Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Cliff Beck

Escaping the Dream.

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by Cliff Beck.

 

We live the dream in a land where things are not what they seem;

where the here and now is discarded for a sacred cow;

a future sold in a sequence of seductive social memes

which the panopticon uses to accuse, judge and abuse

if we can’t afford it, or try to refuse.

 

To live the dream is to grieve when the fantasies we receive

tantalise then vaporise before our very eyes

as the paint blisters and cracks on the dream home,

the dream car rusts and the dream holiday that’s a must

ends in hangovers, flight delays and a credit card that’s bust.

 

But the dream merchants still peddle illusions of future bliss

which delusions of self-respect insist we must not resist

and so we juggle jobs, part time gigs,

overdrafts, and childminding kids;

money, mind and body all overspent in futile attempts

to acquire the chimera of implanted desire.

 

Then a ball slips through fatigued fingers,

followed by another, and another.

Devastated, enervated we give up, throwing away the lot:

and guess what;

the birds still sing, wedding bells ring, children are born

and we‘re freed from belief in unicorns.

Scots pine and sea spray.

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by Cliff Beck. We’ve travelled many years to discover that we’re here where the air carries a bouquet of Scots pine and sea spray prompting memories of endless days on mountains, moorland and seashore; the immensity and intensity of it all making us feel so ephemeral, so small. Remember summer days spent under the trees, […]

Free to be.

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by Cliff Beck. To float in a cool calm sea exploring its tide and currents, imagining its farthest shores. To sit under a clear sky on a warm day watching trees sway in a summer breeze thinking of a world at ease with itself and everyone else. To eschew a world meshed in networks of […]

Of times and tides.

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by Cliff Beck. I Stand in awe as low tide exposes endless stretches of glistening gold. The vastness infers permanence, re assurance that there is a forever more. But look at the fields by the shore with fences hanging in mid-air, their disrepair a monument to the futility of failing to go with the endless […]

Mourning in Time.

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I can’t help feeling it’s ironic that Marissa and I settled on “Time on Our Side” as the theme for this issue, since in the meantime, sadness has overtaken EAP like a blanket of fog. Too much death. Nothing we can do can change that. To think we can do away with death is to […]

Only Persist.

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If you’re a certain age, you might remember a party gag called the Chinese Finger Trap. It’s a simple bamboo cylinder that traps your fingers at both ends. The usual reaction to being trapped like that is to pull your fingers away from each other, making it impossible to free yourself. The only way to […]

Pull back the curtains and open the door.

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by Cliff Beck. Weary of winter mornings filled with the dark confusion that underscored the night before we long to see Helios climbing high, illuminating our lives as his fiery chariot crosses the summer sky. Yet as soon as rosy fingered Eos calls us from our beds we change the time, banish the lark, bring […]

Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.

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by Cliff Beck. My skin, nose and eyes sense trillions of photo-electric stimuli which my mind will synthesise and simplify to create blue skies, warm bread; every experience that fills my head with memories, generating thoughts, intuitions and future visions. But the more I think the more separated, more complicated I become sat in my […]

All at Sea.

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by Cliff Beck. Sailing eastwards under a clear sky towards yet another day that once seemed so far away we follow the stars we have always known to steer by. I stand motionless at the prow between the bow wave which, like the treasure trove of memories saved from my journey to now, grows ever […]

Strangers in strange lands.

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by Cliff Beck. Feeling the pain of injustice and loss tears run hot in the tracks etched into your face as you trudge through a desolate space hunched against a world that doesn’t care and ignores the despair which cuts to the bone trapping you in congealed emotion; disconnected, bereft and alone. You feel their […]