Seeing And Not Seeing

Faith; the fetish for the unseen
and the non-corporeal
where we seem to be blind 
to what is in front of us.

The Formula For Aspirituality

Man + machine = man detached,
drifting from his origins, nature.

Inheriting The Means For Division

Where there is a will
there is often a wilfulness;
material gain fits very well
with inheritance
with it come the means
with which to divide others.

An Agnostic Writes...

In my first language, English,
I am secure, I understand and talk
with equal assuredness, I even swear.

In all other tongues, like those of angels
and prayer, my words will falter,
but my thanks are sincere.

Addressing so certain and unknown
a cause as the intelligent nature
of the world surely requires humility.

The Lords of The Universe Contemplate The World Recession

My Shadow Self,

like other people's shadow selves, will be competitive.
But in myself, for having less than many others,
and for sharing the less that I have, it will always seem lighter.

Nothing Ever Happens In The Present

The present passivity of hope deferred
and then obscured beyond recognition
is the religion of the 21st century.
Nothing ever happens in the present.

When The National Dish Is The Language Of The Menu

'You never Know it might be the effect of their pioneer history. All that rancid belly of pork which frightened them off food, and made them think that anything that you could actually taste must have something wrong with it. Sometimes the only way of identifying the food in America is by eye, rather than palate. It has to be food shaped. Where has all the flavour gone?

One theory is that it has been syphoned out of the cuisine and put on the menu. There your hamburger is a Kingburger, a Bulgy burger. A Hugeburger, is not cooked, but  smoked oh so slowly over crackling hickory logs prior to nestling within, being cuddled between, or indeed graciously amassed upon, two  super-soft bake oven baps and served knee deep in sweet mustard sauce.

That is why when it arrives, piping hot, from your hosts genial charcoal heart, I should  say hearth, it tastes of nothing. Drowned in rhetoric, the flavour dies. The national dish of America is the menu.'

-Robert Robinson on American cuisine

Transparency In American Politics

The bullet-proof glass
in front of the podia in the stadia
where The President speaks
are as transparent as America ever gets 

about it's gridlocked Politics.

Unseen, it shields the human behind it
from the the potential for bullets,
whilst supporting the many divisions
that spread though language.

Hope Deferred With Vincent Van Gogh

The joke being that if he were alive
how would he hear after mutilating his ear?
And if he were dead they were inattentive... 
The bleakest fact being that in his lifetime
Vincent sold one painting, to his brother Theo
who died six months after Vincent died.

Terrorism Is....

surrealism through violence,
assisted by the media circus
that misquotes the source
in any story it tells us.

The Personal Pronoun Of Lack Of Choice

When I was a child there was an 'us'
in which the 'them' mattered more,
and we all knew it and denied it.

There was a 'we' in the crowd
that I had to follow, 

that over-ran me
and left me hollow.

There was 'I' too, but it was one
that I was never allowed to be, 

until long after it could be counted.

Fish For All ?

Socialism was the belief that everyone,
man woman and child, merited their fish,
and there are enough fish to go round
if/when we all shared what we had.

Capitalism says that men should
compete for rods to be sufficiently proud
of what they possess to do each other down
and do down what they aspire to,
through pride in their own rod.

Christianity is the hope, against all realism,
that the sea is blessed with enough fish
to make the species that uniquely believes
it has a soul, when other species do not,
present itself as modest, to any soul who enquires.

Sexuality And Relationships; The Menu/Guide

Where even when we understand the choices
and the different labels, and learn to not judge others
we can't change what our pasts have made us,
when the labels were different.
What we can do is use the menu/
the implement guide to seek out
that empathetic partner for life.
Though even there we may seek
but still not find them. 
 

Darkness In Deed And Word

An innocent sounding lie,
however well intended a ruse,
will always blacken what it touches,
just as surely as the hit
from a fist will form a bruise.

The main difference
between them is one of speed,
the bruise will be immediate,
the blackness from the lie
will show itself much slower.

A Gwen John Painting

See another Gwen John (1876-1939) painting here.
I like this painting because it is a landscape
that has little sign of human life in it.

A Long Gone Presidential Candidate Wrote

'As Long as there is a lower class I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element I am of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison I am not free'
-Eugene Debs 1855-1926*



*four times charismatic socialist candidate for the president of the USA.
At his peak in 1912 he polled 6% of the popular vote, 900,000 votes.
The last time he ran for president he did so from a prison cell for his
'espionage and sedition' towards the end of WW1, in which he, like
thousands of others who were caught up in the loss of civil liberties,
he was also barred for life from voting. He won 3.5 % of the vote.

Long Before Prozac There Was Quilting

and it was a far more productive way
for women to keep calm than medication
decided by male doctors ever could be.
In more recent times women knitted socks
for charity in lieu of personal achievement.

 

The Father Of Perpetual Infant-asy,

Sigmund Freud, never saw his mother naked,
he merely imagined that he had seen her that way.

When he imagined that he saw his mother
naked he imagined he was aroused by the scene.

What he imagined, for his never actually seeing it,
became a collective fantasy, beyond all counting.

For A Tidier Life......

'Laughter and tears are both responses 

to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, 

since there is less cleaning up to do afterwards'-Kurt Vonnegut

Misdirection Made Personal

Education; how to squander
and divert the energy of youth,
and infantilize future adulthood
the better for advertisers to exploit us.

After Nearly 800 Years

of The Chinese using gunpowder
to ward off evil spirits,
Chairman Mao changed the script
when he said 'Political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun'.

But the makers of guns have more power
than their holders. 

Now, like all previous empires,
manufacturers fight wars through trade
-evil spirits for export-to create
a new, more spiralling, dependence.

The Oddest Defence Of Prostitution

You are ever likely to hear is.... 

'Prostitutes are not paid for having sex,
they are paid for leaving afterwards.'-Charlie Sheen

But then the depths of his evasions
about living the high life went rather far.

In his accounts 'friendly entertainments'
were how the eye watering costs of sex workers
got written down, whilst in the meanwhile
he denied to himself that he was HIV positive. 

Entertainment Vs Irritation

'Seeing a murder on television can help
[you] work off one's antagonisms.
And if you haven't any antagonisms
the commercials will give you some.'
-Alfred Hitchcock

The Life We Turn On And Off In The Corner

'Television is more interesting
than people, if it were not
we would have people
standing in the corners
of our rooms'-Alan Coren

A Self Portrait by D. H. Lawrence

Self portraits were not the only paintings he painted.
In 1929 he put on show in a private gallery a series
of paintings that were as sensual as they were primitive
in the techniques with which they were painted.
Ninety years on, what remained of the original
paintings was shown again to a more sympathetic response.
Please read about it here.

Choice in Disbelief

'When I told the people of Northern Ireland
that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience
stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God
of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants
in whom you don't believe?'-Quentin Crisp 

The Evening News

is when presenters
and say 'Good Evening'
and proceed tell the public
who it was not so good for.

National And Personal Delusion

Long before Rohypnol created amnesiac victims
of sexual assault absolute power, self censorship,
and corruption to the point of total misinformation
have made people yield and submit just as effectively.

The Easy Life

The road to Hell often presents itself 
as the path of least resistance,
how else would it appear to so attractive?