Oppositeland

 OPPOSITELAND

This is the voice of Ergo the bird
who pecks out the eyes of liars
and looks at cats with kindness
the bird who stands on top of the pole
and admonishes your transgression
I have been spending my time

Flying around and enjoying the sky
And I spent too much time 

looking at the moon and I hadn't
noticed that I had flown
through a mirror
at some juncture
into Oppositeland

It has been a long time

not that much of a long time

but quite a long time

that we have been around

and we have always

regardless of where we came from
thought that to murder a newborn baby
was a really bad thing to do
actually the depths of depravity
and impossible to come back from
or at least
if somebody wanted to murder the newborn baby
they would make some attempt
to hide
the murder of the newborn baby
but today now I have
flown through the mirror
everything has changed
and we no longer attempt to hide
that we murder the newborn baby
and we say now that

in fact

it is sometimes justifiable

to murder the newborn baby
and this is a new and
I will admit unexpected development
in the sinuous path
of the human project

When the hysterical, screaming, failed dog portraitist
from Germany
with the stupid moustache committed his
unthinkable, industrialised massacre,
this horror was kept secret from the
innocent world.
All of the crimes of glorified secretary Stalin
were perpetrated behind a
proverbial Iron Curtain.

In Gaza

In Technicolor

Hell is agape.

And

we

watch

jaws

agape

and we silently scream

and we say
we have seen things
nobody should see
from the comfort
of our daily
immersive
advert ornamented
amniotic sac.

The child with no face
puts one off Pepsi.

Perhaps even more so than the violence itself
we are shocked by the attempt
at justification, through obfuscation, doublethink,
and the techniques of branding,
of the massacre of
many thousands of children.
Not even Herod had this degree of gall.

The mask has slipped from the West's
face, lathered and lubricated by

oil that is the bounty of baby's blood.

This baby was cut out of its dead mother
the CPR is delicate but futile

delivered by trembling fingertips.

This resets everything. If this can be justified, then what next?

Little girl, about the same age as my youngest daughter,
hanging from a window frame. Her legs are gone.  

Crying man carrying a plastic bag
thick red oozing from supermarket blue
the remains of his child.

"Now we have become real sons of bitches".

How can we continue?
How can we put our feet up and be entertained by mini-series?
How can we put on our glad-rags and laugh in bars?

Let the church towers shudder and peals hail
across the valleys and hills
the cities and suburbia
the great, ringing of death
and of disgrace.

Is this "The New Normal" they were talking about?

Ca-Caw the carrion cry

"There are always basic, universal truths"

The idea of "the post-truth age"
is itself a lie, because
no matter how many images
we or a machine learning application
can create or regurgitate,
we always have the opportunity
to realise that reality
is not based in images,
on paper or on screens,
but exists rather in front of us

and behind us,
at the same time.

Ca-Caw the carrion cry

"Down with the post-truth age!"
There will never be post-truth because
truth is something eternal,
no matter what linguistic acrobatics
bureaucrats and demagogues attempt to pull
over our ears, which ring
with unbearable tinnitus
from this megacity of Babels, where
"Let us confuse their language"
is the daily mantra
for maximum  distortion,

especially for you.

Fritz Lang, in the 1970s, was

interviewed by William Friedkin,
and spoke about his atheism.
On a  personal level
he was happy with this perspective,
but regretted the decline of
religion and society because, as he said,
"How will we teach ethics?"

We now have the first generations
in human history brought up
without encoded ethics,
without moral codes,

without myth,
without fairy stories.

We sanitised and water-filtered fairytales
and folk stories
until all the fire and all the folk was taken out, because
the children can't possibly be exposed
to Snow White's final revenge when
the Wicked Stepmother is
forced into a pair of red hot shoes
and made to dance till she is dead, or
to see poor protagonists
rolled down hills
in barrels full of nails..

Not many people
in today's society
would want to implant
these violent images
in the mind
of their innocent
puppy who will
grow to be a
good and useful citizen
and have a grand and exciting life
and have their friends round for dinner parties
and drink coffee, coffee, coffee,
and evacuate into flushing toilets
rather than Safe Zones.

But the children in Gaza will get no fairy stories

not because of censorship
or because of arguments about culture wars
or because of overprotective parenting
but because we killed them,
and there is no way back.