Pinups #3

I am the spring, the holy ground,
the endless seed of mystery,
the thorn, the veil, the face of grace,
the brazen image, the thief of sleep,
the ambassador of dreams, the prince of peace.
I am the sword, the wound, the stain.
Scorned transfigured child of Cain.

A Televisual Feast

"Anyone fancy a spot of quail hunting?"

With a heart full of headless horsemen and a head full of hate
He heads down the corridor to where the victims await
Trained as they are in columns of four and rows of eight
Their heads full of hollow and meaningless debate
You are what you eat what the system dictates
Cybernetic sons and daughters of the United States
He ratchets dumdum revenge cinematic reload
There’s no turning back from this far down the road
The coin’s flipped at random; the fat cop’s approaching
M16 in hand the future’s encroaching
Blood-stained newsprint graphic detailed inhumanity
Weeping for cameras in televisual profanity
Call me callous call me cold I don’t buy your reality
When the tears that you cry don’t see the brutality
Inflicted in the name of Halliburton and Colt
And casting blame on the victims of your callous assault
For the dead that you mourn in numbers so small
Shot with the same guns that caused buildings to fall
Guns that spill blood in the name of democracy
Cold dead hands that define your hypocrisy
So don’t ask me to mourn don’t expect me to cry
When the blood that you spill casts a pall on the sky
When you expect us to buy your shallow world view
When the morality you spew gets stuck on my shoe
Don’t count me as ally or sympathetic ear
When the crusade that you wage continues another year
And the knights grow ever colder, ever closer to callous
And the truth you profess reeks of greed and of malice

The Laws of Gun

Guns on Campus, Virginia Tech USA April 2007
(photo stolen from The New York Times)

Gun Rule #1. Never point your weapon at someone unless you’re fully prepared to shoot them.

Gun Rule #2. Keep your guns out of the reach of your children. They will destroy the world with your lost and stolen weapons.

Gun Rule #3. Carrying a weapon increases both your chances of becoming a murderer and the likelihood of killing yourself by accident. Always assume the weapon is loaded.

Gun Rule #4. Count your bullets – an empty gun makes a mediocre weapon.

Gun Rule #5: Always keep out of reach of your quarry; to be shot with your own gun is a humiliation, even in death.

Gun Rule #6. A firearm should not be used in anger; while ultimately convincing, you cannot retract your argument at a later date.

Gun Rule Addendum: It is impossible to confine guns to any laws or rules; there is always another bullet in the chamber; another finger on the trigger; another victim to fall; another chance to add your tragedy to the piles of rotting newsprint, eyewitness reporting, fading photographs and memories.

I have transposed the above (from a novel I wrote a few years ago called The Aeon Calling) in reponse to the latest bloodbath in the US.
Rule one is universal and should be familiar to anyone who has received formal training in the use of a weapon, but the rest are my own.

The proliferation of firearms in any country will serve no end other than tragedy. The possession of a firearm, while most commonly justified as self defence, serves most often to feed newpaper headlines.

Grudges most properly solved by dialogue or negotiation are too easily settled with a bullet and in all cases the bullet does not discriminate in its judgement.

What possible use could anyone have in purchasing an automatic weapon, a weapon capable of spewing forth multiple bullets with one squeeze of the trigger, what possible use other than to do horrific damage to other human beings?

And, of course those young people caught by the wrath of this latest avenging angel are, in microcosm, in the same position as those citizens whose blood has been spilled in the name of God/Oil/Allah/Democracy, for it is the same dirty hands that manufacture and supply the tools by which this vengence is taken.

There is only one question to be answered here:
Why would you want to own a weapon so aweful, a weapon capable of destroying so many worlds?

The Aeon Calling is available here

It's a Virus!

I'm not normally one to take much notice, much less to take part in the viral inanities known as tagging.
This one, however appeals to my vanity.
Gregrandgar, over at It Must Be The Vapours has tagged me with much praise so this virus I will spread.

My five Thinking Blogger Awards go to...

1. Red Dirt Poetry: gutsy poetry, true confessions and fantasy shoes for those who like a bit of grit in their soup.THIS BLOG IS NOW DEFUNCT


2. Between the Hammer and the Anvil: consistently erudite bullshit encasing hard-edged satire from the Caledonian FlyingRodent.


3. Posthuman Blues: Science Fiction author Mac Tonnies' erratic attic of off-the-wall stuff from all over. MAC PASSED AWAY IN 2009


4. Kerblog: Hyper-cubist musing from Lebanese artist Mazen Kerbaj.


5. Garp Spam Logic: Burroughsian cutup prose by the enigmatic NBARROWS; words that make you go ([{!}])THIS BLOG IS NOW DEFUNCT

The rules are as follows:
It comes with the following rules:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Go forth and multiply...

Night Sweats

From wild visions of corn that stem from between amber eyes, to the demons born between alabaster thighs
Between the moments of high insight and sublime elevation, to the cold wind that blows to your final destination

From up here on double helix drive, programmed for headlong rush, feet firmly planted on the winding tarmac that calls you onward
Onward head-rush hell-bent and forever wide-eyed with hope and amazement
This gargoyle doesn’t judge you for your cold calculation; doesn’t deny you that clinical masturbation
Doesn’t cut you or curse you; doesn’t hammer your downtrodden shoe
Nor does he worship your footsteps; your Achilles heel; your tendency to steel your heart against the soft invasion of trust; your kiss that tastes like rust
Heartbeat double bass with entrails strung; thoughts on bone keys tinkle symbolic cymbal obsessive rocking, between the dark of morning and the light-fingered dusk; a kleptomaniac pendulum for a clock of organic design; hung with brass screws and rivets of deep-rooted bigotry and fear; the clanking mechanism beneath that thin skin so photo sensitive.
Don’t pluck me from the raging torrent nor fuck me over with discontent; don’t bless me, baptise me nor save my sinning soul; don’t drag me all along that Watchtower; up snakes and forbidden fruit tree ladders; myths and legends born in nocturnal shudders for the shadows that creep your mind’s bedroom wall; rustle through the papers in your supernatural attic; do so with benign intent.
Intense limitations to the mind’s eye reading; old wife’s tales for menstrual bleeding; the moon hangs a left at Hollywood and divine, longing yet for gravity at his mother’s breast; green groans her bark at the bite of impending change.

So on ambergris thighs the empire of night and her silhouette spies emerge to reveal this reality stalking, through alabaster eyes that do listen to the ears of corn talking.

Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the centre."
Kurt Vonnegut

Smoke & Mirrors

Iskandor watched from the window, alcohol buzzing pleasantly in is gut, as the long black car pulled up at the kerb to expel a drunken woman in purple coat and red stilettos.
The driver rushed round in chauffer cap to steady the elbow of his charge while from the opposite door a balding man in black suit emerged as if the world were watching him.
Iskandor grinned to himself as he reflected on the concept of affluence and it’s equation to power; his grin encompassing the palette that learns to distinguish the subtleties that lurk in a glass of wine and the reality that wine itself is nothing more than sour grapes.
And what, he thought, gives permission for those ridiculous poses that go hand-in-hand with wine-elitism and the appreciation of the finer things in life; like the opera and the ballet; to look down upon those who do not, and perhaps prefer not to, find pleasure in these (like the emperor’s new clothes) intangible things.
For though he could analyse the ideas of intellectual literary excursions and dark cinematic undercurrents of visual savants, he himself had never found logical purchase in these elite pastimes that seemed to prefer the overbearing tendency toward technique and to ignore the more abstract concept of creativity.
Was it perhaps that creativity is a egalitarian force that can, if need be, survive without the need to develop, often at great cost, the techniques required to be recognised by those who claim to understand; those who claim to appreciate; tastes deemed by lofty culture to be refined.
And perhaps, by extension, this refinement, like white sugar and white bread, serves no other purpose than to subjugate the senses, to rot the teeth that so avidly bite into the philosophy of affluence as a measure of worth.
Iskandor felt his grin sour (like wine) and his sense of self harden, even as he tried not to feel superior to these vacuous beings, these bloodless minds who, in a manner no different to the heaving masses at whom they scoff, rather than embrace the realities of human frailty, would postpone their existential dread by deadening the mind with variations of alcoholic haze and guttural insensitivities.
And, even as he considered ordering another beer, he realised that there is a balance to be struck: between awakening and inebriation; between relaxing the mind and deadening the heart; realised that the old and worn out phrase “all things in moderation” may well be the greatest tenet by which to live.