Boxing Day!

Seeing as how it's Boxing Day here in Canada I thought that I'd post a music video "Give Me Your Heart" (just click on the link) from The BoxCarBoys, a new group from Brazil.

Love out of mind

Mind


Not that the mind
Is out there all alone
Attempting to make
Sense of it!
No.
The mind is many-limbed
It can run and jump,
It can turn a diamond
Slowly in its hands
And hold it to the light
Just as it can peel the pith
Of an orange or smudge
A taut canvas with its blood.
Animal mind that pounces
At philosophy, that tears beliefs
Down to their bare bones,
That longs to be free from the bars
That bind it to all that is rational,
To all that will one day die.
And the mind has ears and eyes
And roams the world
In search of clues as to the guilt
Or innocence of those who speak
Of systems that would betray
The body and forever damn
The soul. Truth is no common soap
And honesty no detergent and the loss
Of one’s good name is nothing compared
To a loss of mind, for within that universe
Unlimited and detailed distances
Unfold, so that in such a river
On such a day in such a summer
Two lovers bathed and exchanged
Vows that had been seeded
In the stars that Dante once observed
From the hills above the doomed city.
All cities are doomed, only
Love will outlive their destruction
In time out of mind.

John Lyons


14 December 2008

The Ten Fingers

Here's a meditation on heat and love from John Lyons

Sofía

The ten fingers
Of a seven-year old
Holding a semi-transparent
Pebble up to the light
As she tells her father
That she has found
A diamond, a rather
Coarsely polished
Stone picked from
The obscurity
Of the path
We are walking,
A chip of once
Molten rock
That has the hue
Of lightly cooked
Salmon - all nature,
All life being
About heat
And the loss of heat,
And what we
Carelessly take
To be incandescence.
It is close to sunset
And two woodpeckers
Sit idly on the condominium
Wall, wondering perhaps
Whether to call it a day,
To head home
As we all do,
At the end of a long day.
All out of the same
Cosmic soup, the spiral
Of life, the green parrots
With the bright red patch
Beneath their wings,
And their endless
Endless chatter,
The owls lazing
In the palm shade,
The convection of clouds
Gathering in the distance,
The unceasing transfer
Of energy from liquid
To gas, to liquid, and love
Precious love
In all its simplicity
Passing back and forth
between parent and child,
as tactile and as real
as the sample mineral
held in the hand and yet
of a beauty that could
put any flower
by any other name
to shame.

18 November 2008

Waldir

Here is another beautiful poem written by John Lyons on the day of his father-in-law's death.

Waldir

There are names
And there are names,
Drenched in emotion
But free from tears
Names that sail
Freely along the coast
Of Ilhabela
Names that dwell
On the tip of the tongue
Names that are in essence
A kiss
Or a warm embrace
Names that love
The laughter of life
And scoff at death’s
Dismal victory,
names that purr after dark
just as Carol
is purring still
on the stairs
in São Carlos;
there are names
soaked to the core
in honour
in dignity
in respect,
names with a fierce
tenderness,
names that are
essential to the smooth
running of life
and that cause us to stand
to attention
as they pass us by
or as they pause
to spend a few years
with us, names
that charge the memory
with indelible moments,
names that bear
testimony to the stubbornness
of love, to the fact
pure and simple
that love outlives
pedestrian life that ultimately
cannot keep pace, cannot go the distance, life
that empty misnomer!
What’s in a name?
That uncommon denominator
That we carry from
The date of our birth
Up to and beyond
The moment of complete
Release, no longer
The wounded bird
Held in delicate hands,
But a name that soars
In the beating heart,
For ever and ever.

John Lyons

November 2nd 2008

Real Change

On Tuesday America will elect Barrack Obama as its next president. The corporate media continues to talk of “tight races” in “key states” but I can’t imagine that anyone who knows anything about what is going on in America really believes them. By now it should be obvious even to the most die-hard neocons that John McCain and his born-again sidekick Sarah Palin are about to be wiped off the political map of the United States.

The Republican Party is in serious trouble and the Democrats, under Obama’s leadership, could do much to rectify the obscenities of Bush’s eight years in office. With absolute, filibuster proof majorities in the both the House and the Senate they could change whatever they felt like changing, literally. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal from the start and crimes against humanity, you say? Well, they could end them in one day, simply by voting to cut off the funding to continue W’s massacres. Of course, they could have done that back in 2006 when they defeated the Republicans the first time around, but they didn’t.

Come to think of it, in 2006 they could have also impeached Bush for any one of a number of his crimes against the US constitution, but that too was undoable. “Impeachment is off the table”, said the newly elected House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi (the same woman who later on would so whole-heartedly push for the tax-payer funded bailout of the Wall Street Banksters).

Gordon Gekko from Wall Street "Greed is good"

And speaking of Wall Street and the class of thieves that continues to run America, the Democratic controlled Congress and Senate could have passed laws two years ago to re-regulate the investment banks that were selling the toxic “sub-prime” securities that are now wrecking financial havoc across the globe. But they didn’t. They had better things to do, even though many of them, I’m sure, had a very good idea of what was going on and a realistic vision of where the housing bubble and the billions being spent on the Iraq war would lead us. They knew and could have done a lot when there was still time to prevent the disaster, but chose not to.

Instead, when the meltdown began and the stock market was losing an average of five to seven hundred points a day, the Democrats were the most enthusiastic supporters of the initial 700 billion dollar give-away (to the same criminals who had caused the disaster in the first place). The entire Democratic leadership stood behind the most massive wealth transfer from the poor to the filthy rich in the country’s history. “We must save the banks and the bankers to save the people”, they told us. A bit like the US soldiers who used to torch South Vietnamese hamlets with their Zippo lighters to “save” them from the Viet Cong.

In 2007 the US Census reported that roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth was controlled by the richest 1% of the country and that the top 10% owned almost two-thirds of America’s wealth. These are figures that were published last year before the crisis and the bailout and the daily stock market slides, and yet they remind me more of the kind of income disparity you’d expect to find in a Sub-Saharan nation or a Latin-American dictatorship à la Pinochet, not in the United States. And yet that is what we’ve become. An oligarchy where a miniscule minority of the population sets domestic and foreign policy and every four years holds elections so that the rest of us can participate in electing their representative, who will run their property (the United States) for their exclusive use and benefit.

I, however, am sick and tired of this system of lies and terror and hope that sooner or later the people of America will finally rise up against their autocratic rulers and take back what is rightfully theirs. Change is not just necessary, as Obama tells us, it also has to be real.

Imperfections

More poetry today from John Lyons:-)

On nature

The patience of three birds
Sitting on the garden wall
Surveying their prospects
For the day, their feathers
Ruffled by a gusting wind;
There is preening
and a conversation of sorts,
The contents of which
Do not bear speculation;
Flight is one of nature’s
Boldest gifts and a permanent
Lesson in humility to all
Who are bound to tread
The lowly turf. These birds
Who possess the most
Sophisticated navigation
Systems and an uncanny
Grasp of the mysteries
Attached to human mathematics
As they flock in groups
Of ten or twelve or four
Or three or seven, remnants
Of an age of angels.
There may exist a place
In which nothing is unknown,
In which everything is
Effortlessly explained
But surely wouldn’t we
Soon tire of such ease
Of ignorance? There is
More to the not knowing
That any mere answer
Can supply. Nature
In its wisdom produces
Flaws, imperfections
As though to round
out its genius, the eye
that does not focus
the hand afflicted by
the tremor of self-doubt,
the silence that no word
of genuine love ever filled.

30 October 2008

Red pumps for Palin

You've got to hand it to America's mass media. No one but no one is as expert as they are in dumbing down the population. With the country's economy teetering on the brink of a financial disaster that will probably make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like a cake walk, do the New York Times, the Washington Post or any of the other elite news filters ever try to get at the root of this mess and explain to their readers that they have been taken for suckers once again? No, they don’t.

Nor do they ever write about the economic and moral black hole of our wars of conquest in the Middle East. This is a taboo subject in America and it’s a shame because the estimated 1 trillion dollars that is spent every year on the Military/Industrial complex in the United States could easily pay for all the state deficits ballooning out of control from California to Maine, or the mortgages that millions of Americans can no longer afford to pay on their homes, or the public health-care programs that only government employees have ever had. There is, in fact, an enormous and ever-growing list of homegrown emergencies in America that need to be dealt with and fast, but don’t expect anybody in the next administration to get around to it. That money has already been spoken for (by Wall Street and the Pentagon) and no one in the media is writing about this. It just isn’t newsworthy in the USA.

Sarah Palin's "Naughty Monkey Double Dare Pumps" available for $89.95

Instead, they talk about "Joe the plumber", the average guy who is worried about Obama raising his taxes, or about Obama's "radical ex-preacher", Reverend Wright and his “racist views” (he was the one who made the unpardonable mistake of shouting out in one of his sermons, and letting his anger be captured on video, “Goddamn America for what it’s done!” On the other hand, they don’t talk much about McCain’s advanced case of skin cancer or that many melanoma specialists are giving less than a 25% chance of living to the end of his first term should he be elected.

Yet, perhaps the most bizarre news item from last week is the $150,000 that the Republican Party spent on Sarah Palin's campaign wardrobe. She is not, we now discover, the working class, Hockey Mom that we thought she was because she wears designer clothes from Neiman Marcus, and ruby red pumps from Saks Fifth Avenue. No doubt, we’re all supposed to be shocked by this and given the incredible gullibility of Americans many people will in fact see this routine image make-over as a kind of betrayal. In other countries voters tend to understand that politicians are professional liars and that just about everything regarding their media image is contrived, but not in the USA. Subterfuge will not be tolerated in American presidential elections, because a man, or a woman, has to be what he or she was marketed as being. The important thing is “staying on message”, never deviating from the script.

The system may be rotten to the core, corrupt beyond anyone's wildest imagination, full of distorted images and unrealistic expectations, but the farce that is these elections has to be believed. The lies and crimes at the root of our precipitous decline have to be ignored, at least until power can be successfully transferred from one faction of the nation's business party to the other.

It is the American way.