The Hostage 1 (version)

It was an autumn afternoon when the high school building was shut down. Everything was done quietly, almost secretly, as the wet leaves drooped from nearby trees, and slight whisks of wind stirred them up into piles.
The school itself was grey, solemn, with dark windows and a fearful, forbidding air. The hostages were grouped together in a high room, overlooking a grim parade-ground. The room had formerly been utilised as a headmaster's study, and was filled with collegiate accoutrements, rather dusty and old-fashioned in the dimness of the room. There was a mortar-board, an old globe beside bookshelves crammed with leather-bound volumes. The window was of a handsome old construction, rusted-shut long before. In that room one had the feeling that something beautiful had once taken place there, looking from the windows had once been a joy, you could gaze on a bright emerald cricket lawn bathed in glorious sunlight, and wet with dew.
Beyond the window you could see the crumbling granite cornices and cupolas of this neglected building.
Incongruously, though, there was also a large, old-fashioned kind of double bed in the room, with crisp linen and a heavy wrought-iron bedstead, which took up a lot of space so that the people in the room had to manoeuvre around it uncomfortably. Assembled in this brown, dusty room were perhaps a dozen people, all of them frightened out of their wits, for they were being held hostage. All of them were confused and sweating, afraid for their lives.  

When will we Drink the New Wine?

When will we drink the new wine,
Promised to us in olden time,
And when shall the honoured bells sound,
With new-resplendent chime.
And when will the gates that we laboured to build
Be opened for us that endlessly tilled
The unforgiving ground?

When we will we dwell in the palaces fair
That were built on the backs of our sorrows and care,
And when shall we glimpse the wondrous things
Which are imprisoned there?
We who trod the grapes and tended the vine,
When will we drink the new wine?

Beside the Shore

Beside the shore. A battle is taking place.
It is the Stone Age.
We have attacked a rival group and slain a great many of them by the shore. Piled up beside a rocky outctop in the surf is a pile of bodies.
I notice a severed head, grey and skeletal. I begin to throw largish lumps of rock at it from a little distance, squatting there in the sand.
One of the enemy group is left alive. As I continue to throw rocks at the head, I think to myself that it will eventually be destroyed, perhaps one more rock will reduce it to pulp, like a rotten fruit.

The remaining enemy is struggling among the small waves breaking over the sand, floundering. Perhaps he is to be taken alive. Before anyone can stop him though, one of our party mounts the rocky outcrop and heaves onto the enemy a large, smooth slab of pink sandstone which crushes him and pins him down where he struggles, coughing and drowning.
His foetal position in the water. Suffocation.

The people are having a party

The people are having a party... they elect a leader. The leader begins to abuse his position, for he is marked as "different". All the leaders congregate together and begin to talk among themselves. They see themselves as separate, and are seen as such by the other people.
Over time it degenerates into a "profession". The people cease to decide things for themselves, instead things are decided for them by a professional caste. How to deal with this problem? Where does the power lie? With the people, who originally bestowed power, or with the professional caste, who embody it? What in fact, was the process of transmission, whereby the power was bestowed, granted, and how was it wielded and used? Was it simply stolen by a sort of mafia, using force?
An elite decided to embody power in themselves. They recognised however that the other people would protest strongly or even revolt against this set-up if it was too apparent that the power was so one-sided. They came up with an elaborate solution. They developed, over time, ridiculous rituals to solemnize and lend credence to their authority.
I have always had a problem with Europe and its history because it is riddled with the concept of hierarchy. Which has always seemed to me to have something wrong with it. A truly modern person cannot accept it, it seems wrong, not just unfair but incorrect. Deference to superiors, actual or cosmic...
The gods were imaginary, mental superiors, an abstract hierarchy to complement the actual hierarchy, to bolster and support it. The advent of God merely strengthened this tendency, the diverse gods with their diverse attributes reconstituted in the one monarchical deity, supplied with all their power... As though Zeus had conquered or slain all the other gods, and demanded their obeisance, the servile principle magnified... We bow the knee not variously but as one and to one principle, one authority: the abstract father as higher concomitant to the actual father, the One God monotonously declaiming in turn to Jews, Greeks and Arabs.
The question of redemption was raised:
"Why does God carry out this extraordinary, complicated procedure, making himself his own son incarnate as a man, dying and being resurrected, ascending to heaven, all in order to secure the salvation of mankind? Why not simply enact their salvation, will it, without this preamble?"
The answer:
"The Messiah they spoke about was the people themselves: They suffered and died, they were sacrificed, they were reborn, they will come to resurrect their own dead, carry out a final judgement and establish a kingdom of heaven on earth. They are the anointed ones, the flesh of Christ resurrected in the mass. The father, the son, the holy spirit, all embodied in the people themselves".

Clutter

Clutter like dark leaves, or plastic moulding,
Or leather balls painted fragrant pink,
Bright varnish, glossy emulsion, scarlet lips.
Clutter like silken paper, fast photography,
Plastic masks, fragrance of dildos and boxing gloves,
Bleak lettering, garish type, and clutter of keyboards,
Clutter upon clutter.
Clutter everywhere, clutter is iron railings, cheap overcoats,
Cigar-butts, blue cars, broken machines.
And clutter is a symptom of the broken machine.
Of perfume, of silk, of dribbling nose, of the permanence
Of manly shavings and afterdaubings,
Either that or the slobbing belly under chaffing lycra,
The ozone stiffness, the video screen, and mascara hatred,
And tearing grey, and fashion crucified like string.
Formed from steel into a nine, a cynical, inhuman nine,
That boxed-in glamour puppets sing in cages,
Pressed like silk in fashion tombs of sex.
Clutter of sex, of flattened bellies, blazing eyes,
A solid, definite splat of ghostly semen,
A meaningless aim achieved.
Clutter of Love laughed at by red-faced ghosts, sunburned
By greed and fashion's lust, spurn the earth and grin
Like death in stained-glass window hate.
Laughing like clutter.

Star of Hope

As I stare at the wreckage of my life,

The fractured nights and days of strife,

The promises broken into frozen parts,

And love that yearns in fits and starts-

Lists of ambition dead as stone,

Unseemly dreams uncouthly blown,

And over all a clinging swathe

Of loneliness and bitter waste...

I see arise, as from afar

The figure of a fiery star,

That from this morass rises free

And clothes itself in seeming purity.

And that I call a hellish paradise

Is where this Star of Hope has fullest life.

The star of acid, star of cutting spite!

Whose hatred will illuminate my night-

And sorrow raised to such a pitch shall be

The friend of subtlest sanctity-

The star of joy and dull despair

Enmixed, can burn full bright and fair

Enough to burn the eyes of they

That cherish all the fullest day.

No, I have hidden from the sun,

And if that night is to be borne,

A Star of Hope must lighten me;

Like to the light that shepherds watch,

From Christmas to Epiphany.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.
What we formerly cast down as tyranny we resurrect, even exalt, out of a sort of cheap nostalgia for the blandness of safety. The flag of surrender is the flag of your banality.
Even the voice of heaven would not move you, nor the chants of the free nations moving under clean skies, never cursing life as you are bound to do.
Slaves, they dared to call us.

Your principles are a hollow bell struck without feeling.
We who adhere to a total revolution, a rebellion of the spirit, the affirmation of the third millennium, need no justifications.