But I Love My Poor Earth
I was born on the wrong soil.
Others are born to theirs and bind to it.
It’s always who they are.
For many it’s all they know and all they need possess to feel whole.
They awaken when outsiders cut their water, sever their electricity,
and while their brothers from the same soil pretend to care,
they give their people up for wealth and comfort,
the consequence of their alliance with the big boys,
the consequence of trading their souls for stuff.
I want a land of olive trees and lemons,
not a land of oil, malls and processed foods.
My land is neither a country nor a region,
it is simply my loved ones.
Prophetic Sadness and Quiet Freedom
I’m a carrier, as are we all, of the human plague,
and with it, because of my acute consciousness of other’s fates,
I’m burdened with eternal sadness.
This nightly-awakening alerts me to my fate:
living life with meanings not embraced by others.
Recognition of this: it’s lonely and devastating.
The next morning I continue to live my life and to comment on it.
The commentary seems to be another’s,
perhaps a storyteller occupying a part of my persona,
as if it’s an outside observer
continually reminding whatever the other part of me maybe,
of the transient nature and delicious pleasures of life.
If I had written a symphony
it would finish; celebrations would end at dawn,
the birth of a child would occur as a brutal regime fell,
and I would recognise,
for fleeting moments,
a photograph of mine had touched someone’s life
even while passing quickly into history.
As a photographer I could apprehend moments,
fix them in some state of permanence
and hold them like a talisman of a life lived,
a proof of my being,
of having been present,
of having existed as I documented moments
but also giving others a place in history.
In that, as a partial antidote to my eternal sadness,
I found freedom from having my soul plundered by the rich.
I Disturbed Few, I wanted to Disturb Many
Most people wish to lead a quiet life,
to keep their heads down,
They believe their retiring demeanour will keep them safe.
Within brutal cultures,
whether in kleptocratic dictatorships or amongst towny thugs,
or simply within arm’s reach of uncaring bureaucrats,
most people wish to be invisible,
to not be called upon to defend themselves,
their families or their beliefs,
nor to claim they have or have not witnessed another’s actions.
But I always wished to disrupt, disturb, upset,
to force both questions and answers
and to assault assumptions,
not just my own,
but for the others I have seen in the world
which I have borne witness to.
As with a few others,
I somehow survived into adulthood
with my imagination, curiousity and passions still intact.
I insisted, at first unconsciously,
that I would stand and be counted for what I rationally knew,
that my images would help others admit to the corruption,
the evil avarice and violence surrounding that which they had made theirs.
And I knew that one day,
in the midst of the tragedies they had given birth to,
the broad middle and working classes,
would also be forced to stand up and be counted.
Naïve, yes; necessary, yes.
Weary of Life
Even when evil looses for a moment,
many of us still suffer because we are human
and our humanity can only endure for so long,
witnessing or struggling against degenerate evil
which we come to recognise
is of our own making.
Yes, the robber barons, the expropriators, the rentier class,
the lawyers, judges, bureaucrats and police
and anyone who serves their dark orders are of our making –
our not witnessing,
not being noticed,
not wanting to speak up
and not resisting in our callous silence.
We know that all the perpetrators,
in some guise or costume, are us.
I know I know this and I’m weary.
It is as if falling out of love,
not with a friend or a lover,
but with life.
It is as if I have been mortally exhausted,
all but deadened by the endless erosion of goodness.
Evil does this as often as possible
through the endless abrasions
of the bureaucrats and their instruction books
surrounding us with demands, contracts, taxes, rules and regulations,
and particularly through their endlessly wearing us down
in their schools, churches, media and news with their hype,
assumptions and propaganda.
Yes, I’m tired of witnessing their making what could be free and beautiful
into something banal, venal and brutal.
In the Dungeon of the World, I Am Not Alone
Is it melodramatic to claim there has never been a golden age
when human beings of all casts and classes were at peace,
tranquil within themselves and upon this bountiful rock?
Abel will have screamed in his death throes,
“But Cain, you are my blood”.
Thus, private property was invented through murder
as were cities from his seed.
Is it not so that there have always been rulers and the ruled,
and that the lives of the people have always been pressed into the service
of the Pharaohs, Kings, Counts, Generals, Priests, demagogues and Presidents?
They have, throughout history, enforced upon us unending misery.
If we concertina European history from the Renaissance
through the Enlightenment to the Age of the Masses
and thus to the Age of Democracy,
our lust for personal liberty encircled the rulers.
They recognised that their statutes, laws, corporate structures
could meanwhile encircle our lived lives;
that their fake culture, fake histories and fake news
could control the rest of us,
buying off our dreams of liberty
with their over sexualised, fame oriented banal promises of things
and we would be left blathering like idiots
in a dungeon of consumerism and meaningless ideas,
a huge cultural and moral crevasse at the centre of our beings.
Pity the children brought up without heroes,
pity the young weened into a world without the hope of shining tasks
to make life better and more beautiful for others.
This dungeon of the ruler’s dead-end ideology
is no less an impediment to a complete life and a pleasurable existence
then preying to bejewelled idols.
They teach us what they wish us to know
from the point of view of what they wish us to accept or purchase.
They buy us off with things we don’t need
but with which they wish to destroy our collective imagination.
By the time we’re eleven or twelve
they leave our bodies as empty shells
to become caverns for their larceny, lusts and profits.
When they deem it necessary,
they use the force of the state against us
or use our bodies in defence of their realm.
By then we’ve lost our autonomy to their programming:
they have usurped our instincts.
We can only survive by joining together:
cooking, crying, dancing, listening, making music,
and caring for the ill, the young, the old and those who need support.