Please Don't Watch Television

Because if when television was analogue
it was primitive but seemingly addictive,
now it is digital with many more channels,
on which to show many more repeats,
than we can count, it is harder to navigate,
and much worse for our attention span.

 

 

Andy Warhol

put his heart and soul into his paintings.
He was a sickly man with a simple plan,
to be more creative with money
than he was in his art,
in which being slapdash
and making use of serendipity
was the height of his creativity.

He never knew how long
he did not have to live.

Democratic Politics

is like Religion-a good disguise
for turning altruism into selfishness,
whilst monetarising chaos through divide and rule.

That said, when elections are regular
and how our leaders are chosen
is half-worthy of trust
then those changes at least ensure
that the future will be made by mistakes
that we have not made in the past.
  

The English Vice:

wanting to be seen to be fair
whilst being selfish enough
to destroy the commensality
that ensures true fairness.

The Certainty Of Dogs

is 'Good News' for their owners.

'Love' Revealed Through Grace/Action

'Beauty without grace
is like a hook without the bait'-
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seems that Mr Emerson was referring
to the grace in actions performed
within relationships, where the beauty
lay in the action more than the appearance
of the person performing the action.

Heresy;

the oldest form of 'free will'
that religion has 'allowed',
not that the heresy 
(or anything else in life)
is in any way unconditional.

'Adam' and 'Eve'

were the first heretics
and the founders of life,
which is why ever since,
long after the events,
orthodoxy has always been
pedantic, a comma here
a full stop there, and relative.

Self Diagnosis

whilst resisting acceptance of what we are
is truly frustrating, it is a frustration
we pass on to each other.

The Bigger The Brain

the bigger the lie,
whether human or computer,
and the more powerful
it's means of transmission.
The more it multiplies.
The harder it becomes
to unpick the lies, later.

We Are The Dead

Actions change what words ossify,
as if the dictionary were the ossuary
and our words are the bones
of our now petrified civilisation.

We are the dead, asking each other
what life is like is our occupation.

Why Dogs Don't Use Computers

If humans knew
the simplicity of dogs
then we would not
make each other cogs
in some infernal machine
that is destroying the planet
we live on, in our detachment.

A Ray Lowry Oil Painting

I don't know the title of this picture,
by Ray Lowry, but where in other
images by him he channels is inner
Edvard Munch, this channels his inner
Edward Hopper, but both depict the loneliness
of the twentieth century with startling accuracy.

The Wisdom Of Depression

From enlightenment
to melancholy
is always a shorter
journey than
it first appears to be.

The journey back
is the harder path,
reversing where
we have been.  

Museums

are white walled chapels of rest
for objects with no use left in them.
They are visited most by people
with no sense of grief,
at the lives presented as gone
in the exhibits that are present,
and a numbed sense of curiosity.

When Is The Next Extinction?

Technology frets and fiddles
at programming human want,
however contrarily humans think.

 
Meanwhile we burn the worlds' resources
at ever faster rates, aspiring to 'ensure diversity,
well beyond ourselves', when we can't see that far.

Apart from the speed at which it is happening, 
the world has seen it all before
-in the previous five extinctions.

Faith In Science

'The big bang'
was the universal
'leap of faith' for all matter.

Human life came long after
and is it's small and slowly dying echo.

Priceless

Life is not worth the superlatives
that modern capitalists use to describe it;
It is worth a lot more than they
(or anyone else) can say.

With the Wisdom of Creosus

millionaires plan the futures of the poor,
and the less poor, around their wealth,
not only not knowing who Croesus was,
but not knowing how, if their wealth increases
then everyone else will end up with less.

How Contrary

When I am depressed
it always seems odd to note
how cynicism harbours hope.

The Universal

human experience;
life is always founded
on a sense of debt 

and can therefore
never be carefree,
though death might be
a release from obligation.

Advertising

is to need what
hypochondria
is to good health;
the illusion of always
wanting more whilst
at the same time
accounting poorly
for what we have.

Cheer Up Mate....

The Miracle

I might want,

but will never see,
is an end to
human hypocrisy,
because that would
mean no more of me.

Licence To Misrule

Gambling, drink and whoring
are the three pillars of absentee patriarchy,
where the more the wife and the children
are confined to the home the less they know
about what a man does outside the home,
where the errant man has his full licence,
.

Given a Choice of Uninvited Guest

I would choose
in order of preference
1)spiders 

2)woodlice 

3)mice
4)rats 

5)burglars
6)teenage vandals.

I forgive the mess that animals make
much more readily than the mindless
avarice of human beings.

Empathy Is....

click  on it to make it bigger

Hospitals And Care Homes,

with their advanced care for the elderly,
exist to take the heroism out of death
and blunt the sharpness of grief.

Love And It's Exits

'It is always possible to bind
together a considerable number
of people in love, so long
as there are other people left over
to receive the manifestations
of their aggression.' - Sigmund Freud

In Heaven

Everyone present except the host
is a happy parasite, put there
by a naturalising but alien grace.

Noblesse Oblige

If anyone should see the fires of Hell,

as a viable eternity, their first consideration
should be their own aptness for being sent there

in the next life, for how fitting they thought it

fit for others would do well there, 
and think first of who would send them
there, beyond any human agent.