Weakness poem

You were perhaps a weakness
or an accumulation of
white cells, tear-shaped, edgeless
the immune-response of love:
a blizzard on the body's page
weakness throwing to relief
strengths of loss and of age
the muscularities of grief.

Possession

Descartes, famously, searching for one thing that he could absolutely and certainly call his own, lighted on his cogito. It was something he was sure no malicious demon could take away from him. But Philip K Dick, famously, is an anti-Descartes. He approaches ‘I think therefore I am’ (he dramatises that question) with the devastating and brilliant counter: why do you assume that the thoughts in your head are yours? It’s an index to the centrality of the Cogito to Western thought as a metaphysical cornerstone, or guarantee, just how unsettling this brilliant, penetrating question can be.

Photonic monsoon

Day is a rainfall of light.

Rain

Falling, the raindrop digs its own grave in the soil.

So it is they say: when the rain comes it hides its head.

Absolutes

Primo Levi said there was no such thing as absolute happiness, 'but there's no such thing as absolute misery either', which would be a comforting thought, I suppose, if true. And more than comforting; heroic, to think that the level of external misery that Levi (for instance) underwent cannot generate absolute miseries. But a part of me thinks the absolute in unhappiness will be generated internally, not externally; and that Levi makes his statement in the teeth of the experience of depression in its fullest form. Of course, Levi knew something about the darkest depressions, too.

Oceans

All oceans have walls.

Adam and Steve

Wasn't it Jerry Falwell who said 'God created Adam and Eve in that garden, not Adam and Steve'? What's depressing, and surprising, in equal measures, about that statement is the extent to which it reveals an inability to think through counterfactuals (surprising given that Christianity is one long counterfactual: imagine if the world were created and ruled by a loving God ...) Can it really be that Falwell, or his millions of followers, have really never thought-through the possibilities opened up by the sf of that sentence? A world created by a savage, judgmental God in which homosexuality is divinely ordained, and disgusting heterosexuals like J.F. are forced to disguise their desires, or face persecution ...

The only response to such idiocy must be: 'let's for the sake of argument say he had created Adam and Steve. What would you do? How would you deal with your desires? Would you marry a man and meet women secretly, on the side? Or would you simply come out and say: "I desire women, this is how my desires are"?'