After the Bullfight

Spitting blood, the bull tumbles head and hooves into the rustling dust before the gloating matador who, dressed in a gold-tassled pink leotard, turns his back on the beast and holds high a black hat to the crowd.

Soliciting appreciative cheers for so artfully performed an execution.

Behind the matador, a few men crowd around the crippled, dying bull. One man stabs a short blade into the back of the animal's neck and, with a rough, sawing motion, hacks through the spinal cord.

In come two horses to bear the bull away; as it's dragged off toward the red wooden doors, its spilt blood streaks into the dust.

Men shovel fresh sand
To mask the red stains
And ready the place
For another joyous death.

Six times in a row. Two bulls for each of three matadors.

This is sport. The winner so blantant that it need not be announced.

Choosing Truths

Old cheese on a wet napkin
Mouse-eaten partly such that
Now it's holy;
Gold-coloured wax wraps
The surface, shining bright,
Illuminating darkness so
Hard-won by one old fromageur
Who wanted for his masterwork to
Never go to mould.

Mouse-eaten old cheese on a wet napkin
Growing holier by the day
Thanks to gnawing teeth
Housed in mouths that
Whisper no prayers;

Don't tell the priest:
He´ll get angry and say
"Only faith and devotion make one Holy."

Don´t try to persuade him:
He won´t trust your facts.
If priests believed in proof
They wouldn't need faith
To help choose their truths.

We Are All Small Things

To anyone who has ever hoped to feel important:
Take some time to count blades of grass
Or leaves of trees
To see how significant you are;
Then take a moment to realise how little it matters.

Sleep-eater.

The sleep-eater creeps through dreams
Delivering unrest to all
Where all ought be well.

The sleep-eater steals dreams
Leaving us sleepless nights
With storm clouds in the head;

The birds do not chirp and
Sing under rain grey skies
And even if they did we would not hear it
Over the thunder crack racket
And the drop splash noise:
Downpours and lightening sing louder
Than any starling voice.

This is what the sleep-eater does,
This is how it destroys:
There are no dreams without birdsong,
And the birds will soon be gone.

Civilised Lives

This is your torn wet-dream
Your forced dry heave
Disgusting and you like it
Wasted awake from
Crucial darkness inside
The mind of another
Fucker claiming sainthood.

Ever considered murder?
The Hell you haven't
And you've committed it, too;
We just don't call it that
So we feel alright about liking it
And the many comforts
Our bloody hands provide.

Who ever heard
Of an innocent man?
Only those wealthy enough
To ignore their own guilt
And deny the atrocities
Performed in their names
So that they may lead
So called
Civilised lives.

This is our war-torn wet dream
Moistened with the blood of others
The juice of life that
has ever spilt so that
The civilised, so to speak,
Could live in peace.
Cultures torn to pieces
So the civilised could live in peace
Take it for granted,
Get fat, and watch TV.

Our wealth is not our own:
Our wealth is what we stole
From better cultures
With blood less cold.
Our frigid hearts
Sterile as doctor's stainless
Remain unmoved as we steal
The lives and lands of others
For the sake of conveniences
That quickly enslave us.

Yet who now objects?
The poet with the privilege
Of higher education-
Few else-
And even then hardly.

Yet who now protests?
The men and women of
The First Nations waiting
Are now gradually changing,
Taking wage jobs
Forgetting the old ways
And giving in to the new God,
The one who will be the end of us all,
The one who allows us to believe
In our civilised lies.

New layout...

Look at how GREEN I am! Jeez, if only I'd known I could get this green just by setting up a blog I might not have done my degree in Environmental Science.

Go green! Yay me! Yay you!

READ THE FOLLOWING IN A WHISPER, LIKE IN A REALLY COOL MOVIE ABOUT LIBERAL CONSPIRACIES: (I hear that every time you even say "green" it saves the environment a little bit. If you yell it you... oh boy... if you get five people to yell "GREEN!" at exactly the same time, global warming actually stops for three minutes. Now, if those same five people get five friends to yell "GREEN!" at the same time while carpooling in GREEN! hybrid cars, well then the whole world will turn into Heaven... a place where capitalism actually functions.)

[I just realised I forgot to mention one of the scariest words to arise here: cynical.]

Captivity

Now that I'm done school, I'm getting this sense that I will someday (hopefully quite soon) live in a way that reflects my convictions. The more time passes, the more distance I feel between myself and this culture. I turn on the TV and the advertisements make me feel ill. I walk down the street and I can't think of anything but how wrong our way of life is.

I was in the local mall yesterday. They've done big renovations since I was last in there, and I wanted to see what it was like inside. I looked around a lot of the stores and noticed the music they were all playing. I could think only of the insanity of it all. Department stores with literal boatloads of useless crap. All this shit that's made to break in a year or two, thus necessitating continual re-purchasing. Then they have the happy music to numb the mind; the last thing they want is for people to realise that they're children in adult bodies being made yet more dependent by increased convenience, lower prices, and planned obsolescence.

I was walking through the toy isle in Zellers (I have a bitter love for inspecting department store skateboards), thinking about raising children in this society. That's when I felt it underneath everything--underneath all the nausea, all the anger, all the disgust--that I simply can't live like that. If there's one thing that strikes me as even worse than having to live amidst all this, it's the notion of bringing someone else into it, the notion of perpetuating the cycle by breeding in captivity.

Now, having written that, I think about how most people would respond to the last sentence in the previous paragraph. "Breeding in captivity." I can only imagine the religious fervour with which most people would rebuke me for such a comment. Religious fervour, which is to say that they would rebuke me simply because they have been trained to. They would rebuke me in accordance with the dogma we have all been fed and forced to follow. They would not respond to my words as something they have mulled over, given some time, and then come to disagree with; but as something that they automatically, immediately shrink from. Then I try to imagine what a presenter on CNN (or yet worse, FOX) would say.

Oh, how I would be chastised.

Then I think about Soren Kierkegaard, about his suggestion that anyone speaking the truth cannot expect the crowd, the public, to agree with him. I think of his suggestion that ostracism is, in fact, a good sign. I think of that, and I feel enheartened; and enheartened, I continue.

"They would not respond to my words as something they have mulled over, given some time, and then come to disagree with; but as something that they automatically, immediately shrink from." They would tell me that we are free, not captive. To this, I would reply with a question: if we are so free, why do most people find it so offensive and so impossible to consider the idea-- the mere idea-- that we are not free?