View From The Treetops (30 Mar '08)

More News From Nowhere

Hey hey here we go Rambo’s saving Burma
Blood red carpet welcomes America’s first black president – prepare for more of the same.
Sub-prime credit crunch fuck you pedestrians, Wall Street brokers are laughing their dicks off.
Israel continues dispersing the bullets paid for in dollars by the American Dream, paid for in blood by Palestinian civilians, cranking the pressure on Concentration Camp Gaza while wailing in protest on the monopoly board.
Cheney’s in the Middle East drumming up business
The machine grinds out a new gadget to pacify your racing heart.
The more we improve and develop, the worse things get.
New and improved but impossible to use.
Choke back your tongue in protest for your children’s future, their education, their hope, their means of survival.
You crime ministers and bone eaters
Paedeophobic teachers and wife beaters
Blockbusters pulling the money (who needs the Oscars when we’ve got CGI)
CGI means never having to be astonished
It has never been truer that you shouldn’t believe half of what you see.
And none of what you hear.

Title from Nick Cave's latest gift "Dig! Lazarus Dig!"
See also the novel by William Morris

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Half of What You See



Sacred cows: always hardest to slaughter, especially in the face of well entrenched truth.
The Greanville Journal dishes the dirt on the Dalai Lama here.

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Terence McKenna ~ Culture is Your Operating System

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Clinic ~ If You Could Read Your Mind

Spring

Easter brought snow to East Anglia


To gardens preparing themselves for summer


To the swans that haunt the river bank


To graffiti ghosts that prowl the underpass


To sunken chests that ripple silent


And protests shouted at the sky.

Redemption

I saw I was a young man clean shaven and serene
Walking on the parapet frozen in a dream
To the left the yawning chasm that beckoned pointless proud
To the right you kissed my neck and uttered words aloud
You need not be who you think you are nor ride the edge so hard
You needn’t tread the path so deep and drag that blackened cloud

And so the mirror smiling does reflect my younger self returning
Turning slow in haze and snow and heart no longer yearning
For that which cannot be contained or written down or spoken
But lies at the centre spoke of the wheel that spins unbroken
So seek ye less for what is real but hold what is known to be
And know that love cannot be defined but represented by a token

Penance

Your eyes too fierce my shame to meet
my feet walking aimless down the street
With no one to meet but red mist persist and all that I own to be me
Shatters and falls a suit of glass shards autumn leaves from an earthquake tree
This bitter pill bitten pit-bull self-inflicted
Ignorance and pain dutifully misdirected
Inward holds the mirror frost obscured
And left with nothing my fingertips to grasp
Only then to see the lives of my children and the love that has endured
The years of formation, the changes, the climb
The belief that we are; the beauty sublime

Barometric Pressure

Oscar Chichoni

Oh my heart my heavy head in sinking sand interred
Oh my world my catastrophic visions temporarily deferred
Mercury details scuttle across my vanishing point of view
Them and us injustice corruption complicating me and you

Assorted envelopes filled with miscellaneous meat muscle and bones
Raffle their moans converse contrary and take out short term loans
On futures uncertain, fabricated or downright dimwit deluded
Tombstoned and chiselled before they’ve even concluded

That the path they walk is paved in perpetual parentheses
Bracket brained in barometric photosynthesis
Roots they writhe and clutch at ankles luckless pedestrian
Seeking purchase hooves unshod inter-bred equestrian

They gallop poles apart to beat the rabbits in the headlights
To flee the night that arcs behind and threatens morning’s delights
To jump the fences braced against the edge of parapet
Blindfolds braced against the fate that threatens with regret

Trade those arms those greenback legs that scuttle past the office
Of those who hold the keys to come kingdom’s crumbling coffers
Pull those triggers hair receding hammer home the horror
Spend your gains ill-gotten now on the dawn of no tomorrow

Black this pit my heavy heart my eyes gouged out in shame
The pendulum its arc describes to cut me from the frame
And roll me up canvas crime and store me in the dark
With all the other works of art whose croak were once a bark