NATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST AGAINST BENEFIT CUTS : EVERYWHERE :- 24/1/11

Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) - Walking Around.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops make me break into horse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stones, no gardens,
no more goods, spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Syill it would be marvellous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died in the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
Insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blaxes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along srenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling

( Translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly)

AUGUST NATTERER (1868 -1933) - Everything you can imagine is real

World Axis with Hare Around.



August Natterer was a German schizophrenic outsider artist.
The youngest of nine children, Natterer was successful in business and boasted a stable domestic life, but was hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt in 1907, after succumbing to depression and experiencing detailed visual hallucinations. Whilst in hospital he began to construct a marvellously detailed delusional system where he began to complete the task of redemption that for him Christ had left undone from his position in a global hierarchy in which he was the highest authority.
His transformation from an ordinary man who had never painted before was amazing, he had a profound effective epihany where primary hallucinations consisted of celestial stages or screens where ten tousand 'pictures followed one another like lightning', including a vision of God, 'the witch who created world'.

The Witches Head, circa 1915


My eyes in the time of appreciation.

He was to remain hospitalized in several mental asylums for the rest of his life, until he died in an asylum in Rottwei in 1933, he was 28. He left behind an amazing array of drawings and paintings that captured his visions.
His legacy is left perhaps with the Surrealists who were drawn to his work because it embodied in a spontaneous way the metamorphosis of objects and concepts that was central to their work. Their is for me an underlying beauty to his work that stand today as a testement to the richness of his delusions.

Anti- Christ

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY - His Last speech let us remember

The Euphenisms - Peter Reading

Portrait by Peter Edwards.

Cracker,Potty, Loony, Bonkers,
Nutty, Screwy, Ga-Ga, Dull,
Strange, Do-Lally,Dopey, Silly,
Touched, A Bit M.,Up the Pole,

Zany, Crazy, Dotty, Batty,
Round the Bend, Remedial, Slow,
Cranky, Turned, Moonstruck, Quixotic,
Odd, Beside Oneself, Loco,

Rambling, Giddy, Flighty, Crackbrained,
Soft, Bewildered, Off One's Head,
Wandering, Wild, Bereft of Reason,
Daft, Distracted, Unhinged,

Attributes of Simple Simons,
Asses,Owls, Donkeys, Mules,
Nincompoops, Wiseacres, Boobies,
Noodles, Numbskulls, Gawks, Tomfools,

Addle/Silly/Chuuckle/Dunder/
Sap/Bone/Block/Thick/Muddle/Crack-
Heads, The E.S.N., The Balmy,
Silly Billies,Dunces,Jack-

Asseas, Dullards, Merry Andrews,
Mooncalves, at least one MP,
Vauxhall Workers (and Execs), Clods,
Paisleyites, Twerps, Playd Cymru...

FROM :-
Collected Poems
(Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle, 1995)

Miroslav Valek ( 17/7/27 - 27/1/91) - FROM THE ABSOLUTE DIARY

Valek was born in Trnava in Czechoslovakia where he studied at the Bratilslava School of Economics. He was both a contributor and an editor of varous literary magazines, chief editor of Mlad tvorba and Romboid. He became Secretary and then Chairman of the Slovak Writers Union, and was a State Prize Laureate. In 1968 at the time of the Czechoslovakian uprising he became Vice-Chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers Union, and in January 1969 was made Minister of Culture in the newly created Slovak government following the intoduction of the federal law system in Czechoslovakia until 1988. It was mainly down to him that many writers banned in the 1950s were suddenly rehabilitatated due to a so called normalisation period, where their was a sudden unbanning of proscribed books.He was quoted as saying " that in culture it is not possible to excommunicate. "

Gradually out of the old stalinist ways a new cultural scene and identity arose. He was certainly a contributor to a new positive devolopment of Slovak poetry though still dedicated to the Communist cause. His own poems owed a particular debt to the meataphysical poets.

1

When you find yourself hanging from a wire
With your feet dangling in the wind
You will grasp
That these are only further steps into the void.
So stop your antics now, the fair is over
And you have sold yourself while still alive...
You were always an ass, galloping in a suitcase,
You were always shut in,
Wound up with a key,
And bearing your burden, were yourself borne,
Though in a different direction.
This is the very mechanism of motion,
This is the celebrated scene of the fool
Who makes his entrance to convince himself
That he is not yet here,
And on returning, sees that he has not departed,
And so he sits there weeping on the steps
Crying out in despair in the midst of the roaring laughter of the
theatre:
'For God's sake who am I, where am I hurrying to?'

Time flows like flour from a sack.

You might have made a handsome corpse,
You could have lain in the grass and peeped under the skirt of the
world,
Nursed a cricket in your ear,
Grown golden to music,
You might have been quoted,
They might have named a confectionary after you...
And what are you?
Nothing. A few bones. At best
A thing occassionally needed in anatomy lessons.
You're already falling apart,
You and this old umbrella, forgotten here,
Nothing, but mere skeletons in a dark cupboard...

Nothing! Darkness, dust chalk!

The poplars and weeds reveal themselves gradually, and the
starfish...
The earth is torn apart, the continents draw apart...
And where were you, homo sapiens?

Must we go on with this? Must we keep coating you
With silk and varnish?

O black umbrella,
Loss of memory,
Darkening of the sun,
Sudden blindness!


4

We fall, exhausted runners in a race, we spit out bloodstained
towns,
Abandon them, we strangle ourselves with our own hands,
Expose the sex of a juvenile word
Before the mirror
Willing to sleep out the night with every better poem.
We envy one another, hate one another.
Just as you swallow your beefsteaks, so we gulp down our own
narcotics
In order to behold a butterfly
Fluttering in a bunch of roses.
We write, we write,
The last underskirt of the night is long agocovered with
writing,
And nobody knows what poetry is.
Some people fefine it
As an accepted plan for the termination of virginity,
And others
As theinterrupted intercourse of emotion with reason,
But that's a fatal mistake!
Poetry walks in a chequered shirt
And spits on good form!
From the viewpoint a comet in the head
And a moon under the fingernails
May be quite suitable for a poem,
But poetry issomething else, my masters!
It begins the moment
You become aware that the skeleton in you has stirred
And is reaching into your pocket from inside, probing
Te year, month and day of your birth,
Te colour of your eyes,
Your distinquishing marks...
That is the time of a poem.
Tremble, for there approaches
An embassage at white heat hisses
Everywhere around,
The merry-go-round of the trees whirls and whirls...

Everypoem has its time,
But the time of a poem is shorter than you think.

7

Ah, aquamarines are cold,
Your eyes, orange flames, hurt me!
Your brow, fragrant, sunburned skin,
The rope round your throat. That whiteness, the complexion
Of lilies of the valley, and of knives!

Hush, now, yes, I know it,
You,too, have wept
Into the tresses of salesgirls from a perfumery.

You were rich then,
And they loved you!

Good day, young lady!
The texture of honey gleams about you,
The delirium of saliva,
Purple, fire,
Musk.
And where is the poem?
We have none!
Ah, aquamarines are cold!

9

Poor poet,who robs
Treasuries and churches
The faithful ox dragging the plough of words!
With Andromeda on your lip!
Now and then you will be hissed off the stage,
You'll go to the fire,
All the shames of the world will find their requittal in you,
And the sum of them will be added to your burden.
Your humiliatins will be mustered by the first rank and the
second,
And the first will enter into the second
To complete them, themselves by them completed.

O, tender member!
Your name is seed squandered,
Your pregnancy will never yield to the cry of the new born.
You will be spat upon,
And the woman you have loved will be there to see it,
Her eyes narrowed to slits
That will weep razor-blades under your feet...
This isn't like that time
When, drunk with whatever music of whatever chance flesh,
You vomited into the decolletage of the new moon!
Where is the woman who has not undressed in the pupil of your
eye

Translated by Edith Pargeter