Title: POETRY
Category: other
Blog Entry: Here's the poetry (by my significant other) I promised. Hope you like it!
The Human Delusion
(Inspired by Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion")
I am Dawkins' Robot,
Complex in my way, it's true,
But I only exist to serve to serve my genes,
As they are the ones that do.
They allow my sham existence,
Whilst turning to their task
Of striding across the millennia
With a single-minded zest.
From Amoeba to Me they've condescended
To join in Corporate groups,
And even Albert Einstein
Was simply one of the troops.
My life story weaves a fiction
Spun out to delay the truth:
That genes are the be-all and end-all
As enshrined in Dawkins' proof.
Science thus trumps experience,
And I mustn't believe I matter.
Its the little cells who are driving me
In their eternal quest to scatter.
For what is poor Humanity
Save Natural Selection at play,
And ourselves are the merest vanity,
When the Chemistry holds sway.
So forget all Arts and Culture,
Love, Sentiment and Romance,
We duped apes are gigolos
In a life-long gene led dance.
Let us praise dear Dawkins
For revealing to us the Law:
That proteins are our masters
And shall be evermore.
Bernard Badpoet Nov 2006
An Indulgence
Closer than any God
Is my street.
I can always return there.
It's my sort of prayer.
Unlike any phantom spirit
It hums with substance,
And rightness remembered.
It is Summer 1969.
My street, fittingly lit
By the twilight's fade.
And the hedges' perfume
Just tops the satisfying fumes
From cars still warm, but resting.
I stand alone on the pavement.
My bowels are tugging in that pleasant way
Which forces me to stillness
While it passes,
Allowing me to survey
This scene from my contented history.
But it's more;
It is the truth about me
Somehow transfigured,
Seeming eternal.
Because, in imagined time, it's always there to visit.
So, allow me this one delusion ;
That it might be there when all else fades:
My last illusion.
Bernard Badpoet Nov 22 2006.
Unwarranted Expansion At The Terminus Of Reducibility
Reduction
Seeks to banish Complexity,
Along the lighted way.
It clarifies;
Elucidates;
Makes limpid;
Explains (that)
Causes are always further back;
Once removed (again and again).
The Prime Mover remains hidden
Behind some litmus
Hinting at material change.
But why these elements?
Wherefore the change?
Who instigates the same?
And (again) who drives the instigator?
The First Cause,
Unbidden still,
Is not only irreducible,
But must possess
A quality of endowing
The overarching complexity,
First divined by our enlightened
Reduction
Along the lighted way.
This can only lead back to the Agent of all things,
(In themselves, and as we find them, so susceptible to Reduction).
Bernard Badpoet Nov 21 2006
Contrapostmodernity
Blasted tree stumps on my wire strewn Somme
Help me savour a bleak territory.
My modern imagination throws up:
Slaughter plus Electrification.
I crave its rationality
Its blood-iron logic
Its faith in the certain progress of the masses,
Who have arrived,
But are no longer guilty.
I dont trump up responsibility ,
I dont ponder helplessness,
I just get vaccinated,
And join the Writers Union
In this city of ten opera houses , but no private cars.
A safe brainhaven from Western Sky Powers,
Whose MEDIAWORLD conjurs up the globe
In a snowshaker of illusions.
Sheltered inside myself ;
Unable to see strawmen tried and framed for powercrimes
by the video lens....
Unable to hear disembodied voices tortured
By a thousand cuts , to lie in soundbites...
Unable to taste DISNEYCULTURE
Served up in raw gobbets of deconstructed belief.
On leave, in the mind's Beerhall,
Marx, Keynes , Bevan , and I ,
Can enjoy brief respite from the necessary trenches.
The lime topped lager in the cold angst bottle is shunned.
Whilst to hearty cheers for "Austerity, Modernity, and Social Progress",
The bright foaming keg , in the handled glass, is downed in one.
Bernard Badpoet 1992.
R.E.M (My Childhood)
Acoustic, wistful, describes regret,
Pining for experience I have not met,
Yet is familiar as my room
Seen through dust in an Easter ray of sun.
Largo, elegaic, affirms being,
Believing in Redemption , whilst still not seeing,
Yet all things will be well,
As in the weary trudge home from the match.
Piano, mournful, confronts dying,
Wishing an end to all the crying,
Yet comforting as the smell of woodsmoke
From the half-term bonfire.
Voices, insistent, cite the case:
Fleeting joy and pain mark the human race,
Yet this banal truth holds
Like washing,stew and carrots on a Monday morn.
Bernard Badpoet 1993
(Inspired by 'Nightswimming')
All the Rage Distilled.
Empty bottles
Lie
With my empty promises.
All Lies !
'Cept cans of lager
And Vodka Vodka.
I'm drinking now.
I'm thinking now,
Somehow.
Oblivion obliterated
In a torrent of booze.
A bucket of blood,
And an evasion later,
I'm still not sated.
So fuck off Doctor Lah-di Dah,
And carers, Natasha and Julie,
Intefering with my cherished chaos.
I'm not a bloody invalid.
I'm a death drinker
Drinking myself to death.
As Agencies spectate,
And the pubs stay open
All hours, for the Chancellor,
My Gremlins skulk amidst the empties,
Then nestle with my vodka in the fridge.
Finally,they're dancing with the rolling thoughts
Of my well proofed brain,
And everything is pissing down the drain.
Bernard Badpoet Nov 21st 2006
My Own Private Contraflow (River Pheonix died suddenly, aged 23 years. May he rest in peace)
River, accept my gratitude:
For the grace in your in your attitude.
For a beauty borne with fortitude.
You were snatched drying painted wings
Which never flew .
Yet your talent is a certitude .
And Death is but an interlude,
Where emptiness will soon intrude,
To seal in amber the fragile mood,
Which so demands my gratitude.
BB Nov 1993
The Hidden God:
Prayer inspired by the great Primo Levi (1919-1987)
Primo , I know what God is not.
Not:
The substance of dreams.
The image of poetry.
The 'x' of the intellect.
The idol who justifies.
The wish of fantasy.
The prop of Empire.
The prisoner of Scripture.
The subject of doctrine.
The refuge of the moral coward.
The construct of the insipid imagination.
Who then, my wakeful Dante , is he?
He is the reality of LOVE.
De profundis you cry, 'Where is love amidst this bleakness?'
Obscured in the mire, yes,
but found , as you found it, still:
Providence in Auschwitz.
Kindness in Treblinka.
Liberation in Dachau.
Solace in Dresden.
Salvation in Hiroshima.
Sanity in Sarajevo.
Truly, if might is right, then there is no love, and no God.
We want no part of it, saying, in despair, 'Thus is the world'.
The world is not thus, Primo . It is we others who have made it so.(I, Primo, have made it so).
Edward Hughes 1992
Canal Vision
At Lower Linthwaite Lock
A Kingfisher angle- darts
To an overhanging branch.
It waits ,
Allowing my shortsighted stare.
This smear of electric blue:
A Van Gogh touch on the slate grey canvas
Of December's days.
Acquitted, it rockets to the hidden bank across.
This pleasing cliché left,
And needing still to seal the Pastoral;
I imagine this vivid instant as redemption:
The point of all the winter day
Summoned before its close.
My witness to this climax:
Increment to the sum of thIngs intended.
Bernard Badpoet - December 5th 2006
This Pantomime Dame Called 'Love'.
'Love',
Never disinterested,
Charades as selfless.
But its pot bellied indulgence
Bursts through the fullest garb.
Love's petty, pretty, gaudy, frocks:
Mere dissembling weeds,
Which shroud a steely lingerie of selfishness beneath.
Below this again,
Foundation garments,
Fluffed up with sentiment,
Cover the nakedness of its base desire.
And we are to look
To some Deity,
To set our hearts afire
With this cheap corrosive bliss?
Dont take the piss!
Give me the combat gear of kindness
Any time.
For colder climes: Justice Trenchcoat.
Final touch;my Panama of reason,
To shade me from the migraine glare
Of the Nazi pulse,
Some dignify as 'Love'.
Bernard Badpoet Dec 2nd 2006
Weary Wings At The Weir
(Twilight 5th December 2006)
Above the brown cauldron of Cowlersley weir,
Replete with days of driving December rain,
Long-tailed titmice- nine-
Are in connected dance up-down
The dowling branches of a naked thorn.
An exquisite carousel in miniature:
Each tiny pink-black mount
Perch-flitting, in well drilled roundelay ,
Above the waters' boiling broth immensity.
For me; a privileged glimpse of bonsai delight,
An animated ornament to light up the gathering gloom.
To campaign hardened birds;
A disciplined, but desperate , forage.
Their winter mission:
To thrive till breeding,
With an endless dance of feeding
On the go.
And so I leave them to their arduous patrol,
With anthropomorphic thoughts of beauty*,
And its unremitting toll,
Weighing down even my, most skeptic, soul.
Bernard Badpoet Weds 6th December 2006
*beauty arising from struggle at its peak performance- a natural aesthetic.
Autumn
On the field with the dogs:
A sense of decay keens a lust for life.
Whilst a sweet warm air, replete with rain,
Frames mortality, making me sane.
On the field with the dogs:
Alone but not separate.
Whilst the deepest green, atop a giving earth,
Validates frailty, conferring worth.
On the field with the dogs:
I'm a steward who belongs.
Whilst ripe fruit, signalling tomorrow,
Discount futility, dissolving my sorrow.
Bernard Badpoet 4th Oct 1992
Solipsism
Laughter in a languid moon,
And then, thought came;
Like a full-blown animated rose
To button-hole him,
Its wagging finger
Unwilling to soften
The necessary steel
Of pointless, self-inflicted, pain.
Bernard Badpoet Jan 2006
(apologies to Keats)
ER and BJ go PNG*
The Queen and Boris Johnson
Sat down to wine and dine.
The joint on display, from PNG,
As ,sadly, was the wine.
To eat a Chief is not so bad
Thought Boris, ruefully,
But to drink a grape from that far-off Cape,
It's just insanity.
'Ne'er mind',said the Queen, in German,
Sensing BJ's despair,
'You can come next week, for a bite to eat,
We're dining on Tony Blair'
Bernard Badpoet Sep 8th 2006.
* BJ in diplomatic hot-water for inferring 'longpig' was still on the menu in Papua New Guinea.
The Hours
We cannot own time,
Not even the moment ago.
So my past, and yours,
Belonging to no-one,
Is priceless.
And its value cheapens all the stories
About it,
We would like to buy and sell.
BB Dec 31st 2006.
Geoff's Death
(in memoriam Geoffrey France 1917-2006)
Exit.
Stage managed,
Without applause.
Footlights dimmed,
And then out.
It's over.
He's gone.
What was
Isness
Is now
Wasness.
There's no more business
To transact.
No show to transfer,
And no bow taken.
Forsaken?
We all are.
For each run ends,
And every House darkens.
Bernard Badpoet Nov 2006
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