Plato
I’m the philosopher king
For you, I sing
Of forms of emptiness
Corruptible they become
A shadow of the light before
Sheltering all illusion
Of the perfect city,
That dwells in the clouds.
Terrible inundation
Of thought that gathers
While the artist rots
In the gallery garden;
The times are behind the times
Where mathematics is a law
Of abstract thoughts and time.
Delirious with geometrical precision
The cave lanterns flicker
And I go down to greet the host
Outstretching a hopeful hand.
The crowd takes no heed
Of the philosopher king
Whose ranting and raving
On a solitary sojourn
Through the park
Releases the true form
Of nothingness.
St. Augustine
He enjoyed ladies and cocktails
In his youth. He garnered
Beautiful kisses of ladies’ limbs
In the dark. Lust, desire
He equated with the life force
Until he fell, and broke
Cracking into the arms of the Lord.
In it, there was no more
Tomorrow, in post-history
Beyond sex and drugs
And inundations of madness.
He turned to Christ!
There was no more defense
In his disheveled state –
He no longer craved the indolence
Of his youth. He no longer yearned
For that nectar of woman
And perfume in the air.
He passed the time with the Lord
Beyond all faith and mercy
That he gave and received
Trance-mission of a greater calling
Death could not take him
Any more.
Marx
Marching down the streets
Socialist rendering the mass
Postering lamp-posts and cafés
For revolution in the streets.
Money, it’s all about it
There’s no tomorrow, when you can’t
Feed the belly today.
Winners of the bread do declare
When shall there be balance
From abundance and despair.
Shattering glass, a thief knows best
To grab when he can
Flowers from the air –
But these fake flowers
Are not life
That costs a pretty penny;
To live most anywhere.
The manifesto came and went
There was no more religion
Grasping at straws
With economy of verse
That can no longer rehearse
In the way of the dead.
Good night to wealth
Good night to poverty
From those who have
To those who need
We have seven days to work
No more days of rest.
Sartre
Puke! My head is dizzy
With all these thoughts
That swim around
Within my brain.
Cancer eats my soul
Devouring this nothingness
Where I am empty and full.
It is human to err!
Now I see a waiter
And I wonder how he sees me.
The imagination is alive
In this intersubjectivity
I wonder if I would make
A good jazz song
In the head of another.
There is duplicity
Self and other
We roam through tomes
Masquerading as luminous.
There is no more desire
Maybe, all is dead
I couldn’t make it any easier.
Shadows roam the earth
There is still some enlightenment
In this death and rebirth
Always in the stream of life.
Heidegger
O Nazi, I don’t really know what you’re about
Dasein, thrown down
To the earth, dreading
Time and being
That, is all
Immanence and ontology
You’re cracked
So fine, to say you’re so
It takes one who knows
Always immersed within the stream,
Where urchins play along the street.
You will be dead meat
If you cross my path
I am being because I am
Not because you say it’s so
I am not who you say I am.
Now laugh, Master
Life is not a joke
To pretend the end is night
Be brief, and extend your glory
As a thief, silent, under the moon.
Bide ;your time –
It is all we have
Tomorrow, you are nothing
But one day more
Than the day you were before
Yesterday.
Nietzsche
So God is dead!
Did we even need him in the sky
There is more to truth unless we lie
Where the silent crowd observes
The madman in the train.
There is more to life than meets the eye
Will to power makes us strong
Wrestle for glory with your mask
Firmly planted on your face.
There can be no self-deception
In this war, Zarathustra
It takes a warrior to even touch
A fleeting ray of the truth.
My mind goes mad –
I cannot grasp
A little of my reason.
Syphilitic curse, beyond all pain
Resentment will not take you
Very far. The universe
Is a wrestling ring.
Give up your haughtiness
There is no sure way for peace.
Disguise yourself in the scarf of an Arab
At least they know how to fight
Train yourself to struggle
You have all the world’s suffering
On your shoulders. Never
Back down.
Buber
Just you and me kid.
See you’ve let me in
Inside your study
Now it’s just
I and thou
So tell me what you’re writing
Existence, so I hear
Is masked intersubjectivity
Together we stand
On the edge of a cliff
Together, we have the city
At our feet
So do we dive
At breakneck speed
To fly around the urban core?
There is no more essence
Just existential dread
And compassionate fraternity.
I go with you, tonight
As Chagal would colour rainbows
And your Judaic sensibility
Makes me want to be a man.
Well, I do all that I can
To match your insightful humility
We will not be ghosts
Until the end of days!
Jarry
Pataphysics, pataphysics
Imaginary solutions
To imaginary problems
As far as we can see.
You drank your absinthe
And went insane –
But as you said
God is the shortest distance
Between zero and infinity.
You go straight to my head
You shit-eating snot!
I couldn’t care about you
Any more than I could fly.
But you do make some sense
And so we’ll play our instruments
To canonize your madness –
There is some laughter to be had.
Your Ubu Pere is a comic
And he makes me want to vomit
But at least there’s no despair
As the clown hands me a chair
To dance above the abyss
Amidst the audience.
How could you be so delightful
When everything is frightful
And so pristine –
Give me that magazine
And I’ll do my duty in the loo.
Kierkegaard
All your fear and trembling
Staring into the depths of the abyss
Does not illuminate weakness
But guards your solitude with strength.
It’s not easy to recover
From the sacrifice of a son
That religious ecstasy
Cannot ever ignore.
You will see the mark of Cain
If you do not surpass
Those ghostly voices in your head.
Are you not the god who made yourself?
And in what image of existence
Repetition is not necessary
But we must represent
Our struggle with the mind.
And now we’ve all declined
There are many here who fear us
And all the power we possess
But look at how we transgress –
I grow weary of this fight
To stay true to a god
Whose manifestation I do not know
Contain your power and redeem yourself
For they are sane who decline
To be the maker and the made.
Mao
So, you’ve had your Cultural Revolution
And the peasants shall rule
And overtake the warlords
Who once roamed your mighty land.
But leaders are called to make strange order
And death seems imminent to those
Who do not obey. Commies!
Better dead than red! They say,
And some may disagree.
And so we are reversed.
And so we are rehearsed.
Many died within the slaughter
And it took more than a little Buddha
To withstand the force
Of an emerging empire.
Red blood, red horizon!
Business men are farmers
And a poet rules the land.
Warrior Chinese pilgrims
All comrades in arms –
The military harms
And busts of Mao convey the Forbidden City.
Therer is nowhere to flee
A tyrant might rules the land
In the name of a people
For the people.
It’s tea time with Mao.
Krowley
Kappa Krowley
Where have you gone?
With your tarot card deck
And your helmet on.
Dreaming of stars
Constellations on their paths
Mercury conveying
The plans that history unfolds.
With Allah, you are
And with the Kabal
A weird mix, Kristian
Science and magick unified.
But you knew the people
By their very thought
And now I’ve dispelled
All the Egyptian magick you’ve wrought
With a Coptic cross, and pentagram
Tied to a silver chain; sulphur
And salt, I won’t answer back
Any more, my love is fuelled
By will, and I can’t
Break any more, to see
You face my sordid magesty
Good night cruel world
We die daily, and I am stone
I will not wake up for the sun
And its astrology
Shanti, when I wake
Death shall die once more.
Buddha
Ommm. The primal mother
A force that shelters in the womb
We are contained by Buddha nature
And we are pure and caring.
The string must be just taught
So it is neither too loose or too strong
So it can make a sound to play
Songs and music night and day.
Self! I sing to you to say no more
The monk can hear and see it all
The lama sits alone and claps
To demarcate his day.
The eastern cross shall guard
The Buddha in his path who won’t submit
To shadows, and illusions of samsara
Only Nirvana shall he strive for
An absence that is always present.
There is a tune for such a hermit
Not to despair but to rejoice
Everything is nothing, after all.
Concealing and revealing
Healing and dealing
With the force
In constant flux
Like a robin perched
In his nest, guarding and guiding
His young future.
All text and photography by:
JD Kruger, GLP4.
I’m the philosopher king
For you, I sing
Of forms of emptiness
Corruptible they become
A shadow of the light before
Sheltering all illusion
Of the perfect city,
That dwells in the clouds.
Terrible inundation
Of thought that gathers
While the artist rots
In the gallery garden;
The times are behind the times
Where mathematics is a law
Of abstract thoughts and time.
Delirious with geometrical precision
The cave lanterns flicker
And I go down to greet the host
Outstretching a hopeful hand.
The crowd takes no heed
Of the philosopher king
Whose ranting and raving
On a solitary sojourn
Through the park
Releases the true form
Of nothingness.
St. Augustine
He enjoyed ladies and cocktails
In his youth. He garnered
Beautiful kisses of ladies’ limbs
In the dark. Lust, desire
He equated with the life force
Until he fell, and broke
Cracking into the arms of the Lord.
In it, there was no more
Tomorrow, in post-history
Beyond sex and drugs
And inundations of madness.
He turned to Christ!
There was no more defense
In his disheveled state –
He no longer craved the indolence
Of his youth. He no longer yearned
For that nectar of woman
And perfume in the air.
He passed the time with the Lord
Beyond all faith and mercy
That he gave and received
Trance-mission of a greater calling
Death could not take him
Any more.
Marx
Marching down the streets
Socialist rendering the mass
Postering lamp-posts and cafés
For revolution in the streets.
Money, it’s all about it
There’s no tomorrow, when you can’t
Feed the belly today.
Winners of the bread do declare
When shall there be balance
From abundance and despair.
Shattering glass, a thief knows best
To grab when he can
Flowers from the air –
But these fake flowers
Are not life
That costs a pretty penny;
To live most anywhere.
The manifesto came and went
There was no more religion
Grasping at straws
With economy of verse
That can no longer rehearse
In the way of the dead.
Good night to wealth
Good night to poverty
From those who have
To those who need
We have seven days to work
No more days of rest.
Sartre
Puke! My head is dizzy
With all these thoughts
That swim around
Within my brain.
Cancer eats my soul
Devouring this nothingness
Where I am empty and full.
It is human to err!
Now I see a waiter
And I wonder how he sees me.
The imagination is alive
In this intersubjectivity
I wonder if I would make
A good jazz song
In the head of another.
There is duplicity
Self and other
We roam through tomes
Masquerading as luminous.
There is no more desire
Maybe, all is dead
I couldn’t make it any easier.
Shadows roam the earth
There is still some enlightenment
In this death and rebirth
Always in the stream of life.
Heidegger
O Nazi, I don’t really know what you’re about
Dasein, thrown down
To the earth, dreading
Time and being
That, is all
Immanence and ontology
You’re cracked
So fine, to say you’re so
It takes one who knows
Always immersed within the stream,
Where urchins play along the street.
You will be dead meat
If you cross my path
I am being because I am
Not because you say it’s so
I am not who you say I am.
Now laugh, Master
Life is not a joke
To pretend the end is night
Be brief, and extend your glory
As a thief, silent, under the moon.
Bide ;your time –
It is all we have
Tomorrow, you are nothing
But one day more
Than the day you were before
Yesterday.
Nietzsche
So God is dead!
Did we even need him in the sky
There is more to truth unless we lie
Where the silent crowd observes
The madman in the train.
There is more to life than meets the eye
Will to power makes us strong
Wrestle for glory with your mask
Firmly planted on your face.
There can be no self-deception
In this war, Zarathustra
It takes a warrior to even touch
A fleeting ray of the truth.
My mind goes mad –
I cannot grasp
A little of my reason.
Syphilitic curse, beyond all pain
Resentment will not take you
Very far. The universe
Is a wrestling ring.
Give up your haughtiness
There is no sure way for peace.
Disguise yourself in the scarf of an Arab
At least they know how to fight
Train yourself to struggle
You have all the world’s suffering
On your shoulders. Never
Back down.
Buber
Just you and me kid.
See you’ve let me in
Inside your study
Now it’s just
I and thou
So tell me what you’re writing
Existence, so I hear
Is masked intersubjectivity
Together we stand
On the edge of a cliff
Together, we have the city
At our feet
So do we dive
At breakneck speed
To fly around the urban core?
There is no more essence
Just existential dread
And compassionate fraternity.
I go with you, tonight
As Chagal would colour rainbows
And your Judaic sensibility
Makes me want to be a man.
Well, I do all that I can
To match your insightful humility
We will not be ghosts
Until the end of days!
Jarry
Pataphysics, pataphysics
Imaginary solutions
To imaginary problems
As far as we can see.
You drank your absinthe
And went insane –
But as you said
God is the shortest distance
Between zero and infinity.
You go straight to my head
You shit-eating snot!
I couldn’t care about you
Any more than I could fly.
But you do make some sense
And so we’ll play our instruments
To canonize your madness –
There is some laughter to be had.
Your Ubu Pere is a comic
And he makes me want to vomit
But at least there’s no despair
As the clown hands me a chair
To dance above the abyss
Amidst the audience.
How could you be so delightful
When everything is frightful
And so pristine –
Give me that magazine
And I’ll do my duty in the loo.
Kierkegaard
All your fear and trembling
Staring into the depths of the abyss
Does not illuminate weakness
But guards your solitude with strength.
It’s not easy to recover
From the sacrifice of a son
That religious ecstasy
Cannot ever ignore.
You will see the mark of Cain
If you do not surpass
Those ghostly voices in your head.
Are you not the god who made yourself?
And in what image of existence
Repetition is not necessary
But we must represent
Our struggle with the mind.
And now we’ve all declined
There are many here who fear us
And all the power we possess
But look at how we transgress –
I grow weary of this fight
To stay true to a god
Whose manifestation I do not know
Contain your power and redeem yourself
For they are sane who decline
To be the maker and the made.
Mao
So, you’ve had your Cultural Revolution
And the peasants shall rule
And overtake the warlords
Who once roamed your mighty land.
But leaders are called to make strange order
And death seems imminent to those
Who do not obey. Commies!
Better dead than red! They say,
And some may disagree.
And so we are reversed.
And so we are rehearsed.
Many died within the slaughter
And it took more than a little Buddha
To withstand the force
Of an emerging empire.
Red blood, red horizon!
Business men are farmers
And a poet rules the land.
Warrior Chinese pilgrims
All comrades in arms –
The military harms
And busts of Mao convey the Forbidden City.
Therer is nowhere to flee
A tyrant might rules the land
In the name of a people
For the people.
It’s tea time with Mao.
Krowley
Kappa Krowley
Where have you gone?
With your tarot card deck
And your helmet on.
Dreaming of stars
Constellations on their paths
Mercury conveying
The plans that history unfolds.
With Allah, you are
And with the Kabal
A weird mix, Kristian
Science and magick unified.
But you knew the people
By their very thought
And now I’ve dispelled
All the Egyptian magick you’ve wrought
With a Coptic cross, and pentagram
Tied to a silver chain; sulphur
And salt, I won’t answer back
Any more, my love is fuelled
By will, and I can’t
Break any more, to see
You face my sordid magesty
Good night cruel world
We die daily, and I am stone
I will not wake up for the sun
And its astrology
Shanti, when I wake
Death shall die once more.
Buddha
Ommm. The primal mother
A force that shelters in the womb
We are contained by Buddha nature
And we are pure and caring.
The string must be just taught
So it is neither too loose or too strong
So it can make a sound to play
Songs and music night and day.
Self! I sing to you to say no more
The monk can hear and see it all
The lama sits alone and claps
To demarcate his day.
The eastern cross shall guard
The Buddha in his path who won’t submit
To shadows, and illusions of samsara
Only Nirvana shall he strive for
An absence that is always present.
There is a tune for such a hermit
Not to despair but to rejoice
Everything is nothing, after all.
Concealing and revealing
Healing and dealing
With the force
In constant flux
Like a robin perched
In his nest, guarding and guiding
His young future.
All text and photography by:
JD Kruger, GLP4.
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