Orpheus Beach

The Head of Orpheus ~ Gustave Moreau

Somnambulant dreaming as the morning sun shines
to allow the pavement warming
The trees nod dew-shaking in green agreement
that tomorrow is once again dawning
With birds awakening the traffic to whisper
down avenues painted by numbers
That the day will return another blood blister
and blow dust from the ears of slumbers

And rising on updraft tarmac wings
from transient psycho street
Are all the hopes and florid dreams
of the people that you meet
Dreams of love and living high
for the future’s bright new morning
Or pinstripe suits or floral hats
to tip rainwater from the awnings
Dreams that have their power dashed
and dragged by high noon out of reach
Of the waves that crash in still life yet
upon the shores at Orpheus beach

Now wide awake with squinted brow
to ward off night’s approach
To shelter yet from vehicle brakes
that threaten to encroach
On traffic lights that glow blue-black
at coagulated corners
And promise more than can be given
to the past’s deluded mourners

And so the whirling firmament
completes another circle silent
To leave us back where we began
all tousled by the violence
That carries on behind our backs
in offices of power practiced
Not to rent the curtain drawn by day
by those who would protect us
From all they feel we should not know,
from all that is constructed
To draw the night across our eyes
and leave our lives entrusted

To morning’s hope and evening’s wane
in green and dream corrupted.

R.I.P. Grant McLennan
The title of this poem was nicked from the The Go-Betweens song of the same name:
"Time to be leaving, run from your reach
Gonna go dreaming on Orpheus beach"
from their 2000 comeback album 'Friends of Rachel Worth'
With gratitude for decades of great music
P.I.

Let x = x

Holy Tech - Alex Ostroy (Wired)

...and crawling on the planet's face;
some insects called the human race
- Rocky Horror Picture Show

Nostalgia equates to the past being merely the present with the immediate experience of the self extracted.
Analogue nostalgists often lament the loss of all the little bits between zero and one but, like it or not, this is a digital world.
Digital even out beyond the realms of calculating screens and cursor flashing colossus; beyond keyboard Rosetta stone and windows hieroglyphic; beyond the microscopic switching processor where ones and zeros jostle for position to present your every whim in LCD splendour.
Digital even out beyond the harmonics emitted from strings of violins or the sine wave serenade from the back of the throat; every utterance and visual input converted to chopped off bits - translating a curve to a step.

Even here in this little box reserved for placing your digital X next to the name of the candidate of your choice; even here you’re either…
red or blue
Republican or Democrat
Catholic or Protestant
Left or Right
Right or Wrong

Even here where you kneel (in denyal) to worship, you’re either…
Saint or sinner
Christian or Muslim
East or west
Saved or damned
Terrorist or Crusader

Infinite choice is thus reduced to this or that.
Digital thought; digital control, digital receipt when they dig that digital hole.
You're either with us or against us; hero or zero.
You're either fat or thin; happy or sad – and we have pharmaceuticals for all permutations of ones and zeroes.
You're either rich or poor, in or out (but no shaking all about – we have pharmaceuticals for that one too)
We’re either black or white; slave or master.

The numbers add up:
0 (me)
1 (you)
1+1=10 (you and me)
10+1=11 (them; you and you)
11+1=100 (you and me and me; the masses)
Your genetic markers may switch from off to on; neatly contained and dutifully performing.
But no matter who you are; one or zero; or where your digit sits, you’re all part of the system; of the overall number. And as such have the power to change the overall number just by being born.

View From The Treetops (16 May 2007)

For the Girls...

"Yes Mabel, pole dancing, it's sooo empowering"

In a world that is not safe for us, why would you dress your child to look like a sex object? Why would you dress yourself to look like a porn star? In a world where violence against women is rampant, why would you wear a t-shirt that says “Discipline Me.”

Paula Rothenberg asks whether feminism has been defeated by the system. The full article, Snatched from the Jaws of Victory; Feminism then and Now appears on ZNet.

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For the Boys...

The woman most desperately in need of liberation is the 'woman' every man has locked up in the dungeons of his psyche. That is the basic act of oppression that still waits to be undone, though the undoing might well produce the most cataclysmic reinterpretation of the sexual roles and of 'sexual normalcy' in all human history.
~Roszak

Since sex is also a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero plays with weapons, which are his ersatz penis: his war games are due to a permanent state of penis envy.
~Umberto Eco

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
~Anaïs Nin

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.
~Germaine Greer

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Patti Smith - Dancing Barefoot

Bring Me the Head of Philip K. Dick

Get Out of My Mind!

Bring me the head of Philip K. Dick
I’ve had enough of this reality shtick
Open it wide with paranoid meat cleaver
And set the bugs free from the surveillance receiver
Let them run wild over bodies and bureaucracy
Let them reveal the truth about modern democracy
- a ubiquitous lie that we all must endure
while our freedom’s worth less than combustible manure
which is mined with expendable and low cost man-hours
from the sallow earth mother by the corrupt superpowers
No spandex or lurex here, no patriotic power factor
No spider-sense tingle in the nuclear reactor
Nor justice league guided by the ethos of purity
Or daredevil flights at the walls of absurdity
Just pinstripe and braces and receding hairline
Expanding bank balance and waste-filled waistline
Greed and control and the amassing of wealth
While we fret and bemoan our declining mental health
disorders created to market the readymade cure
by science and religion we are marched to the door
to face the abyss we were led to ignore
to be caught by surprise as we fall through the floor
So bring me the head of Philip K. Dick
His scanner illuminates the simplest of tricks
That lurks in the sleeves of those amateur magicians
Who we hold up to be our elected politicians

The Fall

Yves Klein - Leap into the Void

Words that fly from the lip of pedestal creating; today announcing with pride, with amazing revolutionary prejudice: “I am”
And in the dust-settled tomorrow the pendulum swings back malevolent; rotten tomatoes and piss-filled bottles flung at random at the pedestal established; to deny any statement of place or tradition.
There are scars that remain (as they must) in the forming of the adult who lurches along time’s erratic arrow; hypothalamic posters hung in the bedroom walls of heart memory, there to be picked over by the ghosts of teenage longing and the guilt of lost lust living.
But time is less an arrow than a piano dropped down a pit of finite (but unfathomable) depth.
All we have is the fall – the freedom; the free fall with music playing to echo in the shaft, perhaps to leave a few paint scars on the walls as we descend; a token of our passing; before the jangle of the chaos chord and broken key teeth and the mind’s release into subatomic peace.