My Science Fiction Christmas

With every season of good will
and expression of joy to the world
I wish it was the last,
less because I want the world to end
and more because I can't cope
with the brain-dead cliches
that media manufactures think
are a fit commercial celebration
for the living to own the event.

The flatness that follows the kitsch and the empty 'hale fellow and well met' type greetings hollow me out, beyond belief.

What I would like to read is the Christmas science fiction story where Martians mimic what rich earthlings do at Christmas, and badly mangle the theology and get the event utterly wrong.

The nearest to such an account I have found is in the following unsentimental work by William Burroughs 'The Junky's Christmas'... 

Which False Foundation Would You Like To Build Upon?

The world is built on problems that resist resolution
where the more singularly we strive to correct the wrongs
the more our corrections look like playground arguments
as spouted by adults, in other words 'politics', 
or some other half-arsed attempt
at marrying humanity with humility.

We under-estimate the limits of our will,
as our errors take on a life of their own
making us responsible for results
we don't want to own, but have to.

The future starts with us accepting where we are.

Who Is Really Sorry?

When with their apologies
the rich and famous feel better
about their second apology
than felt about their first
where they knowingly crafted the first
with a knowing and thoughtless crassness?

Certainly not the public,
when the media
give the sloppiness a free pass
an quote and requote it verbatim.... 
 

Looking For Miss Misinformation

Everyone who has an online life,
however secure their computer, 
endures the adverts that are carried
by the popular programming of their choice.

Adverts are to programmes
what tics and fleas are a dog,
stuff their owner to deal with. 

So if you want to deal with your advertisers,
then in the search engine of your choice
put in the name of a company whose adverts
you don't mind and your computer world
will be set for you to receive regular adverts
from that company; because you chose the company
and you never wanted their product, just adverts for them, job done.

The baggage the adverts leave on your computer,
the trackers and the cookies etc, can be dealt with later.  

Where I Belong

When ever I am advised 
that I 'should update my life',
or repent of my past - the better
to absorb the latest version of virtue -
I don't know how to respond.

I know my past, it's rights and wrongs,
and what of it that I should not repeat
-most of my childhood/being parented
the conditions of which I am now glad
were unique to those times anyway. 

So why should I change what I say 
about myself and my past, when change
becomes one cheap lie after another
to fit around the latest in consumerism

I am who I am whether I want to lump it,
like it, or live in a past where I know I belong.    

The Cowardice Of Being Out Of Range

Paywalls were put up by newspapers
to fund the future of journalism, online
after the bottom dropped out the analogue
advertising market and far fewer folk
bought printed newspapers. 

Digital print relies on fixed subscription
where reliance on adverts often hides
behind pleas for paid memberships,
where the newspaper proprietor says
 'you can't take this print away from behind the pay wall'.

That advertising has pushed print news
to this defensiveness place is old old news,
and many who are interviewed can't help
but go along with the media of the day,
to get publicity for their latest project.

But when money and power colour information
don't expect a press free at the point
of it being easily read any time soon,
much less in the future. 

Modern Science

divides into so many specialist subjects
that don't/won't reference each other
that where wealth creates knowledge
whatever we learn isolates us from each other,
as, like poor Alice in Alice in Wonderland,
we each go down different rabbit holes
of isolation and misunderstanding.

I have no antidote, or any way of making
the scientific rabbit holes meet t up
with each other, all I try to look after,
the better to limit it, is my sense of isolation