Back to The Living Dead part three
THE LIVING DEAD
They say that life in the country
is so much more healthy.
That's because everything is soft.
It folds at the fingertips.
When you're living in the city,
then all you've got is people.
There are always so many,
and all of them acting tough.
That's why people go to the pictures
and look - the way they can't in the street,
and why they buy magazines
and why they're always so nervous,
and why the city is better,
because there's something to come up against.
The country carries you away.
It makes you very big.
You fill up the landscape.
You become just the one thing.
The ecstasies of the city
that you snatch in
staring at a boy sitting at the far side of a crowded café
are only sideshows
that accompany you while you
are up to something else.
The city is going places.
The countryside, love and poetry
are the living dead.
THE LIVING DEAD REVISITED
There is an absence of generosity
in living in the country
and proclaiming it to be
more 'spiritual' than the city
For the city is full,
surely, of a multitude
of spirits or are these
somehow less spiritual
than rocks and birds and trees?
No, but they are obstacles
to the enormity
of spirit, hence the solitary
seeking God
seeks solitude.
It is the rock's very
absence of spirituality
that sets the spirit free.