Poetry – Stuff your whole culture – A poem of despair and horror.

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Stuff your whole culture

I wrote this for a society I did not want to be associated with. I did not respect the premise it was based on, its philosophy or mantra. I did not want to rise to the top and be all powerful, to own and possess and become smug and arrogant.

I yearned for a life that was more creative, fulfilling and meaningful.

I wanted something more natural.

I did not want to be a cog in a machine or a big wheel.

I saw the reality – the drudgery – the losers – the destruction – the wars – the suffering – it all came out of the machine.

I had a visual image of a gigantic machine that was working its way around the globe like a combine harvester. The jungles and wilderness, with all the plants, trees and animals, went in one end and a great swathe of concrete and plastic came out the other. On the distant horizon the private yachts were at anchor and the ‘worthy’ lazed in sunbeds and sipped cocktails.

I did not wish to bomb people in order to sip cocktails.

I wanted to play in the jungles with the animals.
Stuff your whole culture

Stuff your ability to absorb rubbish,

Live in rubbish,

Create rubbish,

Adore rubbish

And become rubbish.

Stuff your cities

Your pleasures,.

Your bombs and bingo,

Social clubs

And discos.

Stuff your brand of drunkenness

Your false happiness

And oblivion.

Stuff your security

That forces you to sell your life

Into drudgery

That destroys you.

Stuff your fear of change,

Your lack of adventure,

Your fear

Of losing out.

Stuff your pride and righteousness;

Your patriotism

And us and them;

Your discriminations

And wish to ‘get on’;

Your rat race;

Loss of perspective;

Your money grabbing eyes,

Conning ways!

And stuff you a million times!

Stuff you!

Opher 1977

Poetry – Like a pressure cooker – A poem about the need to create (a bit of fun)

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Like a pressure cooker

Well I was just doing a reply on my blog when I was overtaken by the force of an idea. All of these words bubbling away in my head, like eels, forming into words, sentences and whole paragraphs and then churned apart in the mixer of my thoughts.

For years they have festered like a huge boil waiting to be lanced.

No time. No time. No energy. No time.

Then there is time.

There’s only twenty six. I have to rearrange them into an infinity of possibility, capture the abstractions and lock them into forms that others can see.

Why?

Because I have to.


Like a pressure cooker

Like a pressure cooker full of alphabet soup

The heats turned up

About to explode!

 

Like a volcano full of words

The magma’s so high

About to unload!

 

Been boiling and bubbling

Much too long.

Stewing and simmering

So pent-up

It’s wrong.

 

Like a washing machine of phrases

All spinning around;

I’m in a vortex

That’s screwing right down through the ground

 

Like a blender of sentences

Churning so fast.

I’ve gotta let it out

Cos this really can’t last.

 

I’m a cement mixer

Gonna lay down a new road.

A galaxy

That’s about to implode.

A neutron star

With a nova inside –

Poetry or novels?

I just can’t decide.

 

I’m a man of letters

That I have to arrange

Before they mess with my brain

And make me go strange.

 

Cathartic,

Illuming,

They gush in a flow.

I couldn’t hold on to them

They just had to go!

 

Here they are – there they go! Ewuytopogrot ooo immy di wo!

 

Opher 20.10.2015

Poetry – Stuff the hole in your culture – A plaintive cry of frustration.

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Stuff the hole in your culture

I did not like or appreciate the regimentation or life. It looked mindless, unimaginative, empty and lacking in inspiration or creativity.

I wanted some awe, magic and wonder.

I wanted to rip the fabric of society apart and replace it with something that was more alive.

I watched my father go off to work on the same train, come back at the same time and follow the same routine. There was nothing to think about or feel.

Life proceeded.

The countryside was imprisoned in hedgerows and beaten down, tamed, ploughed and planted.

The streets teemed with people all looking straight ahead without a laugh.

The TV was short of poems.

I wrote a poem for the boring world of my father. I was afraid that it was one I might come to inhabit.

 

Stuff the hole in your culture

 

Stuff your neatness

Your ‘just so’,

Put away

Orderly rooms;

Your street signs

In straight lines;

You rectangle homes

And concrete lives.

 

Stuff your tidiness;

Your squares of countryside

All neatly trimmed hedgerows

And pruned trees;

Your great productivity

And boring productions;

Your quantity of rubbish

And forgetfulness of quality.

 

Stuff your career;

Your conveyor belts

That feed machines

With human fodder

Producing

Endlessly,

Endless producing

Plastic trinkets.

 

Stuff your nine to five,

Stay in line,

Muzak filled brains

That hum all day on nothing

And feel indifferent

When work is done.

 

Stuff your greediness

As you hoard the plastic trinkets,

The car and TV,

Three piece

And bidet.

 

Stuff the values that are told to you;

All empty without purpose or reason,

That maintains

The status quo

So your orderly life

Proceeds as yesterday.

 

Stuff your boring natures

That create the apathy you live in.

Where the effort of real life

Is too much

For your programmed existence.

 

Stuff your TV shows

That are on at seven every night;

Identical

Formatted into episodes

That are formulaic

And meaningless

 

Stuff the whole of this empty culture

And let me breathe.

 

Opher 1977

Poetry – The Gull Glides – a poem about the mystical beauty of life.

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The Gull glides

This is another of my 1970 efforts. I was standing on the cliffs watching a gull hanging in the air in front of me, effortlessly. It slowly turned its head and looked at me and then scanned the cliffs and sea below. I could see its feathers ruffling in the wind and the minor adjustments of its wings that enabled it to remain so still within the moving air but I could see that its mind was weighing up other things.

It was beautiful, so perfect; stream-lined and confident. It was totally in control, hanging over a drop that would have terrified the life out of me.

Millions of years of evolution had brought it to this culmination of perfection.

I was totally different to that bird. We had no way of communicating. It had different perspectives to me.

It slightly dipped a wing and drifted over the heads of the crowd standing on the cliff and then soared away in a big arc down to the sea.

I was imagining the skid of air across those wings that was supplying the lift and the almost mystical relationship between the wing and the air.


The Gull glides

The gull glides with the freedom to seek its own destiny.

It moves by instinct,

Beautifully through the sky.

Millions of years of perfection

Glimmer against the sun.

It has no beliefs that it would die for.

Hanging on the winds edge

Wings grip the sliding air

Suspended above the teeming crowds.

But I am the drifting skid of the edge of the wing

Slicing through the watery air.

Opher 1970

Poetry – The man who took Happy pills – A poem about life, drugs and what it’s all about.

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The Man who took happy pills

I wrote this back in 1971. I’d been working in a fast food joint in Boston called the Deli-Haus. There were a great group of young people there, including two murderers and a morose cook.

I started work at six pm. We kicked the last people out at about three in the morning, cleaned the place and went home. It was hard work. It was a baking hot summer. I was in charge of the dishwasher. It worked on steam. I spend my time rushing back and forth, carrying bins of dirty plates, scraping off food, loading the dishwasher, emptying the dishwasher and rushing the clean plates back. We only had so many plates and I was always rushing.

By the time we got to one am I was flagging and feeling pissed off and put upon. The chef was always shouting and screaming at me to keep up with demand. I could never go fast enough but all the others seemed to be happily coping. Then one night one of them gave me a couple of small white pills and I was happy. The hours flashed by, I had loads of energy and I was having a great time.

I worked there for two months and was exceedingly happy.

I never touched those pills again after I left. I liked them too much.


The Man who took happy pills

Here was the guy who took happy pills;

Pills to make him smile

Pills to make him laugh,

To run, and rush, and work and feel no pain.

Happy pills

Speeding through the day.

 

Here was the guy who took happy pills

But he also liked to feel

That he was more than just his body,

His moods were more than chemicals

Dictating their synthetic message

And his thoughts were his own

Not an electrical result of a chemical reaction.

 

Here was the guy who took happy pills

And felt them course through his veins,

Lifting his spirits,

Enabling him to work all day

At the boring life he hated,

Happily.

 

Here was the guy who took happy pills

And sometimes he sat down

And swallowed his pills

And was very, very sad.

 

Opher 1971

Poetry – Cleanliness is not hygiene – A poem about the building of prisons for our minds.

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Cleanliness is not hygiene

I have abhorrence for this taming of nature; creation of geometrical shape, and orderliness.

I like my world natural.

When I look at the future of safety, plastic and concrete I am filled with horror.

I would rather have the microbes, bugs and untrimmed trees.

I do not like having my grass mown in lines, my car washed or my behaviour shaped into expected forms.

I prefer messy jungle to ploughed field.

I want a world teeming with life, danger and wilderness.

I see a future of sterility, safety and prisons.

We are building our own prisons.

That was how I felt in 1970 and I still feel it now.

We are building our own prisons – brick by brick.


Cleanliness is not hygiene

With your strange false hygiene

Your absurdity of cleanliness

You are busy creating a world

As sterile

As the blankness of your mind.

 

Opher 1970

Death in a breath – A poem to the wonders of biological warfare – You have to laugh don’t you?

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This is a poem written in 1970 by my best mate Pete Smith. He’s a genius by the way – Wild Science inventor, musician, teacher, explorer, songwriter, and general creator of chaos.

Back in the 1960s we shared a flat as students and generally put the world to rights, saw a lot of gigs and talked, and talked and talked, and wrote poems, did drawings and talked some more. Pete invented light-shows, polarised light projections and made strange musical instruments.

It was a time of expansion.

This was the height of the Cold War. We still expected to be wiped out any day. Britain was doing its best for the cause. We had Porten Down. They were secret laboratories that everyone knew about. They were developing wonderful antidotes to communism, and life in general. They were called chemical warfare and biological warfare. We could threaten people with them and only release them if we had to – or by accident.

We were quite concerned about this prospect.

Pete wrote a poem/song about it:

Death in a breath

We’ve got ……..

Red bloody death

And black spotty death

And they’ve both served their purpose well-o

Fried to a turn

Crisped, brown, burn

And lovely green gassy hell-o

But what we need

To kill with speed

And I’m sure you’ll all join me

In this creed

Is……..

The new yellow

Superkillerfragmentarygermicidal akshun

Superkillerorballisticonecankilla nashun

If you want to kill a lot

We’ve got

Something quite obnokshus

Superkillerportendownsowngallopingbrainrot poxshus

Oh yeah ………

Pete Smith 1970

Infinity 3 – more of the same. A poem about big ideas.

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Infinity 3 – More of the same

I was twenty one and thought I knew it all. Every day was a new discovery. Everything excited me. It was revelation after revelation.

A vacuum teemed with energy. Matter was solid merely because of a force-field. There was no such thing as solid. When atoms were taken apart they were merely energy. Nothing we saw was really how it was. It was as if we were trapped between two infinite worlds – the macrocosm and microcosm. We could not really see either.

Did infinity exist before nothing was invented?

Was this the mystical element from which the universe was formed?

Are there more infinities?

It’s all semantics and words lie – they lie in infinite nothing.


Infinity 3 – More of the same

 

I am the emptiness of space.

I am the illusion of finity.

I am the final truth of solids.

I am the destroyer of space.

Through me the senses are betrayed.

I am what the poet sees.

I am that which remains unknown.

I am the ceaseless being.

I am the answer that never alters.

I am the teeming richness of complete vacuum.

In me all words lie.

Opher 1970

Poetry – Infinity Two – the sequel – another attempt to penetrate the absolute in a poem.

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Infinity Two – the sequel

I wrote a lot of these.

I am not sure if you can have a second infinity? But in an infinite universe everything is possible. I probably created a poem about a polyverses system.

I had this idea that somehow finite could not exist within infinity. That all we could measure was inaccurate. If you took a finite object it contained infinity within it. It seemed to invalidate reality and make me question existence. To me it added a mystical dimension that was beyond science, maths and everyday life.

The universe was infinite.

The world we inhabited was an illusion. There was more to it than we could see, know or understand.

I think it is how religions are born.
Infinity Two – the sequel

I am the greatness of nature.

I am the vastness of a microbe.

I am the creator of philosophy.

I am the ridiculer of man’s achievements.

Without me there is not even nothing.

 

I am worshipped in many forms from afar

I am the element that science shies from

I am the only truth.

I am the only thing you cannot test.

I defy your principles.

Without me your experiments would always work.

 

Opher 1970

Poetry – Looking back – A poem of young love changing before the pressures of life.

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Looking back

I was so young then to be so cynical.

Love and life change. We change. It is a law.

No matter how hard we hold to our dreams they fade.

We always compare things to what once were and become frustrated and discontent.

The intensity of youth and young love can never be as strong again. We have to adjust. Yet we crave.

That rush of endorphins that made the world so vivid and created such dreamy bliss is forever unattainable. It is replaced by a slower pace, a deeper warmth and a more balanced contentment.

The stress and strain or career and family with the restraints that brings, the lack of time and energy, creates distance and friction. It passes.

Much as we might crave, we can never go back.

We have moved on.

I wrote this poem back in 1973 in the midst of turmoil, with a young child and career looming and a lifestyle that I knew was going to change. I think that is reflected in the poem.

I did not realise it was such an epic until I wrote it out this morning.

Hang in there.

Everything passes, everything changes.


Looking back

Looking back,

I see her running through the long grass;

I see her running through the city crowds,

In and out, between the people,

Dancing through the cotton tops.

I see her laughing in the sunshine,

Silhouetted by the blue sky.

I see her sparkling in the neon lights,

Adrift from the dullness.

 

She wears a summer cotton dress

That flows in the breeze.

It is white with a feint blue pattern.

The dress is short.

It shows her slim legs,

Her girlish figure,

A lithe body with firm breasts.

She is always laughing, dancing, whirling.

There is silliness in the air,

Giggling on the wind.

 

It is a carefree dance she weaves,

Abandoned and unbound to steps.

Her hair is long, and free and swims

In slow cascades around her face and body.

Sometimes I can feel us lying in the bracken,

Laughing into each others eyes;

Caution only in being seen.

 

Our merging

Was always intense

And giving,

Making us closer

And more complete.

 

We never made love,

We made happiness and warmth;

We made closeness and contentment;

We made openness and repair.

We had no need to make love

We had enough to spare.

 

We never dreamed of changing

For today was always summer.

 

I can see her open mouth and sparkling eyes,

The crooked teeth and smooth face –

So pretty and so perfect

That I knew that I would wake.

 

All we did was lightly done.

All we gave was warmly given.

All we took was freely taken.

We had no obligations

And we did everything we could,

Whatever we could.

We gave with a fervour that said

‘All mine is yours

But it is not nearly enough.’

We took everything given

Freely

For it was taking nothing.

In the taking was the giving.

 

People said we were young.

They laughed at our intensity.

They thought it would soon pass.

But we had already loved an eternity;

We had given the world.

We were charged with the electricity of life.

 

People smiled and said we were naïve.

But in our innocence we found truth

And will come no closer.

 

I remember our sexuality,

Craving with a raging desire,

Melting in an alliance of pleasure.

 

I can see her with the summer’s sun

Glinting through the strands of her hair –

Streamlets of gold

Forming glowing halo

As she leans across me

In the long grass.

 

I see her as a ruddy statue,

Serene against the setting sun,

Against the orange sky and purple cloud,

Smiling sweetly to herself.

Then coming to me,

Clasping me tight

To reassure herself that the warmth

Will not go with the sun.

 

I can hear her weeping gently amid the green trees,

Sobbing violently against my shoulder,

Crushing me

In attempt to mould us closer

For greater comfort.

And I stroke her back

And whisper in her ear

In reassuring tones

With meaningless words

Until her demons are all gone.

 

If she had gone then

I would have spent a lifetime mourning.

My life would have ceased,

Frozen to time.

The energy would have flowed out of me.

A lifeless husk

Would have immersed itself

In her memory.

Those memories could never have died

For they had a life of their own.

I would have had no present

And can only have faded

To become a flimsy spectre of myself.

 

Instead she stayed.

 

Now, as I look about me

I see the young girls with some of her qualities

Who would awaken me for a short while.

I know she sees the same.

But they are only reflections of a distant past.

 

Sometimes I long.

But we still have something special

That now lives in the past.

If another was to enter now

It would banish hopes

Of resurrection.

 

No short reawakening could scale the peaks we climbed

And would cast us down to abysmal depths,

Dragging with it that idyll of our love.

 

Why did we not die then?

Only knowing perfection?

Before the slide to mediocrity,

The degrading spectacle

Of our mundane lives

With the occasion glimpse to show

How far we’ve sunk.

 

She still turns her head with smiling eyes

From a woman’s body,

Contained within

Is the girl she was.

I am a watcher;

Invisible on my vantage point.

I watch me play my scenes

For I am another person altogether.

My former selves are gods

Whose perfection I can never match.

 

I hope that somewhere in time

The people we were

Are able to live forever,

As we were,

Wanting nothing.

 

For if there is bitterness in me,

Hate, envy and accusation;

If there is despair and sadness;

If there is no hope and little love;

It is because I am a prisoner

Of my own making.

It is not what I would wish.

I would give all

To be the person I was and free,

For us to be as we were.

 

If I shout and rave

And sarcasm echoes round the room

It is merely frustration at all we’ve become

And my inability to cope.

Before, we were,

Without trying.

 

And if I feel like pulling butterflies wings off

Instead of loving their beauty;

If I feel like destroying

Instead of creating

When I would rather not,

What’s gone wrong with me?

 

If I snap at the kids for taking my time,

So precious time,

And then waste all my time,

What is wrong with me?

 

If my directions have all gone,

My ideals all compromised,

So that I no longer can think why I did anything,

Why it was so important,

And nothing is important now,

And the shallow people we scoffed at

Are our friends;

I have the mortgage I never wanted,

And the security,

And they seem important,

And I can no longer get into my house

For the clutter and possessions,

And I’ve suits hanging in the closet

So they do not get creased,

I do not say things that might offend the neighbours,

My job means more money

And a car,

But requires me being smart,

But I tell myself

I can go back to being me

Later,

Besides

You need money to travel

And a base to return to,

It’s the kids that are preventing me,

From being free.

But you do not get around

And things are not so clear anymore,

What has happened to me?

 

How did I used to look

As I watched you dancing

Through those long grass feather tops?

Did I really dance with you

Alone in the universe

With a field?

Was I so boyish and gleefully happy?

Was my face sparking with life

As we embraced?

Did I shine to you as you beaconed to me?

 

Opher 1973