Scruples make us focus more and more
We focus more and more on less and less.
We fall into the black dot we have bored.

Excessive zeal is narcissism galore,
As off to that Confessional we rush,
Scruples make us focus more and more

How can we love our sisters when  unsure
Our  guts and bladders squelch in horrid mush
We fall into the blackness off the shore.

Oh, sacred Self, oh Sanctity renewed!
God will worship me, delicious!
Scruples made me narrow-eyed and sure.

By my own will, I thought I could be pure.
A mystic soul  admired by all the toffs
I fell into the black hole of manure.

The sensitive  of mind  find life so rough
That  penance, torture, whipping’s not enough
Scruples made my focus narrow down.
I fell down the black hole , hey, what a clown!

Schubr

If you see things t other people don’t,
Like   eyes  afloat and  fish  flying  quite bare
Better keep it to yourself, I say
For being odd can lead us to despair

If you see blood dripping down the walls
And Jesus getting off his Cross in church
Get your eyes  glued to the book of prayer
Even if your guts begin to lurch.

If God burns  bold in bushes near your State
Direct him with your Sat Nav to the Gate.
Never call him Father, Mother, Mate
Just tell him you are busy  and you’re late

If us women wish no more to mate
Nor bear children, nor  elucidate;
Is there something evil in control
That boils our ova and cremates our  souls?

And if the men are  unemployed and  feeling low
Wish not to marry nor to share their woe
Well, once we had the coal mines deep and dark
And if they saw a golden light they sparked

I won’t tell you of my secrets as it’s night.
But keep a candle  and a wit to bite

http://hudsonreview.com/2013/02/dying-to-write-poetry-2/

 

“When one has grown tired of one’s contemporaries, how satisfying it is to sit back and get whacked by the great dead, to be reminded of original impulses or models far from one’s own experience. I have for years now been grateful for the poetry of Dick Davis, an Englishman who teaches medieval Persian literature at OhioStateUniversity, and for his extraordinary translations, which perform for Persian poetry what Wilbur has done for French. The sheer breadth of Davis’ publications in the field, the number of major works he has brought into English, including The Conference of the Birds, The Shahnameh, Vis and Ramin and others, strikes me as one of the true literary achievements of our time. Davis’ rhyming lines flow like a river, never impeding narrative, never becoming cumbersome in any way. His new volume brings three poets of fourteenth-century Shiraz into English: Hafez (the only poet in this group familiar to me), Jahan Malek Khatun and Obayd-e Zakani.⁵ The third of these figures was a rascal:”

I drink my coffee from a  mug my brother sent to me
I like to keep  two separate ones for coffee and for tea
This  one was expensive and it looks just like the sea
I think of Saltburn and the shore while I  drink coffee.

From Teesmouth and Redcar we walked in loving times
The long beach was quite empty, Saltburn pier’s divine.
I kept a little journal where I spelt it out in  rhyme
I may come from Manchester but these sands are very fine.

We went to Whitby and Sandsend and  loved it all  the more
My husband liked the pork pie shop and he ate 24.
He didn’t eat them all at once, a fact I do deplore.
For pork pies are sustaining when you walk miles on the shore.

His daddy liked the heather best, his mammy liked the sea.
And she was much the stronger one, it was evident to me.
So if you got to Roseberry and  that Topping  great
Remember his old daddy and   all his working mates

They spent their lives in ICI breathing in foul air
But they earned a living and so they all stayed there.
My husband was asthmatic and they took him out of  town
He spent 3 months up in the Moors , his mammy turned dark brown.

She must have been of mixed up race, an ethnic half-caste pearl
She was always called as white when she was  just a girl.
But when she spent 12 weeks outdoors  then the people saw
Black and white are not quite right to describe our skins-in-law.

 

Null und Eins: Aphorisms

Quote:

KIRILLOV’S MIRACLE.— In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed, Kirillov isn’t entirely mistaken about the outcome of his suicide. When he kills himself, he will indeed kill God, as he believes. Suicide violates the most fundamental of Christian moral principles precisely because it permanently disrupts the very stability of identity God’s existence is supposed to guarantee. In killing himself, Kirillov does not kill God, he becomes God, that is, something that does not exist. Thinking is a war against death; reality is the battleground. The Divine was invented by the primitive imagination as a weapon against death, but when this fact is forgotten, the weapon is turned back against its inventor. When the Death of God is finally announced, those who have killed him do not realize that something will inevitably take His place. Nor do they suspect the obvious usurper: Nature: that which remains when the superfluous hypothesis disappears. Rather than vanishing along with God, the problem of suicide actually intensifies. It goes from being a mortal sin to an unnatural act. Thus, in order for Kirillov to be truly successful, he would have to perform a miracle: he would have to kill himself twice.

 

THE ART OF JUGGLING CORPSES.— Power concerns the organization, arrangement, and distribution of material objects in physical space. Whatever ideas and ideals are brought to bear on this process are necessarily corrupted and weighed down by their contact with decaying matter. Politics, in other words, is the art of juggling corpses and anyone whose highest value is power stinks of the grave.