Cataracts Eye the Light in the Sky

And the sky is filled with light that streams
between the wings of aeroplanes
And in the dirty heart of each there lives a lie
The same lie told over and over
The lie that rings between bell and clapper
Sunday morning salutation to the heart’s defeat
At the hands that steer the rudder

The sky is filled with smoke that streams
Between the teeth to mouth an oh
So loud as to be heard around the world
And setting out from the centre stem
The mushroom cloud heads for the moon
While all around is turned to glass
By the hands that steer the rudder

Enola Gay - your name itself obscures
Your mission cold and all that will ensue
To lose our way our vision grey
Too blinded by the light to see
That this light is not the spark of hope
That lives within the cavern of my chest
while my hands they steer the rudder

Fruition Ignition Cognition

And now my lungs are empty,
no comforting words to spill
Like tattered curtains of memory
which brush your window sill
And scatter dust like glittered galaxies
of miniscule design
across the universe that forms your room,
apparently benign
But littered yet with trip or fall
or lurking dark desire

And having crossed they come to rest
where skirting meets the wall
and there do set about the task
of conquering the house
Emissaries with powder keg and secret atom ray
Sent to calculate the neighbours
to seed their tongues and sandalwood smiles
with decadent behaviour
and then below the bowl of sky
to blow those motes asunder

And passing wheels swish the shaker’s hat
in black benevolence bedecked
the brass, the box, the candles shocked
to feel the passing wind’s neglect
where words are spend in careful pain
on the ciphered days that lie ahead
they circle the ritual wreck, the wooden heart,
the eyes that here were wed
and feet will walk the sidewalk cracks
numb become uneven.

Engineering: A Better Future?

A toast if you will for the ‘no blame culture’ where personal responsibility is forgone for the collective wisdom of managerial piety.
Glasses raised to the church of health and safety that decrees homo sapiens incapable of descending stairs while simultaneously carrying a cup of coffee
Three cheers for the proud man with no method but to pass the task on to the next man to complete.
Kudos to the intelligence that creates a new manager to manage the managers.
Hooray for the man who can, without irony, feel satisfied in a week spent shuffling paper and creating spreadsheets to prove it.
An extra large bonus please for the man whose suit will define him as powerful enough to legally earn a living by doing nothing.
A shiny shiny sheriff’s badge for him that believes with all his heart that he can only manage downward.
A long service flashlight awarded to the man in the middle who can see up the skirt of the company whore.
Here’s to the death of a million trees to design and create a paper mill.

Some weeks are shitter than others.

Seeds

Now the seeds of winter spawn in furrows sown on summer’s rise
And the leaves that turn upon the branches do so in disguise
For orange hearts on ochre sleeves the harvesters do shun
And the scythe its blade directed past the autumn digging done

Now spring won’t let you draw your breath with pencil graphite green
To notice how the lines converge in tomorrow’s field unseen
Or who would sow and who would reap and who would own the land
and who would hang in tattered rags and straw the scarecrow stand

“Not me” you cry in dappled tones beneath scattered oak alight
While laying down the hoe to tow the rising moon to light
Then slipping tween the rays of hope that gleam upon your face
The tears of yester-yesteryear to fertile ground do race

To feed those seeds in springtime sown in hope and good intent
And there spring forth with shoots anew to writhe in discontent
To bite and claw and clamber up to stretch for distant sun
and plough by atheist horses drawn through the rows of reason run

to spill the beans on a plate of pure and unadulterated truth
with meat shaved clean from hamburger cows no longer in the tooth
than the children born in the dying scorn of double millennia
who cannot see beyond the synthetic hem of parental asphyxia

and so to rest these rolling stones whose moss morose does feed
on the past and present fabricated filtered filed indeed
in confidential vaults of lead and notes green soaked in greed
then compressed in chambers secret sacred to reinvented seed

School of Thought

Having two sons in high school doing their best not to be completely demoralised by the absolute corporate nature of the education system, I find solice in the knowledge that they are in good company:

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice."
~ Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)



"I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing."
~ Socrates (470 - 399 BC



"Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used"
~ Dr. Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)



"Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence."
~ Henrik Tikkanen (1924 - 1984)



"If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it."
~ Stanley Garn (1922 - 2007)



"Common sense is not so common"
~ Voltaire (1694 - 1778)



"I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde"
~ Dolly Parton (1946 -)



"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
~ Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)



"My education was interrupted only by my schooling"
~ Winston Churchill (1874- 1965)



"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't."
~ Anatole France (1844 - 1924)



"My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated"
~ Moon Unit Zappa

Tapestry

Stick figures in an internal landscape; vaguely representing voices in the electric field.
I am the cloud on your silver lining; the red rim on the shepherd’s warning.
You are the bared ends of copper in search of the source of resistance.
I am the reality teevee; the visual refuse that refuses to try.
You are the eyes of the blind man on the edge of the sky.
They are the fucked-up formations in shale quarried revolution.
We are the children of wonder; the pages of industrial action.
They are the chattering monkeys tree-bound and divided
We are the super-glued fingers on my left hand put right
He is the man with the eyes that point into his head
She is the woman whose hand reaches into your heart
He is the boy with the bullet holes who staggered the road
She is the girl with the green hair who danced until dawn
They are the parents who sit and determine their truth
We are the children who suffer the weight of regard
Fleshed out now no longer stick figures but the faces that reside in the field of dreaming.

Justice and the Night Whispering

Oscar Chichoni

As befits the darker duties of justice; they came in the night.
For what benefit is there to society to witness the inner workings of administration; the grinding cogs; the pounding machinery; machinery that oft requires lubricating with society’s most precious substance – blood?
His crime? What possible crime could a mild mannered house painter inflict on the tribe? A crime so subtle as to be invisible to the naked eye; a crime of thought perhaps?
They came for night whispering; for dreams unspent; they came in the knowledge that the night’s shadows creep in the mind’s cold corners; they came for his soul; for his wanting; his turned-down-at-the-corner mouth; they came for the ideas that formed between one brush stroke of house paint and the stroke of midnight on the clock that had not chimed since sand had invaded its mechanism during the last storm.
They came in black; their faces hidden (for justice must, by definition, be faceless).
They came on feet that made no sound on the rough hewn floor of the room that he shared with the ghost of his wife, dead these long years.
They came with the boy’s best interest at heart and removed him from the source of his discomfort.
Iskandor felt as if his eyes would burst forth from their sockets; gagged and straining to see what manner of demon had invaded his sleep. From swivel socket orbit to the gulf of awakening, he had no chance to draw any breath other than that which inhaled the pungent tang of deep anaesthetic chemical.
And on their breath fading into oblivion Iskandor heard the words whispering his judgement and sentence…
No screams or shouts; none of the usual cacophony of police action; blunt with bravura; this was a covert operation designed to disappear in the warmth of morning leaving the little house of a humble man deserted of life and object – empty of all history.

This is an extract from a work in progress, tentatively entitled "The Voice of Reason"