The Oldest Of All Human Tools

Take your pick and don't shovel too hard with it,
 it is highly self limiting for everybody
to live in sexual monocultures.

 

Now That Is The Kind Of Book Burning I like

In 2011 BBC Northern Ireland
adapted the book 'Christopher And His Kind',
a memoir of life in 1930's Germany by Christopher Isherwood.

They filmed the script in Belfast.
This afforded the locals the glorious sight
of their City Hall shrouded in swastikas,
which raised many eyebrows
and caused many knowing smiles
about the sad state of provincial politics.

Better than that, a book burning scene
was part of the script. The BBC contacted
every local charity shop in Belfast asking
for all the books donated to them
that the public won't buy second hand,
because the print run is bigger than the author's talent.
The sort of  books where the publishers hope
was that the author's fame would sell
the book and disguise how leaden their prose was.

The BBC probably paid the charity shops
for these literary sloppy seconds by weight,
thus creating a win-win scene
in which one book infused with talent,
'Christopher and His Kind' became the means
of temporarily cleansing one small corner
of the world of books in which the hope
of translating talent into sales
was solely down to the publishers' PR department.

I forgot to ask, did the BBC's fires
also burn the deadly prose of 'Mein Kampf'?

The Ladies

I admire the best all have beards.
I only see them in pictures,
fully clothed, and never in the flesh.
I often wonder, do they have hairy chests?

Doctors And Nurses

In England, and beyond, 'doctors and nurses'
used to be a popular children's pastime
based around a naive curiosity about the human body.

In England, and beyond, basic health care
is free at the point of need for those who ask.

In countries where hospital care
is paid for via a costly health insurance
I wonder how this changes how children play.

Do they charge each other imaginary sums of money
through insurance companies, and learn how to haggle  

over what is wrong with them, making the game financial?

That would be one way of practicing maths
that would be less than fanciful.

Or would the game end when one declared
'I have not got any money'
to which the other replied
'Then there is nothing wrong with you.'?  

The Past Sure Is Tense

Parenting is the process
of parents passing off
their past nurture
as their gift to their children,
as if that past were the purest,
and most definitive, present
that some children
would be better without.

Walpurgis Night

Walpurgis Night by Paul Klee. 'Walpurgis night'
 is the transition from winter to spring,
when witches would gather in the mountains.

Adam And Eve

and their descendants,
with all their hopes
for a life beyond time
are God's vanity
publishing project
called 'Planet Earth'.

Bad Family Values

'Living en famile provides the strongest motives
for rudeness combined with the maximum
opportunity for displaying it.'-Quentin Crisp 

Vanity Publishing

used to be a cottage industry
where small printing firms
bought advertising space
in semi-literary magazines,
to lure authors without agents
into believing that their talent
was worth the price
of the private printing their book.

It now means micro-talented youths 
who to prove that they have survived
been extruded through the mincer of fame,
extract more money from their fans,
and prove they have a personality
append their names to ghost written tomes
that pretend to be their lives.
Where the writing loses all the life
there was in it, before it is typeset.

Pity the trees pulped for such ventures,
pity the wildlife the trees no longer support.
Modesty is their undoing.

Pity the pseudo-sincere charity shops
that try to resell these mis-begat books,
now unsaleable, that devalue the charity
that they are for. The ghost writer industry
can move on, find others to write for
as fame becomes vanity
and the cause for further writing.

Religion

Religion is the life-long job
of connecting how having a soul
connects with having an arsehole,
and undoing the taboos around it.

Teach Yourself Your Lack Of Vocation

The surest way

to lose your identity
is endure an education
with no sense of vocation.

Alas, something that all to many go through.

A Gwen John Interior

See another Gwen John painting here.

Remote, Controlled

I never cease to be surprised
at how fast in prosperous societies
new technologies germinate,
from breezy aspirations for the near-future
to become nervous stabs 

at the unknown life in the present.

It is as if there is now no difference
between the experience of a life
and the half life of a life-style.

With the optimism of advertising,
we seem to be just buttons to be pressed.
We exist less to stroke one another,
more to press and be pressed
into serving a barren future.

A Little Positivity

May it travel wide in every direction.

Hereditary Dictatorships

Like North Korea, 

Syria is a hereditary dictatorship-
a thankfully rare form of government.

It is a condition of these regimes
that under the duress of domestic
disturbance reform will be promised
to 'the international community'.

But such regimes can never deliver
to their populations 

on their words to other governments,
because of their self interest,
and the wrongs to which
they would have to confess.

The gap between the promise of reform
and it's delivery has to be seen to be disbelieved.

Welcome To The Self Renewing Boredom

'It is not the simple statement
of facts that ushers in freedom;
it is the constant repetition
of them that has this liberating
effect. Tolerance is the result,
not of enlightenment, but of boredom'.
-Quentin Crisp

Shadow and Light

Like everyone else
I daily 'do my best to be myself'.
Like many, I often see others
as being better at being me than I am.

The natural choice with depression
is to create a shadow self
behind which to hide from life,
whilst living with the numbness
of a lack of recognition.

To paraphrase Woody Allen
'I don't mind living, I just don't
want to be there when it happens'.

Rubbish Is Us (2)

Without the kind permission of Ray Lowry.

Everything and Nothing

Genetically Homo sapiens
are practically a monoculture,
though our division from
the great variety of creation
is by the smallest of differences.

This small variation grants us
mastery over all other species
which is why we know everything
and understand nothing
about what we don't know.

How we advance surprises me.
Human science is a prayer
to an unknown deity,
who in his infinity has no humility.

Plu Ca Change...

Russian Communism
was an attempt at spreading
altruism tried by people
who had rarely experienced
the generosity that they
were trying to project,
which wrought new symbols
for the old meanness,
and very little else.

Rubbish Is Us (1)

At my local weekly car-boot sale
I enjoyed my walks. I go there often.
I enjoy browsing more than buying.
The human connection is worth more
than the goods being upcycled.

I was struck afresh by how the stall holders
prized their boxes more than the contents
-supposedly for sale-
which seemed to be collectively unwanted.

Was this, I thought, like Weimar Germany,
where with hyper-inflation the wheel barrow
in which a person carried their money
was more valuable than the money being carried?

Casting-A Poem

The waters deep, the waters dark,
Reflect the seekers, hide the sought,
Whether in water or in air to drown.
Between them curls the silver spark,
Barbed, baited, waiting, of a thought--
Which in the world is upside down,
the fish hook or the question mark?
-Howard Nemerov 1920-91

Opiates And Appetites

The hope of the world's end 
and being on the right side of The Hereafter
is surely the oldest and most universal opiate
known to Man, the species that defines addiction
as mere appetite.

Hope on that scale soothes
away the greatest insecurities,
seemingly far more effectively
than drugs, or improving the world
through an honest, but temporary,
aspiration towards humility.

A Townlandscape

by Gwyneth Johnstone,
daughter of  Augustus John.

Name Your Favourite Holocaust

There are a plenty to choose from.
The Holodomor in The Ukraine in 1931-32.
Between three and eight million died then,
and the papers kept on it remain secret.
It is most clearly remembered by survivors
through the shame they felt for eating their pets.

Then there is the Shoa of European Jewry,
1937-45, and the Meds Yeghern,
the genocide by Turks of the Armenians
in 1915-still a state secret in Turkey today.
Or at a stretch the deaths in the first
concentration camps, in The Boer War
as run by the British in 1901.

More recently there was mass starvation
as crops repeatedly failed in North Korea,
and Year Zero in Cambodia under the Kmer Rouge.

There are many more, large and small,
what with how they go under-reported.
My favourite would have to be the next one,
if only because it is the one we may yet stop.

Went Shopping, Got Shopped

Though technically I was still 'free'
I was confined by what I had bought,
it was the bars on the product that gave me away.

Uneasy Respites From Fame

'Cocaine is God's way of saying
"You have too much money"'
-Elton John, post rehab circa 1987
though he had a long way to go
to discover safer addictions, like shopping.

After cocaine came crack cocaine-
the intense but brief high that matches
the adulation popular singers gain
from their public acclaim,
the balm that calms how the power of fame
feeds into feeling hollow and needy.

With crack the voice declines faster
than the money disappears,
and the acclaim of the press
morphs into a morbid prurience,
from which there is no return.

Bargaining

is the art of inverting language
where the vendor says to the browser
'Make me an offer I can't refuse'
when what they mean is
'Offer me a deal that obliges
you to buy the goods'.

Have A Little Faith

I am sometimes rung up
by agents who try to sell me
some pricey insurance
for some electronic kit
that I have bought new.

It seems to me most unlikely
that the item will go faulty,
and if ever it did
then in these times of abundance
it would be cheaper to replace
than insure or repair.

To still the anxious heart of my cold caller
who wants me to insure the item I quietly say

'I admire your faith in insurance, 

but you are showing very little faith in the product I purchased... '.

Deaf Sceptics

have the ultimate respite
against the opinions of others;
what they never hear
they never have to disbelieve.