God's Answering Machine

[Camy]

God's Answering Machine.

by Camy.

I ain't written a pom in a while.

I ain't 'cause I'm glum and can't smile.

I can't smile 'cause life's really hard,

and god's answering machine is full up.

I asked him (that's god) for a moment

to chat about plans for my life.

I said:

"I'm gonna dig and sit in my own oubliette.

Fuck the world, tear up the check-

list my faults, contra the good,

and suck the balance dry.

"I'm gonna rape and pillage (with bleary eyes),

squeeze my squeeze, devour the pie,

smoke, shoot and drink 'till I'm blinding high,

then kip and wake-up - repeat.

"I'm gonna shatter the tenets of blind religious belief,

castrate the bullies that cause such grief,

exlode da bomb on euphonic prudes,

stand on a box and distribute ludes.

"I'm gonna email politicians 'till they scream "NO MORE!"

strip to the skin and dress like a whore,

legalise everything I want to do

and tell those who ask: you told me to!

Whadda ya think about that?"

"god's not here at the moment,

please call back later ... beeeeeeeep."

http://www.awesomedude.com/camy/poetry/gam.mp3

[bi_janus]

Camy,

At least you got the machine. I gave up after the "the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service" message. You little anarchist, you!

[Cole Parker]

What a great use of language, and a piercing denunciation.

What writing!

c

[DesDownunder]

I love it. Set it to music and we have a protest song!

I needed the dictionary...no help...Google came to the rescue:

ludes: Slang term for the drug methaqualude or simple quaaludes, a barbituate like Central Nervous depressant drug which causes clumsiness and fatigue...

For those who missed it, here is the alternate song from the asylum:

Sorry Camy, I couldn't resist.

[Cole Parker]

I needed the dictionary...no help...Google came to the rescue:

"Aha!" I said to myself, smugly, when I read that. "He had to look up 'oubliette'!"

Wrong again. He knew the obscure word, didn't know the more current slang.

C

[Merkin]

It's wonderful, Camy, and proof positive of my heartfelt belief that poems are always best when read aloud.

[blue]

Weird. I knew something counter-culture / alternative that the orangutan didn't? Whitebread little me?

How did this happen?

Great orangutan, you're slipping up. One too many banana peels.

Liked the poem.

Full answering machine, that's gotta be it. Would hate to think my number got blocked for being friggin' annoying or something.

I wonder, though, does the Big Guy get those annoying telemarketing calls too? Aluminum siding? Carpet cleaning? Insurance? Against acts of God? Hah, the irony. The coppery. The aluminumy. The aluminiumy, for the other side of the Pond.

[DesDownunder]

The only lude worth considering is spelt 'lewd', and I know what that means.

[Camy]

Thank you all.

[a wee rantette - or, where the pom is from]

I don't think I've ever felt so broke, glum, angry, insignificant and disempowered. One assumes people are decent and well intentioned: one votes in good faith. And then to see your country driven to the dogs to further party political posturing and shenanigans is frankly the pits. The time has come for us all to pull together to save the planet, not to flounce and preen like overpaid, overstuffed turkeys.

[Cole Parker]

Sounds like you're disenchanted with your politicians, Camy, all your politicians, to the same extent most of us over here are.

C

[DesDownunder]

Camy, I commiserate.

We are seeing a lot of political shenanigans all over the planet.

I have been watching the UK situation and am scratching my head, asking myself, "Is this England?"

But Australia is turning to the right also. Our left wing party has gone obnoxiously hardcore irrational as it abandon its humanist roots. Our rightwing sits there, and rehearses their preening for the turkey parade.

We are living in a time of tranistions accompanied by transgressions of reason and common sense.

We are struggling to understand why our elected representatives don't get that we are no longer in a world of separate villages in the 19th century.

Much of the problem is that the corrupt corporate economic models are running scared of the world wide web influenced new 'global community.' They fear their power and control is being undermined by the information now freely available on the Internet.

The religions demand adherence to stone-age mythology rendering their spiritual relevance extraneous to the evolving needs of humanity.

Clearly we living through a time of turmoil. As Tim Robbins noted in Monty Python's Erik the Viking, "We may not all die, horrible deaths."

Camy, you do have the power, through your voice and your music, and your writing, to influence the world to be a better place.

Just being there, voicing your thoughts and concerns, has made me feel better.

[Camy]

Sounds like you're disenchanted with your politicians, Camy, all your politicians, to the same extent most of us over here are.

C

Yup!

[Gee Whillickers]

We are in the middle of a provincial election here. The current provincial government is conservative, and has been for the past four decades. It's the nature of this province, despite the attempts of many people to make some changes in this. So this election campaign, it seems people are looking for a change, to kick out the incumbent party. So what do the polls show? A huge lead for a new party, one that's even more right wing than the current one!! I am crying and distraught, believe me. It's horrible what's happening here.

[DesDownunder]

Think what we face if Obama doesn't get re-elected, or if the Conservatives gain control of both houses of Congress.

We are by no means ensured of continuing to overcome the oppression of the past dark ages.

Already, the advances made in The enlightenment are being forsaken for inhuman application of a new Inquisition under the threat of theocracies falsely claiming to ensure our freedoms. The problem is that such a scenario is likely to lead to armed and bloody insurrection which will only extend human suffering.

[Gee Whillickers]

We are in the middle of a provincial election here. The current provincial government is conservative, and has been for the past four decades. It's the nature of this province, despite the attempts of many people to make some changes in this. So this election campaign, it seems people are looking for a change, to kick out the incumbent party. So what do the polls show? A huge lead for a new party, one that's even more right wing than the current one!! I am crying and distraught, believe me. It's horrible what's happening here.

My apologies for the self-quoting and continuing the rather off-topic discussion in this thread, but I wanted to post a follow-up.

Our election is now over. And, fortunately, it didn't quite go the way all of the recent polls suggested. The upstart Alberta Wildrose Party was expected to topple the incumbent Progressive Conservative Party, with their far right-wing platform. They failed, and quite spectacularly and miserably, too. Several factors contributed to this, and I see a couple of these factors as very good news indeed for this rather right-wing, redneck (In relative Canadian terms) province. Just before the election, two different candidates from Wildrose made serious errors, which likely turned the tide a great deal.

One of the candidates said, essentially, that he had an advantage over the other candidates in his riding because he was white, and they were not. He then went on to say that while the other candidates could only represent their minority, he could represent all people, because he was caucasian. Needless to say, he was justifiably and righteously slammed for his hateful and bigoted comments.

Then, another candidate's blog was dredged up. This candidate, quite a number of months ago, had made hateful comments that, "homosexuals will all burn in hell." Once this became public, once again, the media and the public were all over it.

Finally, the leader of this party, Danielle Smith, while making a speech in front of an oil well, talking about tar-sands and other resource development, stated that the science behind global warming is still questionable and highly controversial, so there was no reason not to rip up half the province just to extract expensive oil out of the ground. (Obviously highly paraphrased). Once again, this created a large media shitstorm.

So, once again, we have a PC majority. The Wildrose only managed a very weak 17 seats in the end, and while that does give them Official Opposition status, they likely won't have much bite.

Now, I'm not exactly a fan of the PC's either. But they're a hell of a lot better than Wildrose.

The good news in all of this? The people in this province are likely the most right-leaning people in the country, overall. And they have clearly stated that they are really, really, tired of bigotry, of racism, and of homophobia. And they simply won't tolerate it from our politicians. Also, those two candidates I mentioned? Both soundly defeated.

[Cole Parker]

Sounds like Nixon's silent majority at work.

My feeling is, most people, in most countries, are moderates. They even moderate their voices, and aren't heard much. They leave the bombast for the far right and far left. It seems those folks like bombast. They sure use it a lot.

But that silence in the middle doesn't mean those people aren't listening. They do, and they vote, and this is why we rarely get a far right or left candidate doing much in national elections.

Which I like. Both edges of both parties scare me. I like compromise and rational thought and middle-ground agreements.

We'll have two fairly moderate candidates running for president this year. It could be a lot worse.

C

[Merkin]

I agree, Cole, that the silence is in the middle, and hope desperately that on election day the electorate will make it's dissatisfaction with extreme positions on either side known. But I am terrified by what has happened within our Congress, for it is there that we see the outcome of rabble-rousing and negative campaigning in each of hundreds of congressional districts.