Everything we do is Vain

"No-one can be called happy who is still alive."
– Solon of Athens

MEMENTO VITÆ

Dead tired
means tired to death
of not being able to die.

but see below

Suicide is not difficult for the determined, rational and cool-headed.

There is any number of painful, unpleasant, half-effective and/or messy means, some of which could leave you horribly incapacitated or in a coma for years.

There are three basic methods: toxic substance or toxic dose of medication, plastic bag, expert self-strangulation.

These are all discussed in Chris Docker's excellent book Five Last Acts (second edition, 2015), which actually discusses five methods. Other books are available, but I do not recommend the exploitatively expensive and obsessive e-book emanating from Australia.

My own preferred method was for many years the simple large (metre-long), transparent plastic bag allied with just a few sleeping-pills. If you have access to liquid helium, liquid nitrogen or pure carbon monoxide, either the simple, large plastic bag can also be used, or you can enclose yourself in a gas-tight tent after taking a couple of sleeping pills – or not. The methods can be refined with something to keep the plastic bag off your face, and of course with music as a pleasant accompaniment to your departure from this planet of pain and destruction. I have kept this minimum equipment (also including a bungee or elastic band for sealing the bag at the neck or even at the waist

Since reading Mr Docker's book, however, I have obtained, very easily, via the internet, 10 grams of Chloroquine phosphate (used to clean aquaria), which is plenty to ensure a painless death if preceded by an anti-emetic and then a few sleeping-pills which are NOT benzodiazepine.

On no account should anyone who is not a licensed veterinarian attempt to get hold of Nembutal. All offers on the net – usually by glossy web-pages with only slight (but telling) mistakes in English – are predatory scams, whereby vulnerable and desperate people have each been defrauded of hundreds of dollars, pounds, pesos and euros.

I had the unfortunate opportunity to test the efficacy of Chloroquine – on my dog...

click here to read the story

Since then, drugs og dangerous recreation have flooded the market and caused the numbers of drug-related deaths (both prescribed and obtained on the black market, By now, everyone has heard of Fentanyl, banned, popular and often mixed with opioidsto make them lethal.

Another drug that is added is stil legal, for it is widely used by veterinariasns to anesthetise animals, especially horses and cattle.It basically slows down the heart and the breathiug until the user dies quietly,with no threshing or falling about, no emanations from orifices. If injected, however, its residue on broken skin caan cause ghastly, unhealable ulcers the size of your hand.

This drug, knwn colloquially as Tranq is neither opioid nor benzodiazepine.A fifth of a gram of the powder is a lethal amount (as opposed to 10 grams of powdered Chlorazine and additives to prevent nausea, when it was legally obtainable (as a fish-tank cleaner) before Trump's insane remarks about it - abd bleach, during the Covid-19 epidemic.

legal and easily obtained from China, through Ali-baba and delivered vy FedEx - with false customs docunents declaring it to be hydroxypropyl+methylcellulose. The minimum purchasable amount is 100g - enough to kill at leasrt 500 people at a Garden Party or International Peasce talks by dropping a pinch discreetly and professionally into a glass, or scattered on top of dressed caviar.

The less good news is that it costs $200 for the hundred grams,payable by ordinary credit card.

You can read here about my trial of the powder
which I received from Mss Helen Dzao in China.

Hydroxypropyl+methylcellulose is powdery substance similar ro flour It is used widely in the processed food industry to make liquids gel and amalgamate. It is perfectly harmless. HPMC, on the other hand, is crystalline. I was fairly sure that I had been sent the write stuff and had not been scammed - except in having to buy 100 grams, Maybe the rest will deter ants, or I can offer it to Exit,the organisation which promotes self-murder, suicide... I think the Thuggees with their car of Jagernathi will decline it, especially from a crackpot Westerner with unpleasntly-pale skin...

MEANTIME, HERE IS THE SUICIDE HELPLINE :

THIS IS THE SUICIDE HELPLINE

If you want help to commit suicide now: press �.

If you want to plan your suicide in advance
and elegantly: press �.

If you wish to be sent our Info-Pack
on setting fire to yourself outside a bio-lab, embassy or abattoir:
press �.

If you want to help someone commit suicide: press �.

If you want to encourage as many people as possible
painlessly and quietly to kill themselves to avoid
medicalisation and lingering, increasing powerlessness in
hospitals, into which everyone else is herded like sheep
– in other words, if you want to spread the word
about true freedom of choice;
or if, having sterilised yourself,
you want to stop being an ecocrite
and reduce your Carbon Footprint to zero
press �.
There is no good reason to stay alive,
except for the creative fun of
of planning a quiet abitus or escape
with no blood or mess.
Your screams will be unheard, because they are your last experience of tinnitus.

However, a quite different approach would be to found a charsimatic cult of the End of Days or assist Death Of Jesus
who passed awayway up above, between Jupiter and Saturn through lung failure, because so many millions were breathing and dancing so joyously that all the saved and the Saviour died painfully from the foul, plague-ridden air in the Heavenly Dome of the Rock, outside which Jews, deemed to be almost perfect, immolated themselves against a reproduction of the Wailing Wall. And in front of which, various Muslim sects wailed in ecsasy as they were shot by the celestial guards.

The fate of black, brown and beige people isdescribed in a Top Secret document which has been converted into paper pulp, because, of course, there are no trees in Heaven, thus no places to hide your perfection.

'Wherever you look, there is an end to your troubles. Do you see that precipice ? That way you can drop to freedom. Do you see that sea, that river, that well ? Liberty sits in their depths. Do you see that tree – stunted, blighted and barren ? Release hangs from its branches. Do you see your throat, your gullet, your heart ? They are all escape-routes from servitude. Are the exits I show you too difficult, requiring too much courage and strength ? Do you ask what is the straight road to freedom ? Any vein in your body.' - Seneca

CULL: one of the most chilling worsd inthe English language

For what we do well, such beautiful words:
rampaging, marauding,
mangle, eviscerate,
procreate, extirpate, cull...

Though we're like dogs when we dream
we want consolation when dying,
having no faith in death
which we feel to be null
and not the Consolamentum of harmlessness,
long consolation for living,
sweet everlasting lull.

DRIVING HOME AT SUNSET FROM THE CINEMA
for Suchoon Mo

The sun is the colour of gold-mixed-with-blood.
The moon at the opposite end of the sky looks like the papery skull
of the Unknown Victim snatched up from the mud.

BIG BANG

In the beginning
god burst like a balloon
showering the world
with dirty shreds
of indestructible Hypocrisy.

The baboon in the laboratory
desperately holding the pig's heart
which "scientists" have plumbed in
to his neck
(and which is going septic)
cannot cry
My God!
My God,
Why hast thou forsaken me ?

Infection of matter
Molecular fever
A painful collection of scatter.
The condensation
of darkness.

In fighting death
we extinguish life.
How fortunate I am
to have had no father
and never to have sought a wife!

If I – a clot of clabber and bones – were stupid enough to desire to
"have my life over again"
I should want to be born a shepherd
not of sheep
nor even of wolves
but of stones.

Before acceptance –
illusion
After acceptance – burial.
Apart from everyone
I listen to the crows.
and I practise howling

which is poetry.

BEWARE A POET BEARING WITNESS

To bear witness is to wade against
the filthy flow of smug hypocrisy,
greed, conformity and callousness.

Poetry is the wealth between words.

Where is the poetry of witness
in the English-speaking lands ?

I hear only muzak
and the dreadful drone of solipsistic wordsmiths
sitting on their hands.

FREITOD

To be born is to be defeated.
Suicide is triumph
labelled despair
by those who do not know despair.

Meat on a plate.
Is life itself the tragedy
– or only the mutation that is human ?

After Descartes,
'scientists' nailed dogs to walls
to show that beasts could not suffer.

Hacked love from reason's belly
and chopped it into
childish dreams.
Nothing is as it seems.

Our comfort is the measure
of our disrespect for many
creatures, many things.
In my beautiful garden
the feeling: How much longer ?

Beauty dies where comfort lies.

The worst that we do
to each other is nothing compared
with what we do to mammals, fish and birds.

Outliving evolution
we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tightening tyranny
of our concocted words.

I move as the shadow of the shadow of a wolf
among mummies wound by the vast webby mire
of words, in which there is no cranny
of culture that I honestly
can crawl into. Nor have I found
a human to admire.

Street-furniture
everywhere, but no signposts
direct me to the abattoir.

The sun sinking
tells me to stop thinking.
Truth is way beyond words.

As zero to the infinite
light loses you
while darkness
welcomes you home.

CHALLENGING EMILY DICKINSON

"Because I would not stop for Death
Death kindly stopped for me..."

Nature's red in tooth and claw
But we are black of heart.
There's more "soul" in a jackal's paw
than all our works of art.

So I will kindly stop for Death
and do the gracious thing.
And with the gift of my last breath
transform to sweet
nothing.

THE NASTIEST WORD IN ENGLISH IS
TROUBLESHOOTING

At the poetry rave
a hermit sits in a small cave
toasting his chest by the furzy fire and eating
little mushrooms. He dreams the mystic murderings
of Money God Shame
and the oceanic liberation of equines.
Praise the black veins and foamy manes
of dancing stallions!
Praise the deliciousness of lice!

"Before you kill a beast
you must be beautiful," a proverb runs.
"The stranger the meal the better,"
said his soulmate over the sea.
The only poets are cracked mirrors
with cracked voice.

While people who would not squash a slug
eat gelded bulls insatiably,
roots shoot softly from his rectum
and a thousand holywording worms
turn poems into almost-something
not seeking
but giving,
not owning
but being
and raving and drowning.

A Deviant Double-Burial, County Roscommon

Deviants before they died
and dangerous beyond the grave
their departing spirits and/or maledictions blocked
by rock before they were consigned
to shit-dark peat by The Controllers on an isle
which had supposedly been Christian
for two hundred years. Father and son,
perhaps, or unwanted Itinerants,
blasphemers, maybe, or incestuous male lovers,
believers in a Golden Dawn,
or the Jamaican Jehovah's Witnesses of their time
whose spirits, words and practices
could not be allowed to spawn.

Totenkranz

and Totentanz
are dead

on est en-chant-é
begeistert
ensorcelled
by the trivial
instead.

Singular and single
the wolf's and
my saliva
mingle.

'YOU READING THIS, BE READY'
after William Stafford

The problem – the big problem
– with poetry is
that it is written
by the rich and free
or comparatively
rich and free – even Akhmatova and Mayakovsky.

Famously, Adorno said that poetry
after Auschwitz was 'barbaric':
like the Nazis lapping up Wagner
at Bayreuth.

A line from 1993
by the American William Stafford
(not the 16th century English courtier
but a celebrant of the chloroform culture):
'What can anyone give you greater than now...?'
has a horrible humour
for the prisoners in Guantanamo or Tongliao,
in Gulags, Gaza, refugee-camps,
or in ten thousand torture-cells
around the world,

for a hundred thousand women
being raped this very minute,

for a million old or newborn,
crying, starving, dying.

Humans have made the world
terrible even for humans – no matter how the gilded, gifted poets spin it.

IN MEMORIAM HAROLD PINTER

In the whispering dead of night,
and howling dead of day

those who never were alive
root among the latest bunch
released from suffering
and have their lunch

scraping diarrhœa
off the caviar
and stirring lobster bisque
with rotting cocks

and after baked alaska
(guess what is inside!)
they perambulate
the dripping caves
and sacrificial rocks
decanting Dão 1963
into mass graves.

THE SCHEME OF THINGS
for Dalan Lusaj

ALPHABETICAL

A is for atom, which has many parts.
B is for bomb, so dear to men's hearts.
C is for cock, what you do to a rifle.
D is for doom, which is only a trifle.

E is for end which we're all of us living.
F is for future – it's quite unforgiving.
G is for Google, search-engine of choice.
H is for hoodlums, who once were sweet boys.

I is for me who should not be here
J is for Jihad against all things queer.
K is for Kali in Heaven Above.
L is for Limbo the circle of love.
M is for monster – what Man has become.
N is for nation and nasty and numb.

O is for ogle – what I do to dogs.
P is for progress that's lost in the cogs.
Q is for quiet: the peace of the dead.
R is for raucous: the thoughts in my head.
S is for steel destroying the world.
T is for triumph with banners unfurled.

U is for umbrage, so easily taken.
V is for virtue by value forsaken.
W doesn't scan – I'll move to X
which is for excellence, lurking in wrecks.
Y is for yearning which we do from birth
Z is for zero our future on earth...

PARADE

I'm not happy with Parade
which is why these poems are placed
by stealth upon one web-page among millions –
where you, a tiny few unknown to me,
find them, by accident, in haste,
in passing...by stealth.
You are my tenebrous
and virtual wealth.

THE REALLY GOOD THING

about meeting people,
whether for the first or the last time,
is bidding them farewell.

ERECH/URUK, IRAQ

We're told that writing was invented here:
lists of weapons, foodstuffs, kings, kinsmen,
laws and penalties.
Here lived the first Man-God, Gilgamesh.
Here children beg for ballpoint pens.

Here there is no fence around the ruins,
no turnstile, booklet, shop or guide.
Here there are no tourists, toilets, postcards
or Keep Off notices.

Here is the first city.
Here urban evil started
to gyre its tentacles across a world
which now it strangles.
Here was the New York and Washington
of seven thousand years ago –
the best of man is his ruins.

Not far away is Hamurabbi's Babylon
whose ruins were so recently reconquered
by American Marines,
and turned into a huge base
with helipad and roads wide enough
for trucks, the threshing floors
the shards of pottery
covered with gravel and hardcore.

The best of man is his ruins.

HAIKU

A teeming ant's nest – mind, examining itself,
finds only matter.

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Time is kind
to very few
until the end
when time is
infinitely generous.

for Suchoon Mo

Great is Death
We are his
urgent breath
his eager pus
Thinking
we're in the thick of life
we do not see him
blinking
in the thin of us.

XANADU

In that exotic land
coffee and pornography
arrived at the same time.
Coffee they called
American Tea.
Pornography they called
American Joy.

WHO GATHERS KNOWLEDGE
GATHERS PAIN (Book of Ecclesiastes)

(remembering...dismembering)
Success is succeeding at seeming.

Along with Schrödinger's cat
I am a hole
inside a hole
staring out at a fog.

I have written and destroyed so many poems.
O to have the brilliant connectedness of a dog!

THE FUTILITY OF TRYING
TO COMMUNICATE THE FUTILITY
OF COMMUNICATION

98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees.
We have polluted 98% of the world.
Dogs are bored 98% of the time.
Nearly 98% of life is mechanical.
More than 98% of us are lost in the plot.
And parrots think,
and parrots mope.

O praise
the 98% of thinking animals with the integrity
not to pray or hope.

NAMES AND NUMBERS GAMES

A man who kills five people
is called a psychopath, a serial killer

A man who kills ten people and himself
is called a terrorist

A man who has a hundred people killed
is called an entrepreneur

A man who has a thousand people killed
is called a politician

A man who has ten thousand people killed
is called a Minister of Justice

A man who kills a hundred thousand animals
is just doing his job.

This Chinese bear, captured while a cub,
will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket while a dirty metal tube
inserted by "superior" animals directly into its liver drips "magic" bear-bile like rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...
But hundreds of thousands of animals suffer just as much mindless cruelty in American laboratories.
In the "democratic" USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published.
"Free speech" on animal welfare is regarded as criminal by the American r�gime.

HARDEST OF ALL IS TO WRITE WHEN YOU'VE SOMETHING TO SAY

I spoke to a turd
another day.
No reply
came wafting with the breeze.
That turd was smart
rejected art.

Hell is where there are more people than trees.

WHEN ALL THE WORDS HAVE STRUTTED PAST
THERE'S JUST THE TRAMPLED TRUTH

Desire is the destruction of the world.

COMPASSION

Pity the pig who has never seen light
Pity the food that she eats
Pity the Christians, Buddhists and Jews
and the people and dogs that they've beaten
and killed in secret and streets
Pity the dolphins in tuna-nets
Pity the tuna, too,
and the 93 million new babies a year

and the pitiless, affluent few.

OBSERVATION
after Bardhyl Londo

Where suicide is outlawed
it is not to protect us
but to keep us from escaping.

UNDERSTANDING MÖBIUS

The meaning of catastrophe is
the catastrophe of meaning.

If the human brain is as wonderful
as we are constantly told it is,
why aren't we living in Paradise ?
Why are we the only stupid species ?

Great poets are dead and dutiful.
The dead are always beautiful.

combat crusaderism

COLOURS

First, every tree and beast was burned.
Then the worship of the guns and the
boiling of the blood-smeared
boots for soup.
The best of man is his ruins.

Trapped in our private catastophes of comfort
we only seem to live:
comfort, even more than consciousness,
makes criminals of us all.

I am terrified of white.
Stainless
and murderous
it chops hearts and minds.
The moon is bone.

Why do we prefer stories to insight ?
Grey is the witnessing of silent stone.
Knowledge is the white of slaughterhouse,
experience is red as abattoir,
red and white the screaming brains.
Purple broods on its corrupt, corrupting wealth.
White is frightening
freezing and sterile
eating with stainless democratic dragon-teeth
like cancer
through everything
Black is deep truth.
Flies are the sun's kisses.
If we kiss those
that celebrate the outcast's eyes
we'll maybe learn compassion
and become a little wise.

WASTE

The evil of war
is not just the killing
but the hypocritical taboo
against eating the slaughtered.

THE TEMPLE OF ART

Look !
There's the world hung on a piece of wood.
It says that the piece of wood came
from a poisoned tree
from among the hills
of a land turned to dust.
The nails came from satanic mills.
The cord came from the universities
for the Upper Crust.
The world is jerking and bleeding
in a very painterly way.

Now let us go down
on our knees and pray.

WRONG

In 1970 I looked forward brightly
to the Collapse of Capitalism
with False Communism tumbling after.
Now I understand that the merchants
of desire thrive upon calamity and schism.
Capitalism will do very well
out of the Collapse of Capitalism.

TENSE

We are the indefinite
strung very briefly
between absence and infinity
longing and failing
to define ourselves
and everything.

TOMBS FOR THE LIVING ARE ERECTED BY THE DEAD

Poems give me no pleasure
no satisfaction like painting
and paintings do – why
do I write them, then ?
I just feel the urge – like
masturbation – and (as with
sex) don't rate the product
too highly. From a young age
my goal was the learning of wisdom,
the finding of truth, the Life Worth Living
– but no help was forthcoming – except by dead
poets and novelists – not by philosophers, nor
it almost goes without saying, by teachers
or friends or relations. I have met no-one
to share my demanding obsession, and so
in my solititude I write poems that no-one will read
about subjects that people want to avoid.

What I write is depressing.
Everything I want to celebrate
is threatened or destroyed.

WRITTEN WHILE WAITING FOR A TRAIN

(floating + sinking) – breathing = dying
blessèd, terminal inaction
(with or without a little, or a lot of, pain).

Life is a death-camp of distraction.

WHAT WE CONSUME IS CRIMINAL.
WHAT WE WASTE IS DESOLATE ABOMINATION

Rats laugh when tickled
and enjoy surfing.
Dogs smile,
and Duns Scotus believed
that the world was born
when the Trinity fell in love
with Jesus' soul,
and in Massachusetts there's a law
preventing goats from wearing trousers.
Botticelli threw his paintings
on a puritan fanatic's fire.
The sound of one hand clapping
is the amputee applauding war.

PREJUDICE

I am rarely invited out to dinner
but recently I was invited to
two middle-class,
(lovely, and can I say Philistine ?)
homes.

At the first, I heard a rant
against the Roma from a Hungarian Jew
(who, after 20 years in France
had never eaten a croissant that was warm)
and her racist neighbour
who is a Catholic Scotch-Irish solicitor*.

At the second, I listened to complaint
about Jewish exactingness
from an Irish dentist,
formerly long resident in Surrey, England,
who makes Nescafé in a microwave,
avoids the English, and speaks little French

An anti-fascist Italian refugee two doors up the street
inveighs against North Africans,
"but not the Berbers".

A charming Chinese-Malay
(who spoke no French) told me
that she and her English husband
had moved to France because there are
too many immigrants.in England.
She also complained about the brutalism
of buildings designed by Jews.
I said nothing, for I was staying
at her bed-and-breakfast in Toulouse.

*solicitor (British Isles) = attorney (USA)

OUR SKINS
(expanded from a blog)

feel like
the skins of snakes.
We are one of only two
mammals without fur.

This evolutionary
accident was our
Original Sin.

The other furless mammal
is The Naked Mole-rat

also known as the Sand Puppy.
It is an almost-blind and
ever-burrowing rodent
native to parts of East Africa,
and is remarkable also
for being one of only two mammals
with a "eusocial" structure close to those
of several species of ant and bee.

Many control-enamoured
members of our species
(politicians, militarists, sociologists,
social psychologists, philosophers,
policemen, "the moral majority",
business and religious leaders – to name but some)
would like to organise us more "eusocially"

– and they are attaining their goal
ever-more-rapidly
.

HYMN TO DIOGENES OF SINOPE
ON MY BIRTHDAY

Now I'm 66 and I have a travel-pass
and I don't do up my fly
and my trousers smell of piss

and family and riches and career
I let pass by
and I'm sipping cognac by the fire
in France, composing this.

Alcohol's a tender friend
if you treat her with respect – like dogs – and unlike men
who'll stifle you, unchecked.

Man is the cancer of the world
evolution turned to tumour,
mainly because he has an
undeveloped sense of humour.

"Death is the least awful thing that can happen to anyone." – Quentin Crisp

NICANOR PARRA
(20th century Chilean "antipoet")

for Paul Flaherty

In poetry (he wrote) everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
that you improve on the blank page.

But that is an impossibility.
And the blank page is a miserable
come-down for a tree
and even for rags, once cotton-plants.
Then there's arse-wipe paper
which used to be newspaper
and slim volumes of unread poetry
and the Oxford English Dictionary
and the thousands of pages written
about the murder of the Prime Minister of Sweden
and the holy books
which accounted for the loss of Eden.

WINDING FORWARD

I'm losing me
I don't care
I'm losing care

At last: to sever!

Only monsters
live forever

There'll be no need for suicide

by pills or hypothermia.
Though I am tired of life
I'm friendlessly happy.
So let me confide:
one day I'll go to bed,
and a week or two later
someone will say 'He died.
Of nothing.
He just died.'

THE DIOGENES SEQUENCE

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