Song to a daughter

When the day turns black

and everything seems darkened with the tar of faint light

Look for me

Even when love fails you

And you are abandoned in a feverish and soulless place

Angels still are to be found

Do not give up hope

For even within the nightmare there is God

For how long we are lost

and how long we must search

and so hard do we strain to hear
music

though our ears are made deaf

though our mouths are made mute

All is prayer, all is prayer

Uncharted is your life

a wilderness of choice

hidden inside a maze of conflict

Harken to the voice you cannot hear

for it is the One who will tell you the truth

even as lies pile around you like the stones of mountains

and your heart has flown in fear from you

You are not lost

You are not lost

I see you as you are

Wonder of wonders

saint of saints

god of gods

nothing can compare

nothing is greater

nothing is as eternal

or as wise

as I understand you to be

For how long we are lost

and how long we must search

and so hard do we strain to hear
music

though our ears are made deaf

though our mouths are made mute

All is prayer, all is prayer

I know who you are

Wonder of wonder

saint of saints

god of gods

nothing is greater

nothing is greater

than you

mr god

He lived a quiet life

washed his socks in the sink

strew his crumbs about like 

everybody else

and tried to keep himself clean

One day

when he was quite finished being a young man

he came upon a book

from which

words poured forth to him

into him

surrounding him

He soon lost it and could never

remember the title

But the words became a part of 

him

And he began to use them

secretly, only

secretly

For the magic in such words was too strong to share among 

the weak and mortal population

though he was no

Akhenaton 

He had never caused a revolution

or caused any of his hands or

those of other to be raised

in either joy or anger

and when he passed out of this world no one noticed he was

gone

or asked after him

He seemed a transparent person

a wonderwall

that no one cared to breach

His name was quickly forgotten by the postman by the dentist by the doctor by his employer

He left no children behind

His job was had been so unimportant that his assistant took it over while he was still performing it as it did not need to be taught and soon the assistant began to think he had always done it alone

While no one would have believed it he wished for this erasal

To be so forgotten would have given him an ultimate happiness 

And so it was easy to forget this man whose tastes were utterly boring

of which there was nothing to remark upon 

Even as he had done in his daily life he did in death

New people came and removed his meager belonging and were surprised to find 

jewels

gold

silver

the mighty and the superficial

the bright and the dull

of all patterns and colours and textures and beauty and repulsion

containing more wealth than Pharaoh himself

He had lived an ordinary space of years 

in an orderly fashion

of unimpressionable effect

Like all who went before

And so many after

He had collected a treasure

Some might say

He’d found some interesting words

that’s all

Those who chanced upon them hid them away for

they knew that it was enough

to raise him to the level 

of a 

small but mighty

god

Jerusalem

Jerusalem

(for Racheal) 

Send me the heroes who have 

lost all their gold

Who knelt to false angels who 

purchased their souls

The ones who have sold their clothes

for the cloth

The ones who melt devils then

wail their loss

And I will trade a million days

for their one thousand nights

Perhaps the dark surrounding them

will make them seek the light 

We'll dance on Rocks between the mounts until we stench the flow 

Of corpses filling heavens they were never meant to know

I offer you these million days

to save one thousand nights

The dark will sooth their wounds

and sleep will take the fight

Even as the harbor burns the ships before the glow

We will sing in places where only rabbis go

and sing them songs 

of sunny days lost and

far ago

Before the day extended to son above and also

son below 

Promise me your thousand nights to my one million days

A thousand nights of peace

is worth double what I pay

As Jesus and Mohammed pray in caves throughout the land

I'll have them up and dancing with nails in their hands

Forgotten woes still sting the wounds

that wail on the wall

Allahakbar cries the morning but no one heeds

the call

Make to me the fair exchange but remember in the light

That days are always shorter and dimmer than the night

And hard the wine and blood will flow

until a dozen ships ago 

A young girl died and closed her eyes and missed her falling star

Still Helen could not want for more; she did not start nor end the war

She died so many years ago

I will pay a million days for her one thousand nights

A thousand nights of love are worth 

a million days of strife

And tell her gently

do not come again

The war and the Eternal City will not end

......

Jerusalem must await

A race of better men

John 800 and thirty-nine

If one of them had understood

if one of them had known

each one of the apostles would

have cast the first stone

They laid him out in honour

They laid him on his bed

decided they would eat his flesh

decided he was dead

But still he lived among them

yet no one knew his name

his eyes were sunken back

and swallowed up in pain

Abraham's children 

10,000 strong that day

inherited the past

then cast it all away

Judas was a preacher who

sat upon his throne

and laughed in merriment

as he stroked his band of gold

and counted all the money

and counted all the heads

And Abraham's children cried over his death

Who do you look to god for who do you understand

who do you believe was truly son of man

Look into the ocean the sea has it's own ways

and the stars need no disciples to send them to their graves

Bereft and lost we seem but are we really free

Can we learn to stand without the guilt that colours all we dream

Abraham's children increased their force of arms

then threw them in the water

and burned them in the sand

the sky will be their dwelling place without the plans of man

And who will walk before us

And who will walk alone

And who will take the prophet's hand

and lead him to his tomb

Daisy Daisy

Come and walk beside me

and keep me company

pretend some one is watching

inside of all our dreams

Please come and stand beside me

follow me to sleep

you think we've found the answers

inside the in-between

Draw yourself a picture

colour it in green

place God inside the garden

and follow me to sleep

I know that you are lonely 

think I have all the letters

your words will ever need

Don't mistake the honour 

of sharing in my sleep

we all hide deep together 

in some one else's dream

Come and walk beside me

we'll walk into the sea

and drown in streams of letters

with no words for company

Please come and stand beside me

I'll swallow all your dreams

it's what you've always wanted

it's where you've always been

No dead can wake the living

No life can death redeem

Let us walk together

into the in-between

Merry Christmas

I tried to get to you for days

but it was too cold

or too late

or not the right time

I spent those days with friends thinking

you would be there

you would be happy to see me

we would laugh about our sisters

maybe have a meal together

I didn’t think about you a lot

it was a busy time of year

and you were busy too 

I thought

When I was close I'd get the call

but it wasn’t from you

it would never be from you 

I thought there was something wrong 

because

the grief was so ordinary 

as ordinary as opening the door

and 

sometimes

I 

still think you 

will

Liar Liar

I wish I could I wish I could

never forgive never forgive

or forget or forget

living without you living without you

pain more pain pain more pain

in my memory in my memory

erase it erase it

easy soft easy soft

no bad dreams no bad dreams

live live

faraway faraway

you tell me you tell me

once once

is enough is enough

but once is impossible but once is impossible

because because

there is then there is then

there is now there is now

two times two times

that never add that never add 

up to up to 

once

Melanie Emmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

She sat in the diner in her wool pinken dress

her pantyhose tied round her neck

and a violet's short stem behind her

Nothing but bliss she believed in its kiss

and a new day born from the ashes

If looks could kill well she probably still 

believes in what the mirror says

and round round her neck the nylon stretched 

as she looked in the mirror

Bashing her parents her teachers her pets

who had all got so far ‘tween her knees

She was tired of silence but no one could hear

when she talked her mouth chocked her with glass

Broken so young no need to get old

for breaking takes longer for some

who just aren’t as ready

who’s hands aren’t as steady

when they try to pick up the gun

all cowards, we age in our blue jeans

She dressed herself up, and tied back her hair

with the longest elastic in air

and in her pinked woolen dress she stuck out her tongue

and hung it to fuck  

all the people who found her

She is still living there, with a part in her hair

and one of her shoes on the floor

if you walk up beside her, don’t bother don’t mind her

The mirror wasn’t shattered, it held her and grabbed her

like the hand of a tv show debonaire

Once walked a moment, once walked a girl

along a cold bitter street

but if you happen to find her, her body still warm

forever you’ll wrap in her arms

and the chill once it finds you will keep you so perfect so young and so rare

And the promise of death, that promise is kept

forgetting forgetting the swoon

and the pain of her lovers who spurned her who covered

their mistakes with their suits and their fumes

They now hang beside her for youth is no minder of

whether you’re black or you’re blue

Mohammed and the Moneycounters

it was a 

bonfire of the vanities

but in vain

the princes live still in their castles

counting the heads of their prisoners

deciding which ones they will trade

that day

it was rumoured that all the shades from hell had risen in smoke and fire

but it was only money that fuelled the flames

and the noxious fumes it sent forth

were shaped into tanks and bombs and guns

no soul slept in repose after that

there was blood money to be made

a type of money that cannot burn

but kills by fire nonetheless

and the souls cried out for peace

and prayed to god

but god could not hear them

for god has

nothing at all to do who

rules hell as well as who 

sets the rules of heaven

the prisoners sit in jails somewhere else is all

and the princes they worship are

clothed in

glistening

ash

How to Get Mildly High and Incredibly Constipated for the Small Fee of Setting Up a Science Lab

You know that weird thing when you're on the net looking for something and you find something completely different -- and weird? I just came across a site called Opiophile (people that love opioids) who share tips and suggestions on how to get high on on opiates. Well, getting high on opiates isn't all that hard, as that's what they do, get you high, as well as act as painkillers. But these people aren't even talking about anything so obvious as Hillbilly Heroin (oxycodone), which itself is leagues below the morphine injections you get in the hospital after surgery. These "opiophiles" are talking about getting high on, of all things IMODIUM, the antidiarrheal over the counter medication! Here's a description of Imodium  (generic name Loperamide) from Wikipedia: Loperamide is an opioid-receptor agonist and acts on the μ-opioid receptors in the myenteric plexus of the large intestine; by itself it does not affect the central nervous system. It works similarly to morphine, by decreasing the activity of the myenteric plexus, which in turn decreases the tone of the longitudinal and circular smooth muscles of the intestinal wall.[6][7] This increases the amount of time substances stay in the intestine, allowing for more water to be absorbed out of the fecal matter. Loperamide also decreases colonic mass movements and suppresses the gastrocolic reflex.[8]
     I  have a long history with Imodium -- not to get high, that's for sure -- I have used it as an antidiarrheal for Crohn's disease. It was once explained to me by a pharmacist that it is related to codeine but that the molecular structure is mirrored as well as missing a few components, so while it works on slowing down the gastro-intestinal tract like codeine, only a minuscule amount is able to pass through the blood brain barrier to effect the central nervous system, so you get the constipating effects of an opiate but without the CNS effects -- no high and can't poop! But I really hate the stuff;  I find it doesn't work for me at lower doses, and if I take enough for it to work at all it works too well and my intestinal spasms don't just slow down, they stop. Makes me feel like a pregnant hippo, or like I swallowed a giant barrel cactus.
     Some people who obviously can't get anything more than a tylenol from any doctor  anywhere forever (probably because they have a rather suspect history of doctor hopping and abusing prescription painkillers) have come up with a way to get what little bit of opiate is present in Imodium to pass through the blood brain barrier and effect a CNS high. Apparently they add pulverized Imodium tablets to a solution of Butyl Cyanoacrylate (BC)  and Polysorbate 80 (P80) in acidified water. BC is used to make those weird bandage-less bandaids--you know, the liquid bandages that you paint over a cut--and P80, a sugar alcohol found in all sorts of food products as an emulsifier. The last thing added is Insulin, a hormone that helps our cells absorb glucose from the blood.
  The end result of all this weird science is to first break down Imodium into small particles through the acidic water, and to allow the  nanoparticles of BC, P80 and Insulin to first deliver, then bind the opiate properties of Imodium to cells within the Central Nervous System. The preferred method of delivery is by IV injection.
     I really wonder exactly how long it took for someone to figure this all out and, well, the pertinent question is WHY? There must be easier ways to get stoned. And shooting yourself full of bandaid-glue is kind of creepy if you ask me. Where exactly would you get readily available insulin? Insulin can be farmed from mice, but most of the Insulin people use nowadays for diabetes is artificial, no harm done to any animals at any stage at all. Do they have shelves of mice they feed a lot of sugar too in order to increase insulin production? Wouldn't you need a warehouse for all this equipment? Or do you just do it at the kitchen table in a frying pan?
   Well, that's my weird find for the day. It just goes to show that if a person wants to get high and constipated for about two weeks straight and maybe have to go to the hospital for a high colonic enema, where there's a will there's a way!

Movie Review: August: Osage County (release date Jan 10/14)

I really wanted to like this film. The premise, the actors, the fact that it centers on a family of real grown ups (not 50 somethings playing 30 somethings with teenagers who are 20 somethings). I was looking forward to watching an American film in which the actors play their ages (it seems of late that when an American movie requires grandparents who actually look like grandparents and NOT the evil browed botox caricatures Hollywood passes off as grandparents they have to fly in British actors whose attempts at American accents sounds as if they have a flute up their nose) and WHAT ACTORS: Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor et al. From the promos it seemed the film would deal with real issues. Well, this film does have issues, all right. Buckets, wheelbarrows, truckloads of issues. There were so many issues I thought I had gotten lost on Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, but without the realism -- this was the same white trash but living in a bigger house, and had they been living in a hovel this film would have been attacked as classist in the extreme. Incest (suggested), infidelity, addiction, alcoholism, racism, manipulation, bullying, greed, lying, stealing. It was so hard to find any redeeming quality in any of the characters that it was hard deciding who to hate or who to blame. The mom, Meryl Streep, might make a good scapegoat/punching bag for all the family's problems, but her ho of a sister (or sister in law, I forget and who cares) is no better, and neither are her kids. They go on and on and on and on about their junkie mom but have they ever really tried to help her? And moan about their poor, poor dad, the drunk, as if the fact that he doesn't need a prescription filled to get his mojo and no one in the family ever brings his scotch consumption up since he's such a great guy because he's never been to rehab makes him some kind of saint for sticking by his pill popping wife! One of the daughters wants to marry her cousin, which is creepy enough but when she finds out from her mom that he is her half brother (without the mom knowing she had the hots for him in the first place) she blames the mother for, for, for, WHAT EXACTLY? For never telling them their dear old dad was such a dog and was for years screwing their nice Aunt Mattie? The daughters all play "who's the bigger martyr" although they really don't seem to give a damn about anyone but themselves. Even when Julia Roberts has had enough at a family dinner, freaks out at her mom then flushes all her mom's pills down the toilet, exactly who is she doing this for? If her mother's pill addiction is as bad as they make out, wouldn't abruptly stopping the pills put her into intensive care? There really was no one in the film that was worth caring about, or rooting for, or even mourning. In terms of acting, well, it would be impossible to not over-act with such scenarios and such a script, and the actors in this film do not let us down in that regard. The mom's ability to talk non stop for 20 minute intervals without taking a breath while suffering from MOUTH CANCER(!!) and puffing a cigarette at the same time is admirable, and reminds me somewhat of King Lear's hefty dramatic monologues but with a lot of smoke. So if you want to see one of modern cinema's greatest actors (Streep) pull that off, I suppose it's worth the price of admission. And even though he was a lying philandering drunk, ultimately the dad really isn't so bad. He had the sense to off himself at the start of the film, which I was itching to do to myself half way through!

Three Words

I wanted to write a book

when I was younger

Bigger than The Entire Encyclopedia Britannica

More Important than Einstein's Theory of Relativity

as World Changing as The Gospels of Luke John Mark Matthew

and The Epistles of Paul

Now I just want to write one good word

followed by another

and another

Just three that go along together well

like

I Love You

or 

I Hate You

or 

Oh My God

something

original

but

familiar

like

Let's Fuck

(the 's being a second word, more powerful in its suggestion. 's could be Us or So What or even Salad. 's can mean more than one, or maybe more than one time, or s as in single or small serving or simple. at this point in my life i'd be happy to either create or experience an 's, full of meaning and apostrophic doubt as it is, but it has already been done)

I like to think that if someone came across my three words, perfectly chosen and perfect in order

they would

feel an epiphany

as though a cat walked over their brain

a new

understanding of the meaning

of the universe

and their place in 

it.

I had so many words planned

and so many planned words

but they all drifted away

like children who grow up and move to 

Montreal

or 

maybe Barcelona

and I hope there is a god

capitalized or not

who will feel sorry for me

and give me

my

three 

words

This is not my personal intellectual property, but it is my name!

Manifesto

It is time to

disassimilate

to say our final farewells

without having to

die

To find a new kind of freedom

to discover a new way of living

that is as important as

dying

To understand that what binds us to each other

is that which promotes slavery

is that which annihilates the soul

and maintains evil in the world

While I cannot see the future

I can hope

and I can dream

of a binding

without discrimination

without hate

without poverty

without high and

without low

A new relationship with each other

in which no one holds more power than any other

in which all colour is beautiful

in which no colour is beautiful

in which sex and gender is Absolute

freedom

A world where

no one is rich

just as

no one is poor

In which we police ourselves and not each other

especially not each other

for the policing of the world is what destroys the world

it is a policing in which the poor police the poor and the slave the slave and the worker the worker

to increase

and to profit that which first steals identity

and returns identity by naming that which it has stolen

making us owners who are owned

by thieves

by imaginary desire

by worthless worth

until we are nothing but items on a shelf

lined up like poultry

laying our young out to be picked by

farmers with no fields

landowners with no land

branded

with a warranty that lasts a lifetime

For too long have we ignored this

For too long have we believed

that only a life worth living is worth living

Perceive the worthlessness of this vision

how it has strangled us

how it has dulled us

how it has failed us

and prevented us from being able

to see that worth does not mean going up in value

Disassimilate

it will be hard

almost impossible

almost the end

almost more frightening than death

always more frightening than death

for death is freedom, and freedom is frightening

but we need not die to become free

if we break these ties

this noose

this suffocation

we no longer have to go "up" we can go

sideways

in circles

whatever we choose

The first step is to realize

that we can say

goodbye

whenever we want

Safe as Houses

There is no home for some of us

it changed its mind too often

so we 

paint our walls with the visions of philosophers

and fashion windows from the minds of artists

and pattern doors from the rags of fairytales

the pounding of fists cannot open it

nor can the loudest scream pierce its glass

it is remarkable how 

the deepest tissue of the brain

can create a house so final

that daddysmellslikeginandpussyscaringmummywhoissoscaredshehitsustoprotectusandissososososososorrysorrysorrysorrysorry

and nosupperforyoumissyiwillgiveyousomethingtocryaboutyoulittleshitfuckassholebastardbitchdon'tyoudareusethosewordstheyarebadlikeyoubadlikeyoubadlikeyoubadlikeyoubadlikeyouandiwillwashyourmouthoutwithsoapandiwishyouwereneverborndon'tcryyoulittlebaby

cannot break through its hard doors and though it takes forever when it is finally 

final

we can finally go

home