New Tunes & More Art
Also, I've just completed a huge re-vamp of the art pages on my website, uploading several hundred artworks that haven't been available before. You can see these at http://www.rimbaud.org.uk/artmainpage.ht
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does not confound with conundrums, nor exalt,
rather it chafes, rubbing rough channels
of bruise coloured, brittle ice
down through the ductus cochlearis
into the lightless kernel of your being.
Of course we have no soul, you divine:
a mind, maybe; consciousness, barely.
We are a race of grinning golems
sleepwalking towards our own extinction.
There is no animate spirit,
just the dull raging
of imbecile instincts.
We are born, we struggle to survive
and then we die.
We assume and consume,
in a desperate, blind rush
through the corridors of loneliness
to the grab sale of empty promises,
sating ourselves with pathetic comforts
that are scant protection,
for in the end
the thin darkness
will still consume us,
as it must.
Ah, but the wind does whisper in your ears,
it insinuates itself into your soft core,
through the staunch castle walls
of your meticulous cynicism.
How do I know this?
Well I too have been touched by the wind,
in the deepest, most secret of places;
with the sultry syllables of her sibilant fingers
she stoked up an inferno
of absolute uncertainty.
Listen to me, she commands,
can you hear her?
Listen to me...
open your legs and beg me to enter in,
for together we will bleed as one,
together will be poetry,
an infinite verse
that traverses the universe,
singing like the Rosenbergs in Sing Sing,
like a Stradivarius violin,
snapping to the beat of violence,
to the absurd silence that commences
when the words end,
when the rhythm finally moves through you
like a monk walking through boiling waters
wearing only feathers for clothes
and dreaming of wings.
So let me confound you with conundrums,
let me exalt you, like an angel of melting ice,
let me excite you, let me entice you,
for I will swim through the lightless channels
of your stoppered up ears
and my whispers will grow fierce,
throwing up a tumult
that will ignite the smouldering embers
in your no longer lost or lonely soul.
I'm not frightened of dying exactly. I had that fear dampened down in September 2001, when I nearly bit the big one, with a brain haemorrhage. I saw "death", and it was not nearly so big and terrifying as one has been led to imagine. I also saw the seeds of our planet's death, as I lay in my hospital bed, with that second plane hitting and hitting and hitting the second twin tower, in constant action replay. Even in my fevered state, I knew a bunch of mad mullahs could not orchestrate an attack of that magnitude against the most powerful, most well-defended nation of this planet. Sadly, my first fevered thoughts proved to be vindicated.
Maybe we all deserve to die, for letting these murderers and psychopaths take control of our lives. Maybe we are just not evolved enough to be able to peacefully co-operate and co-exist. It seems painfully inevitable that we will eventually wipe ourselves out. If it isn't with weapons of mass destruction - as stockpiled mainly by Saddam Hussein's accusers - then it will certainly be because of the climatic (and maybe even seismic) havoc we are reaping, as we rape and despoil our planet.
In some ways, I might have welcomed this collective self-destruction - after all, it is the pettiness of our skin, the blindness of our belief in our individuality, our isolation, each from each other, that causes such untold misery. In death, we will all be brought back to our true form, which is spirit, not flesh. Spirit recognises no boundaries. Spirit has no divisions. It cannot go to war with itself. It cannot steal from itself. It cannot neglect a part of itself. It cannot inflict pain upon itself. And yet, that is exactly what Spirit does, while encased in these separate bodies of flesh. So yes, part of me would have welcomed our collective death. Except....
Except that same month, September 2001, I became a father. I became blinded by the little parcel of flesh that I had helped to co-create. I became blinded by bio-chemical love, as all procreators do. I became jailed by the illusion of flesh. Like all fathers, like all mothers, I see myself as a guardian. I guard the little life that is my daughter's, just as preciously as any other parent. I may even kill to protect her, if push came to shove. I may even lay down my own life for her. So sucked in have I become to that bio-chemical illusion.
Yes, I see the bigger picture. Yes, this is all illusion. But what a beautiful illusion it can be; and I want my wee daughter to enjoy her allotted span of three score years and ten (and hopefully many more) before she shuffles of her mortal coil and joins the amorphous otherness of Spirit again. I want to shake George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. I want to sake Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Alasdair Darling. I want to shake the slimy, cold bodies of every politician from Downing Street to Darfur, from Beijing to Washington, from Stockholm to Sao Paulo. I want to shake them until some dormant part of their brain wakes up and they realise the consequences of their actions (and their inactions). Like me, most of them have children. Many of them will have grandchildren too. And surely - even though their blood is colder, their hearts more calculating than the rest of us - they must at least love their own offspring. They must surely want them to thrive, even if they don't give a rat's as about the rest of us. Sure, they do deals with multinational corporations and line their own pockets, to ensure that their offspring inherit their wealth and power. But what use will wealth and power be in a world that is no longer inhabitable? I'm guessing that all those politicians and big business people just live day-to-day, that they truly are blind to the consequences of their actions, because I cannot believe that they would willingly sacrifice the happiness and well-being of their children for the sake of a quick buck. Cold-hearted as they are, I cannot believe they are that cold-hearted!
It is with these thoughts rattling round my head, rattling round my heart, that I compose my latest tunes. It is also these thoughts that drive the words I put down in poetry. The poem below goes with the tune I mentioned above. Click on the link and listen while you read, if you want to get the feeling in its totality.
What will we be in the end, but radio waves and static,
chaotic patterns of interference, perhaps detected,
but not understood, many years after
we have finally extinguished ourselves.
Maybe, high-powered telescopes will be trained
upon the dim star we once worshiped, long before
we were sophisticated enough
to bring about our own destruction.
Maybe those far off others
will be sufficiently technologically advanced
to be able to detect the cold mass
that was the planet we used to inhabit.
What will they suppose
when they hear the static encrusted voices
that once belonged to our leaders?
Will they try to decipher meaning
from those alien voices
that hiss and crackle through their atmosphere?
Will they speculate upon the reasons
for our demise,
or nod knowingly, sadly, sagely -
glad they had the luck to be so far away?
(You can hear more songs from The Melted Rubber Humans latest album, "Tunes To Play As The World Goes Up In Flames" at www.virb.com/melted_rubber_humans_2 )





