Stifled - A Voice For The Animals

(inspired by the film ‘Earthlings’)

Our lives have been stifled

We’re rife with tension.

Our children are condemned.

Our cries don’t get much mention.

What wild dream did you have for your life?

What fanciful fantasy did you feel you possessed?

What hope for a good life did you feel you had lost

Been left bereft of, dispossessed?

We’ve been held back, held down, bound and gagged.

We’ve been stripped of what’s legit,

Throttled, bottled …and bagged.

We’ve been packaged and labelled,

We’ve been set upon the table.

The fat cats have gathered,

They’ve got the gravy boats and ladles.

We’ve been used and abused,

Mis-used and bruised.

Misunderstood, trod underfoot, and misconstrued.

The big washing machine’s

passed us through the mangle.

We’ve been wrung out by the wringer,

We’ve been strung out and strangled.

What wild dream did you have for your life?

What fanciful fantasy did you feel you possessed?

What hope for a good life did you feel you had lost

Been left bereft of, dispossessed?

We’ve been caged and chained,

Maimed and made lame.

We’ve been twisted and wrenched, strained and sprained

We’ve been arranged and tamed, contained and constrained.

We’ve been estranged from our kin, cut off from our land,

Cut down in our prime, cut out of our hand.

We’ve been locked up and knocked up,

We’ve been docked and shocked.

We’ve been shut off from sunlight and chained to blocks.

We’ve been jammed in, rammed in, hemmed in and slammed in.

We’ve been managed and damaged, sandwiched in and crushed.

We’ve been force-fed and force-bled,

Medicated and sedated,

Pumped, plumped, and dumped with a diet of lead.

We’ve been shoved down and shackled and shunted along

They’ve put shutters on our minds

They shut up our songs.

They’ve shat upon and crapped upon us,

Zapped and sapped us of strength.

Hacked at us and wrapped us up on the butcher’s bench.

We’ve been corralled off and held off

And walled off in stalls.

We’ve been hauled off to the slaughterhouse

While we called out and bawled.

We’ve been rounded up and hounded, thrown around and knocked down.

We’ve been goaded and railroaded and loaded on trucks bound for town.

We’ve been towed and mowed under and snowed under with stress.

We’ve been stowed on the road where some are crushed to their death.

We’ve been jerked around and jarred, jostled and jammed.

We’ve been nabbed, grabbed and stabbed, jabbed and slammed.

We’ve been bullied and sullied, worried and hurried.

We’ve been harangued and hampered, clamped and penned.

We’ve been left perturbed and disturbed, in turmoil and trouble.

We’ve been seized with disease, left confused and muddled.

We’ve been left needing medicine, food and water.

We’ve been mauled and tortured, slaughtered and quartered.

We’ve been knocked and socked, clocked, bopped, whopped, and dropped.

We’ve been topped and lopped, sliced up and chopped.

Our blood been mopped up, our bodies sent to the shops.

What wild dream did you have for your life?

What fanciful fantasy did you feel you possessed?

What hope for a good life did you feel you had lost

Been left bereft of, dispossessed?

We’ve been herded and bewildered, murdered and killed.

Stabbed and skewered, flamed and grilled.

We’ve been bludgeoned and bashed, lashed, broken and thrashed.

Smashed and gashed open, lives and hopes dashed.

We’ve been robbed and ransacked, ravaged and ruined.

Fleeced and plucked, sent to our doom.

We’ve been presumed and imposed upon

Opposed, and suppressed,

Deposed, dispossessed, truly oppressed.

While you’re inundated with inanity,

Your sanity seems more like vanity.

How can you call yourselves humanity?

29 – 1 - 2011

Mushrooming (1980)

1, 2, 3, 4

Naga Saki

When will the rain with the wind wash down.

The death toll sound in this peaceful town.

His…tory

Hor…izon

Clouds in the south lie limp on the line.

Watch as they wash over memories in time.

Her…story

Her...eyes on

Me.

The Sun Trip: Suicide In Space (1980)

It was the flight of the Icon Tester.

I was taking it for her first run.

When I thought of how I missed her,

And flew into the sun.

The video hummed by my side,

The technician’s hands were wrung.

He said, ‘Look man, you can’t commit suicide,

We just can’t let it be done.

That Icon Tester’s brand new,

It’s worth a heavy sum.

And top-grade pilot’s are few,

We can’t afford to lose another one.

I said, ‘You try and stop me, for

I’m looking after number one,

And life’s not worth living anymore,

I’m making the final run.

My wife died two days ago,

And life’s no longer fun.

And now I’m going to join her, so

Say goodbye for me to everyone.

The pain I felt grew more and more,

But the instructions couldn’t be undone.

The last thing I saw was the white of the core,

As the ship and I melted into one.

5 -7- 80

Cancer

Right, you got me off the mark fast and furious:
You bring to mind the word ‘canker’:
n. 1. An ulcerous sore of the mouth and lips:
That’s fine, by chance I have that at the moment:
Stress-related, embarrassing, but at least it’s not going to kill me.

n. 2. An area of dead or decaying tissue in a plant surrounded by healthy wood or bark.
That’s more like it. I always found that fascinating, that trees had dead parts next to live.
Are you then the canker of the human world, the dead we tolerate among the living?
No, you are worse, the dead that presumes to be alive,
The fool haunting our world not seeing the light.

n. 3 & 4. Any of several animal diseases attacking especially the ears of dogs and cats.
Any source of spreading corruption or debilitation.
Dogs and cats are sensitive creatures, their ears burn with your lies.
You are corruption, corrupt, bankrupt, broken to pieces, entropy,
Infesting others, investing others, wanting them to mirror your lie.

Cancer, the crab, crustacean, carapace over cephalothorax. Carcinoma, creeping ulcer.
Clutching with claws your hold on our lives, demon of material realms.
Malignant tumour caused by the abnormal division of cells, invading surrounding tissues.
Blind materiality. Carcinomatosis – n. the existence of carcinomas at many bodily sites.
Ah, but epiclesis - the call to the Holy Spirit to turn bread and wine into body and blood of Christ.

We will name you, Cancer. We will address you by all your names.
We will learn the words to hold our power against you.
Even if cancroid – adj. 1. similar to a cancer 2. similar to a crab – we will know you and see you.
Our call is life, of the living, to the Life Force, to consecrate again our daily bread of life.
The transubstantiation of the Eucharist is more a miracle than your self-making.

Take this bread and wine and make it known to us as human flesh in kinship with the divine.
Anull in us the pernicious notion that this body can mutate in darkness by its own.
From the ouroboric ovum of a single cell, to the birth of a baby with 20 million million cells,
And the universe of 50 million million cells in adulthood, we are the united light.
Lend us the language of metaphor – it is body and blood because we pray and say it is.


3 - 2 - 2007

The Quiet Young Moon

Apple night the quiet young moon is dead.
Splash splash on the windowsill shows where she bled.
With wind on the lake the warmth of the land
Will curl and unfurl mist over the sand.
In starlight the child might sleep through the dream.
An owl flies by but nothing is seen.
My murder has happened a long time ago.
See here it was there that I felt the first blow.

Death

Death is but a blink of day,
An eyelid of the night.
It only happens on the surface of things.
Deep within, life goes on.

Prayer for the Healing of the Liver

Your liver is alive! It calls on you
(And in pain can be quite urgent)
To help it now enthuse with yellow light!
In the rainbow light spectrum of your body,
Your liver lives at the level of the swathe
Of living yellow light that forms a band above the waist.
Look at that liver! A large wedge of living tissue
That takes the living nature of god’s creation
From the food absorbed by the bounteous bloodstream
And catalyses it into the lifeforms that fuel your being.
What a wonderful aspect of being –
Receiving from the world all its bounty
And supporting the heart to love fully in the world!
Vigilant in its power –
Filtering out all the poisons and dangers that beset the world.
What thanks we give to the liver!
The liver, the lover of life.
We honour it now with washes of yellow light.
Repel the invader, support the wonderful warrior liver!
No mention of meat and decay in the body –
Cancerous notions of the growth of substance without consciousness –
will ever deny the liver its largesse, its lifting power,
The laughter and license of life itself!
The liver, the wedge of lemon suffused with the juice
Of the the ‘zing’ that sings in life-well-lived.
Praise and love to the liver!
Let sunshine lighten its burden now!
Golden honey, lambent candle flame,
Lemons and melons and the glowing memories
Found in autumn’s radiant leaves of yellow.
We heed to the calling of the liver
And love it now for its courageous and loyal service.
Amen.


January ‘07

One Regret

Mum, my one regret
Is that I didn’t get
To know you better

Other than that

I am happy you’ve found your life fulfillment
Now knowing you are moving on
I can never forget the reason of life
Is to know of life enough to know
The ones we’re here to share it with
The ones who mean the most to us

The mother who loved us so much when young
The father who did his best for us
The brothers who have lost the one
They loved the most, their only mum
I’m sad to see you moving on
But in your wake you leave your son

Who still loves you as much as he has ever done.

Happy Mother’s Day Mum.


13 – 5 – 07

Dear Dad

And what date is it now?
The 22nd of the 10th of the 2003rd?
And only three days since when?
The day that you died
When life decided
This particular life had come to an end.
Run that by me again.


22 – 10 – 2003