Limbo Terminus

Time Transfixed - René Magritte

If my words are wings that hang on the air like winter breath; like fine blood mist that settles on my face after each pulsation, then let them take me far from here. [not back: you can’t go back when back is what got you here in the first place.]
Taste blood on the tide of sun-bleached uniforms and civilian corpses; destroyed culture and gangster alleyway surprise in desert camouflage; blood on my hands and blood in my mouth – you can’t tell me this is right.

If her words here on this pocketed paper that burns at my thigh; this message in a battle that once carried a faint hint of her; this mind bomb of folded and refolded and disintegrating paper; if her words still held sway, then I might yet hold that thread, that motivation to survive; to return.
If words might warm my feet; might thaw my static heart.

If your words were armed with justice and truth; if your self-belief were justified; then let them take me far from here; not back to the world you have created; the place that got me sent to this hell that we have created; here where everything is questionable; here where my fellow soldiers exhibit an ugly lust for blood and revenge, fuelled as they are with heavy metal soundtracks; playstation reflexes and incompetent leaders; ignorance and hatred for those who would rather we were not here to liberate.
Here where my faith has had its back broken on a cross of cordite and phosphorous.

If words are broken shards of a great design; the book of all; if they have any power at all, then let them take root in the minds of these children – integrity; humility; responsibility – let them keep their meaning; let their power be used to prevent the misuse of power; let them construct great buildings of thought that disavow the use of violence to achieve any goal.

If words were enough to convey this feeling; this hope; this despair; this lack of feeling; this rectangle of blue sky between the tank edge and pock-marked building; then whisper them now in the ear of this medic who, fear in his eyes, thumps at my chest with bloody fist.

If.

Pyrric Empyre

Sun and stars and singles bars
Runes and ruins and stolen cars
Major Keys and minor chords
soundtracks to the corporate wars
Talismans of love long lost
Pebbles into ponds once tossed
Love and lust and angel dust
Broken toys now turned to rust
Bar-room brawls and basement boxes
Blood and guts and slaughtered foxes
Climate change and jingling purses
Shopping malls the madman curses
Can’t condone the failed design
drives against the one-way sign
Smashes daily into brick walls
a barrel over the Niagara Falls
Dusted down with anti-static
lost alone, caught in the traffic
He bites his nails and loses hair
sad and lonely in his electric chair
Oh foolish empty lost ghost-man
son of son of Uncle Sam
Killer and carer rolled into one
Carrier of disease and laser gun
Those that eat at the mind’s cluttered core
Callous and clean like a swinging door
in a dream of vengeance in the sleep of lost reason
Buttered, battered for the thanksgiving season
Kerosene lanterns on the deck of the dark ship
Back-scarred sailors for press-gang and hair-lip
Plundering hoards on the sails of human skin
Nobody knows the trouble we’re in
Gun runners gang-bangers Oh-800-Jesus
Evolution revolution rare blood diseases
Hanging on hinges of the gallows trapdoors
Bloodlust for mega-pixel cyber-age whores
The age of consent has now given way
to the age of resentment; needles in hay
Wiretap wave riders paranoid tomorrow
Bottle-in-front-of-me inconsolable sorrow
Meander and ox-bow through the lessons of last year
Onward ever onward to petroleum pasture
that suck all the marrow from your crumbling bones
A hard-on for tomorrow and the pole dancing clones
who gyrate dead meat on the cusp of the moon
and reveal all they’ve got before you enter the room

View from the Treetops (22 Nov '06)

Hijacking the Images

Long time readers of The Far Queue might have heard me allude to the hijacking of historical protest figures by the very agencies who spawned that protest.
Mickey Z spells it out better than I ever could in this piece entitled Will the real Dr. King please Stand up? posted on ZNet

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Stick This in Your Ears

I'm always astounded by the way our system allows and encourages talentless and empty-headed avatars to parade their unjustified fame and fortune in books and music, while real talent goes unrecognised; unheard or read.
For those of you out there who are sick of being fed bland and unimaginative crap (like Robbie Williams or The Da Vinci Code) please join me in celebrating the creative talents of Tonefish76.

If, like me, you are entralled by the strange and wonderful sounds and the pick-me-up-swirly-whirly graphics offered by

***** DOCTOR PHONIC'S STEREO TONIC ****

then join me in spreading the word...

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Jamming

Jams O’Donnell’s recent post regarding censorship in Iran prompted a negative reaction in me that I’ve been struggling to articulated in the comments left there.

I believe we must ask ourselves who benefits by the spreading of this news?
Given the USA’s current campaign to demonise Iran (admittedly aided and abetted by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad); I feel we should always be careful about whose cause we take up.
Sure, censorship is an unacceptable concept for those of us who care about what governments do to us, and I do not for a minute condone the actions of the Iranian regime.
But it is important too, not to believe that we are free from manipulation.
Splinters and logs may be reversed in biblical eyes but nevertheless…

This having been said, I do not for a minute wish to suggest that Jams is a tool of the US administration (lol), on the contrary, I am a regular reader and long-time fan of The Poor Mouth and know him to be no tool.

Perhaps what follows will clarify my view:

There are various depths of sophistication when it comes to governmental censorship.
Everybody knows about the blunt edge employed by the Nationalists in South Africa during the Apartheid years or by the USSR; China; to name the obvious few.
These are relatively unsophisticated and overt methods that basically say to the population: “you are not allowed to read this book because it is bad.”
For those who wish to question these restrictions there are various scenarios depending on the regime:

• you may be arrested as a dissidenter if you ask your questions too loudly
• you may well disappear if you voice is heard by too many
• On a lower level you may only be frustrated by this infringement on your personal liberty and this frustration may lead to further questioning of the system under which you live.

Whatever the consequences, those living under a regime that openly censors the information available to its citizens are, if they care to notice, confronted with a question:
“Why?”
And there is nothing the human mind likes more that to ponder a why.
Therefore, for those who live under such a regime, it is relatively easy (albeit in all likelihood dangerous) to realise that something is not right.
The more sophisticated ’democratic’ regimes are far better practiced in the use of censorship. Rather than agitate a populace which is a least nominally responsible for the election of its leaders, censorship takes on a far more translucent face.
Rather than dictate, it manipulates, using various tools, not least market forces or just plain repetition to drum home what is, and what is not, acceptable to the good of the nation.
Sure you can read what you like, and this is good, but this does not mean that you should accept that you live under a regime that does not seek to pervert the way you see things, since what you read is your choice, but media intrusion into our lives is unavoidable.
In the US censorship is taken up by the so-called moral majority fuelled by the corporate media wholly owned by those money groups who finance the presidency. Parents are fed an emotional hook and are mobilised to protest the contents of a school library and a figurative (and sometime literal) book burning mentality is cultivated.
Refer to treatment of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 and J.D.Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or more recently the theories of evolution practised in US schools.
In the UK the moral majority model is practiced, reasonably successfully by the baying of The Sun et al, in addition the population are lulled by the ‘fact’ that the BBC is the world’s most respected and fair News Corporation (given that it is financed not by advertising, but by the population direct through tv licence fees.)
The BBC may well be all of the above, but that does not mean it cannot be (and is not being) manipulated - even by those parties who howl about a ‘liberal bias’.

Question the terminology used to describe the occupation of Palestine by Israel.
Question the terminology used to describe the occupation of Iraq by the USA.
Question the terminology used to describe the occupation of Afghanistan by the USA/UK.

Question everything.

Dead Letters

The Good Old Days

Under the ledge at the bottom of nowhere, breeding, multiplying in archaic algebraic formulae of arcane irrelevance.
Under the ledge, where numbers are translated to sound, digitalism as a form of governance for a logically illiterate species.
The black hack sunrise would have you believe in evangelical hand-me-down prophetic fireworks; tenuous links between mind and body masquerading as spirit, chains of Markovian predictions that carry only the weight of theory and whose calculations are lost to tomorrow’s realities.
Stand in queues far divorced from geometric brilliance; patterns of bread crumb and dairy shortage curdled to bitter defeat.
Hand to mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Fly with the migrating hoards before the rising sea; refugee; refusenik; your family by your side and only your skills to keep them alive.
Eke out your existence in the mud of lost love; the haunted house of past denials.
Spectres of regret and phantoms of nostalgia vie for position on the ghost train of yesterday’s dreams: carry you home on the wings of tomorrow.
Man thing, woman thing - coded to survive; conditioned to fail.
Brown skinned children with doomsday eyes and piano-key ribs upon which to play charity’s ballad of dry wells and dead crops.
Exploiter and exploitee; a game to entertain those for whom entertainment is everything; reality on plasma or LCD.
Give, give, give.
Take, take, take.
Give and take.
Take me to your leader.
Give and take: the punch-line to a cosmic joke.
Tell me what I want to hear; listen to what I say and file it away in brackets and binders; letter-headed and lead-weighted; the machinations of egos and petty power plays; the covering of tracks and the cowering in cracks painted over with paperwork devised to protect and protract the incompetence of those who would be in charge.
Rise on the hope of changes that may spawn the evolution of thought and action.
Perhaps this vision darkly; this cold and analytical stare, will serve to prepare the lamb to flee the altar of the future.
Afraid of what cannot be changed or controlled; afraid of the changes to come.
Mindful of the folly of believing that all is inevitable.
Hope alone is a thin fabrication; a façade that, when shattered, will cut deeper than the truth itself.
Therefore, Light fire and forge hope to anvil; wrestle the future from the voices of the media and the hands of the hollow men; quench it with action and words that do not repeat parrot-fashion the conditioned reflex; the perceived knowledge.
There is no bottom line; there is no line bar time.
There is no best or worst case scenario, no first strike policy, no last best hope, no axis or roadmap, no protocol, deal or accord, no election promise, no passport to peace, no gateway to the future, no convenient lie or bitter truth that can compensate for the lack of thought and heart exhibited by those who claim to speak for us.

Tickets Please

In silence (murmur broken) and darkness lit by green exit sign, the audience awaits…
The end of the world review.

INTRO DUCK SHIN
Ushers and usherettes offer goodie-bags and baguettes to the tailored suits and stupid hats; feathered nests of perfumed decadence coat the smell of moral rot and ignorant elitism.
Precious stoned Green Party vote Celebrity power-cuts and third world debt relief for those who would wipe their guilt on the hem of the reaper’s gown.
Outside in rags and ashes; putty faced and mascara-ed lashes questions and camera flashes; we jostle for position in the handout of dream scraps and crumbs of hope, shout in vain pleas for recognition.
Curtains raised to the ground with napalm orange agents their duties to perform – actor and actresses all cloak-and-dagger wise – a method of sorts.

PAR TWUN
A round of applause; a round of ammunition; around around round round carosel horses on legislative poles driven; three and half miles to the gallon; nought to sixty billion years in a second.
Put your hands together for the show; the charade; the shit-house blues.
Hand me up another beer, I didn’t come here for the sopranos.
Hand in hand with tomorrow’s world, praise the lord and pass my sword.
Hand-me-down Kalashnikov Crusade for those who would fight their way out of war.
A round of applause for the dancing pressmen; arse-licking good; chicken-legged legions for old MacDonald’s pharmaceutical nightmares.
Crescendo crescendo laughter and light.

INTER LEWD
You can watch me swing from this tattered rope or swing your watch hypnotised to cope.
You can read the critics or watch the news; paint your nails or turn the screws.

PAR TOO
Flip your coin, cast your vote – may as well cast a spell by rote.
Or read the leaves in the bottom of you overrunning cup for all the difference it makes.
Might as well whistle while the wind blows or murder the crows that descend on your patch of green concrete.
Might as well stare at your feet.
Raise your glasses, campaign, you patrons of saints; you prosecutors and defenders of freedom; rattle your programmes in elegant approval.
The critics will rave about the choir of lost integrity and gratuitous sex and violins fiddled by the orchestrated; wax lyric on burning issues doused in kerosene - the better lesson to learn.

FIN R. LEE (choreography by)
Not a dry eye in the house when the curtains descend – curtains for me and curtains for you. Bring up the house lights on the end of the world review.

Anarchy in the Bouquet

Depending on your age and condition(ing), the word Anarchy will bring to mind any number of negative images or shallow fashion statements:

Anarchy = chaos
Anarchy = lawlessness
Anarchism = Nihilism.
Anarchist = terrorist

Here are some other views:

“Anarchism, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.” - Emma Goldman

“The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.” - Germaine Greer

“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” - John Taylor Gatto

“For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown” - Rudolf Rocker

...and finally:

"Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." - Anonymous

The Outsider

Yves Tanguy - Outside

He sits on the wall and drinks beer.
Solitude blends with the light but steady flow of traffic passing the house; the day’s fading light makes the small patch of grass glow like green tobacco in the bowl of the evening.
Listens to the voice of the town, sounds blended to white noise; the odd firework; the traffic.
Inhales the smell of imminent rain.
Thoughts wander where they will, unfocussed by the alcohol, unburdened by the weekend’s demise; follow the electric lines from light pole to transformer; the invisible source; the blind spot.
Old lady next door ventures out to collect Sunday’s junk mail. He sits still in order that she won't notice him; engage him in conversation.
[Weirdo]
Tries to fit himself into the big picture; tries not to imagine the lives of others.
His frame of reference is too small; his canvas cannot stretch to incorporate more than this fraction; this wafer slice.
All his dark foreboding, for once, seems not to hang on his hairshirt; perhaps the solitude or the alcohol have numbed the hooks; perhaps there's a little synaptic switch somewhere in his head that allows this moment 0f respite – a reset.
The smell of rain grows strong, ripping into his memories; a fine mist has begun to mark the tarmac black – ten out of ten for trying.

People are best left untended.

Society survives on the mythology of dead yesterdays.

Psychosis is no escape from reality, it is merely a darker view.

The future holds nothing that cannot be tasted today.

Shadow-play shadow boxing clever silhouette theatre of war child 21st century blues with uni-polar heart and iceberg feet of titanic clay; golem for ghost dance messiah.

The town grows quiet; blanketed in damp sobriety as twilight encroaches. The cars creep past with tail lights blazing; progress disguised as shelter.
He tries to imagine the occupants of these time capsules; these bubbles of isolation; he imagines their purposeful lives; their pride in the shiny objects in which they are cocooned.
There was a time when he did not doubt himself; there was a time when his arc was ascending.
Perhaps it will ascend again... perhaps in a different sky.
There was a time when he knew what he knows now but without the weight of understanding.
Beer bottle empty he climbs up on the music of the night’s descent, allowing a seed of optimism to enter through the opening between today and tomorrow.

The Verdict

Guilty by Association

Charged with crimes against insanity
Sentenced to live on a plateau of mediocrity
Words fall blindly from his quaking lips
Or scatter wildly from his fingertips

A cell to sell on the open market
The meanings well in writhing carpet
Facts and figures here in concrete
Contracts signed in ink indiscrete

Lies and allegations based on lies and allegations
Murderers freed by legal negotiations
Money changes hands and lives and destinies
Of cultures and countries with bullshit remedies

The man in the iron lung breaths a sigh of relief
When the power is disrupted by political brief
Rises from his half-life, his mind in tatters
Heads for the hills where all that matters

Is the taste of raw tarmac in the back of his throat
Is the sound of the drawbridge being raised over the moat
The sight of his body unhindered by science
And the feeling of leaving it all behind in defiance

Don’t prick me, don’t prod me, don’t cure me of rage
My weapon, my warning, my turning the page
From ignorance blissful, from head in the sand
From fences to sit on, from throwing in my hand

The cards are all marked with numbers and signs
Marked with cash totals to be made by designs
On those who are not even permitted to eat
At this banquet of corrupted and ill-gotten meat

So the verdict handed down is hardly a surprise
When the judge and the jury are those in disguise
Who set up the table who financed the game
For one man’s atrocities are another man’s gain

Scarecrow

He hangs his decapitated head in defeat, half heartedly attempts to return his entrails to the gaping hole in his gut.
The world has no place for those clubfooted clown-shoed fools who cannot but see; cannot but question; those who cannot keep their big mouths shut.
At the edge of the sea he sees it all connected: Should’ve taken a photo; should’ve paid attention to the weather forecast; should’ve kicked the can when the worms were still inside.
The sea washes over him; rising through the holes in his shoes to bubble up through his gut and lungs and leak out through his eye-holes; salty and bitter in the back of his throat.
What do they have lurking up their sleeves?
What magical treat for popular consumption devised? What cybernetic propagandist hero in Clint Eastwood poncho tassels brushing psyche with cold tomorrows?
What blind need to top the polls without supplying the quality?
He sees now the gaping void in those magician sleeves; the hand that sleights no longer distracting his weary eye from the truth that has become too awful to ignore?
How narrow is the trembling lip of the prejudice?
How wide the ledge at the precipice?
How do you shoot the rising water; bomb the obscured sun?
And now the rain joins in; lashing a sine of cat tails against his face; mewing and mauling his already drenched thoughts.
He breathes it in, tasting the grit in the gull’s cries, the weight of past tides, the fate of the future.
It’s cocktail hour at the submerged bar of inconsolable sobriety.
Drunkards; dope-heads and demons possessed await, knowing it’s his round.
Do him a favour and cut him down before the gulls take his eyes; the sea his soul; and the red fire-ants get to hollow him out for multi-story car parks.
Cut him down from the billboard of mediocre engineering rituals.
Cut him loose to fly from the hollow hearted; the lost souls of nights dreaming.
Filter him through fine mesh net to catch all that bone and bitter lip chip; the poison in the well; those boots laced with lead the better to kick shit out of that which will not fit.
Pepper him with lime and lemon zest, dress him in unfashionable tea-strainer vest, tell them he wasn’t ever quite the best at what he endeavoured, attempted or underwent.
Close up the box with bread and milk staples; fill it with amber and maple molasses.
Paint it with symbols indecipherable and bleak, arcane and oblique and weigh it down with all that has been lost and all that has been yet to be found.
Nail his heart to his sleeve where it’s always been read, feast your eyes on the feelings that are better off dead.
Send the sea to reclaim what has always been hers, let the moon leave the sky in silver tatters.
Howl.

The Seeds of Time

The madman stumbles through these halls, his head full of steam driven demons, his heart weighs heavy with electronic rust.
He asks himself whether he's to blame; whether guilt-edged dreams can be held responsible for the paths less travelled by.
A violin wails in counterpoint to a piano with missing teeth; battered and bruised, electric shock treated, coffee and cake for the deranged; the misfiring; the misconnected.
Atoms gyrate in the god’s great dust-pan, oblivious to their purpose; their purposelessness; their random dance to the rules of chaos.
And buried deep beneath the damp footprints that he leaves on instututional floors are the faded photographs of past loves and family members long gone; heavy burdens of pointless nostalgia laced through with bitter-sweet regret.
The void toward which he now rushes might or might not hold the answer to the question that formed in the oh of his upsidedown mouth as he was pulled from the warmth of the womb.
He laughs a bitter two-tone; an ejected breath of acceptance; a light in the bleak corridor; laughs to uplift the dark reality.
With bleeding heart pinned to barometric sleeve he calls to forest that grows between here and now and there-there-it’ll-be-fine-in-the-morning when the moon no longer wells; he calls to the life that writhes between the rotting and the rutting; to the light that lives in that ejected laughter.
This minor chord strums in his gut and pulls him down to his knees.
And as the floorboards turn to wax and wormwood writhes to dust his heart soars with the elation that sometimes rides on sorrow's wings.

You, Me, Biology

This contract of needs; this pact of faith and trust
Deoxidant for infidelity and love’s slow rust
Will serve not as a guarantee for future stability or complacent reliability
Words and deeds are measured on a daily basis
Testing and retesting the waters in this beautiful oasis
The distance between your smile and my mind, sheltered as it is, difficult to find
Can be measure in increments of hope, seashells and talismans of black perfumed soap
Can be weighed in raw tissue from heart muscle and brain
Where blood drains spiral down stainless steel drain
You walk down these paths of future plans and current needs
Your footprints remain, your aura precedes
You shine like the moon in the firmament, the glittering night
All who meet you would own you, would gather your light

Conditioning Your Reflexes

I’m just some reflex
When struck, the knee will jerk
- James

Will I bleed my head dry without ever knowing why; without seeing the vein tapped as the years roll by?
There are thoughts that can be plucked like feathers from the golden goose of the collective unconscious. There are thoughts that spawn from misunderstood concepts, from misspelled words and faulty statistics.

World views are narrow perceptions of the whole, affixed with perceived wisdom and hand-me-down knowledge.
Opinions are shaped and sculpted by the hands of the unscrupulous few, their agenda to pursue.
Words are nebulous and vague inexactitudes, meanings manipulated, perverted by power, shaped into labels loaded with emotional short-cuts that best serve the powerful.
The printed word – that which freed the common man from the grip of ignorance, which gave voice to the oppressed, has fallen into the hands of the oppressor.

Speak up now through this Babylon keyboard; this narrow window of freedom where you can yet speak without advertising or political pressure – where if you so desire, you can choose to speak and think for yourself without recourse to the lies you are fed.

And yet we see, in great reams of electronic paper, the regurgitated views of power, religion and self-imposed ignorance, schoolboy dreams of sporting prowess, fear of an apocalyptic future, a future where the ghosts of dead activists are turned to stone cold cultural icons and employed as weapons for party political gain.

Belief is a malleable tool in the hands of the unscrupulous, belief is their strongest weapon. Belief is your strongest weapon when suspended.
Hold it close to your chest and question those who would have you believe in them.
Why do they petition you so?
Why do they require you to believe their shallow agenda?
You are but a grain of sand on time’s desert, why would they require your consent?
And why would you – the most important person in your world – why would you desire to be part of this construct; this hive mind where the honey is held as preserve for the few?
Yes we may huddle together for protection; but who do we most require protection against?
Who should we fear the most: those who claim to do Allah’s word; or those who come in the name of god? Are they not two sides of the same coin?
Terrorists? Anarchists? Antichrists? Islamists? Christian Fundamentalists? Israeli Expansionists? South American SocioCapitalists?
Or those who would have us believe that there is danger behind every pair of brown eyes; every foreign tongue; every veil?

Fear the seed in your own heart that wishes just to be left in peace and not to be concerned with all that is done in your name; all that is done with the taxes you pay; all that is done with those little electronic components that you helped to create; with those pharmaceutical miracles that you cannot afford; all of the tomorrows that your children will inherit.

And what of my own hands, lightly stained in oil gotten gains? Who am I to say what you should believe?

Form your own beliefs. Write your own life.