Poetry – Bums in the Air

Posted on by Opher

Bums in the Air

Bums in the air

Indoctrination everywhere.

Allah and sweet Jesus,

Jehovah

And God above.

How absurd they look

With their array of holy book.

Spouting words

From Neolithic lords

Dressed in fancy costume –

Medieval bride

And modern groom.

Opher – 14.9.2016

Bums in the Air

People are great joiner-inners. They go with the majority. I find it quite startling to see how conservative and fundamental things have become. Back when I was a lad my Muslim friends were all westernised. They didn’t take their religion to extremes. The girls did not go around in head-scarves let alone burqas. In Islamabad University in Pakistan the students wore jeans, T-shirts and listened to the Beatles, Stones and Pink Floyd.

How things have changed.

The children are taken off to their Madrassas where they are subjected to religious indoctrination.

I see families walking down the street, in the summer heat, with the poor woman completely enclosed in heavy black robes, breathing stale air behind a mask, while her husband is cool in T-shirt and jeans.

I am a believer in freedom but I hate misogyny, indoctrination and superstition.

Spirituality is about harmony with nature and the universe. Religion is about power, indoctrination and division.

Poetry – Take me back

Posted on by Opher

Take me back

So take me back to the African plain,

Before we all went collectively insane.

With a sweet gourd and a laughing refrain,

Before the kinks in our seething brains

Created god, slaughter and pain.

I want to live in the past and remain

Where possibility exists in harmony again.

Take me back to that campfire,

Before we put the last chimp on the funeral pyre;

Before the concrete and the screeching tyre

And plastic heaven that is so dire.

When the sun set in blazing fire

For the eyes of wonder to admire.

Cos I’ve looked down this road

Where concrete and plastic explode;

To the clash of ideology

Demanding death by decree

And I don’t like what I see.

Give me the virus to end it all;

To send humanity to the wall;

To free the planet from this death thrall.

For if it lives – we make it crawl.

So let it breathe

Once and for all

Seven billion apologies

For why we brought it to its knees,

Axed the once majestic trees,

Destroyed the flowers, birds and bees.

Plastic hell

On a concrete frieze.

So take me back to the African plain

Where I can breathe once again;

Hold the soil and feel its pain,

Feel infinity in a sand grain,

Without seven billion fools

To drive me insane

Opher 22.2.2016

Take me back

Sharing a planet with seven billion, oblivious idiots, who consume, chop and slaughter their way around the planet, is thoroughly depressing. All I see is a slow decline towards an inevitable nightmare.

We destroy it all in a rampage of careless cruelty.

We descend in fits and starts towards the plastic and concrete nightmare of neon heaven.

We replace danger with safety and excitement with security.

We take the wild and tame it.

We take the wilderness and transform it.

We are turning the remainder into a theme park.

We slaughter the wild life and cage the vestiges in zoos, parks and reserves for the day-trippers to gawk at.

Hollywood meets Las Vegas, run by the new mafia, in a desert of our own making.

I want to go back to the start and try again. I want to wipe the slate clean, put the jungles and forests back and repopulate them with the slaughtered beasts.

I want the world to live again.

All the colours have gone.