Taxing the Seed

QUESTION: Les députés envisagent de taxer l’utilisation par les paysans des semences auto-produites. Votre réaction?
C’est absolument scandaleux! C’est une stratégie de confiscation de l’autonomie des paysans pour pouvoir ouvrir des marchés. C’est aussi bête que ça. Prendre des résolutions comme cela, c’est absolument stupide et meurtrier S’il n’y a plus que des multinationales qui ont le droit de vendre des semences, alors que nous avons un patrimoine semencier de 10 à 12 000 ans, transmissible de génération en génération, ça veut dire que l’on engage l’humanité dans un processus de prise en otage et de hold-up légalisé.

(Pierre Rabni)


On the scandalous proposal of some minister with agricultural multinationals breathing down his neck to tax the seeds peasants grow autonomously as they have always done since the beginnings of humanity, here is a little song:


tomatoes and peppers
drying in the midday sun

for twelve thousand years
they've been feeding my people

now you tell me
they're not red enough for you
they're not big enough for you

now you tell me
i have to pay taxes
on the seeds i grow

minister you must be joking
minister you gotta be crazy

now you tell me
i have to sow your American seeds
now you tell me
my ancient taste buds gotta die

tomatoes and peppers
drying in the midnight sun

no one gonna take them away from me
no one gonna take them away from me

Dylan, Ginsberg and dancing Saints

Dylan did not write songs they say
he picked them from the atmospheres
like ripe lime figs in October

Ginsberg saw Blake rising like a bearded phantom
he lost his mind
to the greater outside
where his mother's pain
stripped the skin from his wrists
he lay out there in the rain
howling for she who could not be
poems flowing in universal breath

many events have no explanation
to interpret them is already to lose them
often the only response is laughter
not a laughter which kills
but rather gives birth
which heals the lame

the screens which adorn our mobile prison walls
have too many words on them
too many images we cannot turn off

break them i say with feathered fists
let haloed saints dance on gilded shards

the tomorrow of me (a midnight poem)

i have been away too long
i have been through the desert
i have found myself at dawn absent in the sands

what i long for now
i cannot tell
but i can feel it

it is neither anticipation nor arousal
which impresses the nerves in me

it is the fact of you

the bone of you
nailed into my flesh
the lips of you
living the tomorrow of me

11 - 11 - 11, a rant

when will the pneumatic drills stop? the buses? the trains on the tracks? the jets on the tarmac with their managing directors on cocaine singing wild anthems at rampant androids gone berserk? banks emptied of cash, wallets full of useless plastic? is it just a bad film? weak psychology's anxiety at a buffoon's end of the world pushed as it teeters into a bed of thorns? can so many riches be wiped off in a day? will they come back tomorrow the same way? so much pain, so little blood. but the blood is spilled elsewhere.

democracy you say began with principles, the notion of the many, not the mass, not the undifferentiated, but the identified minnows within the group and groups within groups, all with names, all respected, taken care of, massaged into old age and gently lain to rest upon final heartbeat. they all had a vote upon adulthood. they cast their die into the winds of change. songs and images tossed at the aerial witness of perpetually new dawns.
until the new dawn never came. billboard faces came however and melted into screens. every household room multiplied. their smiles and their slogans reverberated ad nauseam. there were hopes. there were tomorrows. all based on principles of well being and prosperity, health and riches for all. masses moved toward this magnet of dream. they came ashore to the land of plenty from all corners of the globe, shipwrecked on an image, which jangled, stuck in the head.

so why now does the screen flicker ? why do the graphs hurry downwards? wasn't it the best of all possible worlds? the greatest good for the broadest mass of mugs? so why now does the dominant politician stumble as he reaches democracy's pulpit? what does he have trouble hiding now, as discontent mounts? did they prepare him for this at school? did his history lessons tell him what occurs in the heartburn of action? when you have to think without thinking and pay for your decisions forever? what is fear now as it rises along the backbone of your arrogance?

the leaders are seated. their smiles are a deck of cards shuffled and re-shuffled for cameras from carnivorous photographers. ideas and advice, everyone has them but the graphs seem to have a mind of their own and money is having a frightening habit of vanishing when you need it. the more you need the less there is. something is wrong in the central breakdown cortex of the brain. nothing can be built without faltering. no solution holds more than ten minutes and the populations are grumbling. they are throwing units of broken ideas at the camera men on the high street. they are running with stolen goods. they have odd ideas and alternative talk. they are getting suspicious. just when the leader-images needed the masses, it looks like the masses are leaving. all hell broke loose and no one had seen hell for a while. death having been banished and deformity lost in wastelands of dull pain.

what is a million? what is a billion? what is a trillion? how many drills do you need to break a million walls?

my words are anathema to the politician's smile. i was a school with him, the fiend. i could look him in the eye then and spit at his future. now he is protected by the army and the prison-language of hordes of housewives huddled around their newborns.

it is late. it is grey. my overcoat is not enough to keep my warm. my hat my scarf my gloves. every minute is money. food for someone i love. i keep at it. i keep smiling. i am fighting a lonesome fight. i am a slave just like any other. these useless words won't help me. whichever readers there were are too busy watching the graphs, the double dips and the exchange rates. i learnt my lesson long ago. i should have kept quiet. i should have stifled this ludicrous will to sing.

On Michelle Williams' Female and two poems

Variations on Michelle William's book, Female


There are several stages in the revelation of a writer to the world. The first is perhaps the revelation of writing to the writer, an uncanny moment when one realises there is something more than just speech and thought, there is another voice, a flow of something deeper than both thought and speech, something primordial and yet simultaneously artificial, a river that pours itself out in ink. Words come and create another body. I hid my voice for years and many friends and family are still unaware of my silent vocation to write. Having such a vocation as mother and wife is probably even harder. Every moment of every day is full with tasks to perform. Where and when does time leave us the moments to speak this secret voice? Such is the predicament of poetess, Michelle Williams, outlined in subtle, whispering tones in her first tome of poems, Female.

These are some of the sincerest musings I have read in a long time and I listen to them in tranquil rapture as they induce me to think. They bear their fragility with pride. They recognise obstacles and the contours of failure. Williams writes: "she remains/ scarred for wanting/ that which she carries/ empty with understanding…" Or: " for it is/ the ancestry of my gender/ the sacred burden of my sex/ to be/ the core of strength within/ each weakness/ perceived/ to always equal the greater sum/ of my circumstances…" The peaceful reflections here belie the hurt and the battles which must have preceded their writing. There are scars here which have been overcome. The serenity with which the poetess writes is wonderful and much of the writing's beauty resides in the joy of writing itself, the pleasures inherent in the activity of poetic practise. There is a longing and a pining in a poem which lives and breathes within that poem. The senses are contained there. The beauty of this singer's voice is such that complications and excessive ornamentalism are not prerequisite. "i have held the keepsake of mo(u)rning/ in a reverence meant for lockets/ and solitary breaths"

Of course, she is already elsewhere. She has been for many years. But the paths poets embark upon have aleatory beginnings. The important thing is to begin. Somewhere, to don a mask, to speak these words:

"i held you there
in moments of eyes
you filled my palm
with the willingness
of your empty
and how the clasping
remains"


From my sojourn with Female, came the following two poems:


one


in the trinity
of wife of mother of woman

much of what falls
will fall on you

you who in arias of silence
write the future

it will fall
as you grasp the moment
which must not fall
as all around it fractures

you must not fall
in the fall
but rise
between midday and midnight

with the poem


two

you write your portrait
in secret text

it is dangerous to be understood
unwise to open to the sun

what protection we have
is our poetry to listen to

what you call vocality

we have it
we keep it
we travel with it
to unknown destination
on paths at dusk

where whispering sings