandal
the dogs of war languish
by the well’s rusty handle

Across from the School of Demolishing
where the headmaster quarrels
Major Smith resumes polishing
his collection of morals,

finding it harder and harder
their tarnishing to allay,
but unable to stop
for fear of public dismay.

After turning her living room
upside down in myopia,
Ms X breaks the loom
of her lost cornucopia,

having found, in disgust:
no cause for concern;
Jesus and lust
And a stick of luscerne.

The last she discards
in the perfumed pink bin
that loiters at her back door
like a dust hungry djinn.

Deep on Parable Street, desolate
With their age at the door
Able & Mandy play games
of control on the floor.

Their children, resigned,
nod their heads in agreement,
knowing no other option,
their thoughts in concealment.

And in this game so erratic
The kids gave up learning
They hide in the attic
Of the school of mild yearning

Mandy clucks like a hen
as her thoughts wildly scatter
Able’s disapproving tone spills
from his lip to besplatter

the green carpet they bought
from the sale of desperate years
with the love that they built
in a back street in Algiers.

I watch from the window,
of this little black tower;
I’m the madman on Main Street
And they expect me to cower

I can hear Pretty laughing
her high pitched bird twitter
in the studio next door
where she creates her art litter

from threads of her hair yellow
and thoughts from head empty.
I imagine her boring
her lover aged seventy

a husk of a man
with a narcissistic fringe;
whom she discovered in her bed
after a choc-latte binge.

She squeaks in deliverance
of how the world works,
her voice like cold helium
in the afternoon ignorance.

The grass has turned blue
on the lawn by the shed,
blue as the thoughts
in Mr Melancholy’s head,

blue as the veins of
bitter distrust
that pollute the lit mind
with calamine rust

blue as the hair
that writhes with unrest
obscuring gay tattoos
on Constable Conservative’s chest.

Here Comes the Night

Inertia has a life of its own; it starts in the gut and ends in the gutter where you’ve pissed your life away trying to overcome the simplest of choices. Suddenly you’re middle aged and you’ve got nothing to hold onto, not even the future. Inertia drags you down into the hole that only the night can cover.
So you’ve gotta ask yourself what the choices are? Do you swallow the dream and spend you life trying to believe and convince others that you’re living it? Do you wallow in self pity when you’re labelled a failure ‘cos you just can’t be happy with the way things are going? And if you do decide to open your eyes to the reality of it all; to see behind the façade of the dream; what’re you going to do about it?

Asylum

The thin black hands on the large circular clock pointed to the twelve. Twelve. Midday. Eight plus four. The Eight of Cups when appearing with the Four of Cups can indicate a descent into morbid thoughts and actions. Twelve. Midnight. When corpses rise from their graves to tread a staggering path trough the dreams of children. When the witch’s powers coagulate in deep red menstrual spells that conspire with the werewolf’s silver moon to trouble the lives of haunted men. How many minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock? Twelve disciples for a guerrilla messiah. Twelve paces between the dead man in the green vinyl chair and the large circular clock above the nurses station.
White vacuum infinitely still, sterile and with no reference points. I looked down to watch the hairs flutter in time lapse motion on my arms and the nails grow and shrink on my fingertips. And though I could not hear them, I could feel the ghosts nearby, calm; in their element.
I lifted my hands to my face, their movement jerky, as if random frames had been snipped from the film by time’s board of censors.
I felt for the gaping hole that the bullet would have made as it exited the back of my skull but found my head intact.
My clothing was unfamiliar, ragged and dirty in contrast to the pristine white vacuum in which I found myself. My breathing was erratic and shallow, as if the air too had been cut up into small fragments of irregular consistency and my lungs were having trouble coping.
And yet this place was familiar, vivid as an erotic dream, and frightening as the truth behind a politician’s lies. In the city that remained somewhere in my mind a pigeon pecked at a discarded leg of fried chicken as the driverless cars passed within inches, powered by anger and solitude, and the black oil from the plundered continents.
And in the ubiquitous shopping malls the system sucked the spirit of individuality from the mindless throngs.
Thought control. Nature abhors a vacuum. The white void gaped and the blood thumped in my wrists, tight as a drum skin. The white void swallowed my breath’s echo; all sound as dull as plastic cutlery.
The thin black hands on the large circular clock stole yet another minute.

Rise

Have you have ever asked the question ’Why?’ and have not been satisfied with the answer, albeit a factually correct answer
'Why' is the most powerful word in any language - it gives us the tools to determine our own path forward.
Those in power however, are afraid of the process (democratic or otherwise) that placed them there. And so they employ systems of control that govern and blind the mind through fear. Individuals in power employ these systems as 'spin'; 'damage limitation'; 'press release'; 'democratic process; or failing all else, 'crowd control'.

Have you ever noticed that riots only happen in other, less democratic contries than our own, while at home, anarchists attack police and loot Mcdonalds?

There is one weapon left at our disposal, and it is this weapon that the system seeks to manipulate with words and images, as it understands that brute force cannot control ideas and thought.
The manipulation of public opinion - thought control - is achieved by contol of the media, and where it is unable to reach the mind through media, the system will seek to still that mind’s dangerous questioning through tranquillising medication or where expedient, through mischief of the terminal kind.
The war on drugs, the axis of evil, the roadmap to peace, or wherever it is we're going this week.
Those words, those obvious facts and figures that spew from your TV news while you digest your dinner, often require a little more thought, a little more effort to realise that they are nothing more than lines of code for the machine.
We are by degrees cogs; cannonfodder; product; demographics; sheep; lubricant for the wheels; shit on the heel; body bag ingredients.

Question everything.

Question my opinion.

Build your own machine.

Anger Wells

Wheatfield With Crows - Vincent Van Gogh - 1890

According to the laws of physics, nothing occurs in a vacuum; no force can be met without consequence; there is a balance to everything.
According to the rules of the world, the sum of all the numbers, real and imaginary, add up to zero; the angles between the interaction of minds, the geometry of human endeavour, add up to a mean level of remembered history; the forces that govern love’s loss and unacceptance roam free of morality. Go figure.
And when these organic theorems coincide, the outcome must equalise in a manner poetic and cruel, and on a plane higher than humanity’s understanding of itself.
It was thus that the gods were conceived in the minds of those who watched with concern and arrogant disdain.
And the system of tastes that they created? What good the system that promotes mediocrity and rewards those who live the lie?
Critical acclaim goes to those who play it safe; who pay lip service to the cliché – the hard working businessman; the struggling artist; the self sacrificing teacher.
Anger Wells, east of Eden and in my heart I know I must not go down this route, but every now and then the lesson is re-learnt and the bile it brings to the back of my throat becomes harder and harder to swallow.

Octopus

Contrary to common perception, the lighthouse does not shine its light onto the rocks to warn passing ships of the danger of running aground. Sure, the lighthouse may be used to warn of danger, but this is a secondary function.
Lighthouses are coastal navigation aids.
Each lighthouse has its own signature; and it is this signature that is read by passing ships and allows them to determine their relative position.
The Bridge crew of a passing vessel will see the signature of the Hate Point light (Long flash followed by short flash) and will be assured that they are passing approximately six miles north of Eden’s harbour mouth. If it is their destination, they will then contact the port captain in order for a pilot to come aboard to guide them into Eden itself; there their invisible duty to perform.
It’s what lies just beneath the surface that’s most dangerous; those rocks that are only alluded to by the lighthouse’s beam.

Green Earth

Money; the more you get the more you need. The more you need the more you have to work for it, giving you less time to enjoy spending it, accumulating rooms full of unused junk, expensive gadgets of no value and essential accessories with no purpose – where’s the fucking logic? On the wall of my tree-house hangs a picture of an old Cree man, the distance and age etched on his face. At the bottom of the picture is the following quote:
‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.’
I know, I know; you think me a naïve monkey to be listening to all that pseudo-earth-lovin’ bullshit, but hey, surely there are those amongst your species that know where it’s at, that are not consumed by that greed and lust for the all encompassing power that you hold so dear as a god-given right - that which you label ‘freedom’ and which leaves us all teetering on the brink of extinction.
‘I promise to pay the bearer on de-fucking-mand, two thousand years of destruction’ – Print that on your money, at least be honest about it.

Demon Etchings

I leave these words for any unfortunate who should pass this way.
Do not remain here; there is naught here save damnation.
I have stayed too long, by preordination or by cowardice I know not which and it matters little for I have become what I always have been; a demon.
My home is an absurdity; all the elements are upside down. The sea no longer threatens the journey of this sleeping ship and the ship has grown soft in not having to resist to sea’s onslaught. In a sense this should be perfect, life without physical threat. It is not.
Let these scraps of sepia parchment be my confession; my obituary should it be possible to find some other place where death holds no deeper horror than the end of existence.
My conclusion is as follows:
It is love that makes all things happen; this journey so deep and short; so woefully unforgiving and brutally lonely. And it is love too that is the only refuge; the raft at which to cling when the faith in God’s wrath does wane; a strawberry in a field of thistles.
I am in need now of the company of one whose beauty of form and spirit would allow me to separate them from all others, being neither predator nor prey, but mind of equal and opposite parts, whose shared experience would soften the way forward and allow to enter those open wounds of tender regard that the soul deems more valuable than all else.
But you traveller who by circumstance driven must pass this way, you who may have lived a life that did not concern itself with all the surrounding darkness, you whose faith is yet unbroken by this place, you need not heed the words of this lesser demon or greater god. What constitutes your soul is yours alone, with only you who will be its judge, jury and executioner. It is here that true power resides, here at the centre of a universe created for one god – the god that resides at the core of the human mind.
I am but a leaf, pressed twixt the pages of the days; the hours; the minutes. I am dust on the wings of the eons, blown hither and yon by the whim of whatever passes as the creator; not worthy of judgement; fit for punishment at the hands of my own desires and weaknesses. I am a shell for the hollow longing; a carrion marionette in this sideshow where lost souls go, their callused hearts to shed in laughter black and cruel.
I am not worthy of this narrative, for it is not the confessions of the damned, but rather the petitions of the worthy, that deserve the attention of Hope.
Farewell traveller, and pray that, on some ragged link, further down that cursed chain, you do not come face to face with the demon that resides in your own heart.

Excerpt from 'Markov Chain'

Shout!

There was a man who sat beside a busy path on the crest of a hill and railed against the world. Railed against all the wrongdoing and corruption, stupidity and greed.
The more he protested, the louder and angrier he got. Passing folk averted their eyes and their ears, embarrassed to be seen listening.
Still he continued, not knowing any other way, and soon the passers-by grew immune to his noise and stopped hearing him altogether.
Gradually over the years the area around the man on the hilltop became littered with unheard words. They lay around in scattered heaps, exclamation marks and commas, degrading syllables and scattered letters.
The man grew old and his beard grew long and grey and his voice grew weak. The grass grew over and through the words and letters, entangling its green tendrils in his beard.
And when the entanglement left visible only his closed eyes and his open mouth, still talking quietly to himself, he became one with the hill; indistinguisable; a nipple on its rounded crest.
And the hill grew a little taller and began to whisper his words into the ears of the passers-by.
The Book of Fate - Parables

Art - What's the Point?

That old bogeyman, Aleister Crowley, said that everything is permitted.

Everything is both permitted and acceptable so long as it is already written into the collective psyche. Lawyers call it precedence – the herd call it history.
In the art world you’re more likely to sell any old shit so long as
a.) it looks like something that’s been done before or
b.) your name is familiar to those who
c.) have the money and
d.) are led to believe that art is either
e.) a good investment or
d.) good for a man’s status in society.
But where is your art and what good have the 'sensitives' done with their insight and antennae and pens and paint when the buyers and sellers have gone past the point of no return?

What good are your tints and hues when the gutters run red with the blood of the disenfranchised, when the black blood of Capitalism’s currency ceases to fire the demon inside the internal combustion engine?
What will remain of our civilisation but a series of increasingly obscure warning signs from the idiot savant mind we call art.
And when I look at my work I know that I’m not saying anything anybody wants to hear – I should have stayed in bed.
If you ask me, the real artistry comes down from loftier easels than those than I could ever reach.
Consider the artistry of the creation of wealth through real estate. Sure it’s democratised to a certain extent – Joe Soap can make a few quick bucks by buying and selling his home – but really, the profits the average Joe can make are miniscule when you consider the silent passing of laws that allow the destruction of ancient forests to facilitate the creation of prime real estate for the benefit of those who pull the levers. There are more zeros on the end of these transactions than you or I as small time con-artists can imagine.

Africa

The ghost of Africa appeared in my dreams last night, her left arm reaching in support for where the East should be, her bulge pregnant with oil and with the blood of her people. She carried herself as best she could without the legs of Angola and Mozambique - amputated by cheap landmines planted by mercenaries and fools, for money and for power, pawns in a bigger game no less meaningless.
Africa is a large ghost, large and ancient, and her voice is deep and proud, strong and angry, despite the fact that corruption has turned malignant, cancerous in many of her organs, causing them to eat away at themselves with guns and money supplied by the great god Capitalism.
“Do you deny us a place in your world white boy?” she asked, “We who nurtured your babies until they were old enough to hate us. We who thanked you with upturned palms while you stole our treasures, raped, plundered and destroyed our past, our present, and now you do your best to destroy our future.” She dusted the desert sands at her brow where her intellect had admitted Islam.
“You have infected us with the Aids of your greed and charity of your aid. The pride and grace of our ancestors - your ancestors – is sold for the crude black mud that fuels your own greed in your single-minded stampede to the death of all people. Do you deny us even a place in your mind white boy?”

Denial

I don’t read the papers or watch the television anymore; there is no point. I don’t need the news to tell me that it’s the end of the world; I can feel that in the ache of my bones.
Somewhere in the back of his head I hear the sound of Eden’s perpetual reconstruction. I lean on the stainless railing and look down on the first spits and spots of an afternoon shower on the river’s glazed surface and see Mars’ reflection looking right back in mirror image. I haven’t shaved for days now, and I watch as Mars lifts a hand from the railing to scratch the itchy red beard at my neck.
Here in the doldrums I have no need to resist his impulses, spent as they are by the last furore. He allows me time to breathe my own memories; to recover from the exhaustion; to try and figure it all out.
“Hey Red” comes the old refrain from behind me “Didn’t your momma tell you not to stand out in the rain.” Wait for it…
“You gonna get rusted” the inevitable sniggering, as if nobody’s ever said anything that funny before.
I feel it coming up from my gut – that dead feeling, like nothing, nothing is worth it – I fight back with the hope that maybe tomorrow it’ll all be different.
It feels, on days like these, as if there is something akin to fibre glass shards that flow in my blood. They aggravate me in a truly fundamental way, a way that language cannot define. What is it that my body requires of me?
We, Mars and I, are the first generation to be born to a dead God. Freedom is our human right. Freedom - the big myth. We slave away, working all the hours of the day, stumbling home tired and irate to curse at the lies that spew from the TV screen, and to sleep fitfully in overheated houses under over-thick covers, dreaming of nothing save the prospect of freedom that comes with the week’s end.
Mars laughs quietly in the back of my head – Mars has no need for freedom.
Mars is his own god - the god of war and of vengeance.
Not for him the agonising search for meaning; or the numbing arms of alcohol or barbituate. Mars lives and acts in the moment. What Mars wants, Mars takes. Mars doesn’t care to consider that everything might only exist inside our head – the whole fucking ball game – a product of an organic operating system, a lump of meat, trapped behind our eyes like some mad ringmaster in this circus of blood and guts.
Another reason for me to avoid the papers - aside from all the other stuff, the macrocosm – I do not wish to find out what atrocities have been committed by the gods. What difference would it make for me to see all those details anyway? It is, after all, the end of the world.

Extract from 'Markov Chain'

Medulla Oblongata

Facts and figures leave me with a mouthful of nothingness; a head full of jumbled words and numbers; no conclusions to be reached by dividing the average age of these dead residents by the square root of forever.
Some deeper divining is required when seeking the truth. The brittle skin of facts and figures is rendered irrelevant by the contemplation of what lies beneath the surface.