In A Fools Paradise

the greatest revelation
is knowing you must leave
and the greatest wisdom
comes from our choice of  exit.

The Weakness Of Democracy

We don't have to be

a fool or a democrat

to argue with an idiot,

but if both are evasive

and the public argument
provers idiotic
that will increase equality

through decreasing choice.

The 10,000 Hour Rule

World class violinists typically practice
for 10,000 hours, between aged 7 and 20
to get that skilled.
The better to play the violin in their dreams too.
It is not a penance, or a sentence in a prison,
but a skill for life, and discipline as freedom.

In countries ruled through television
children spend a similar amount of time
at the same age in front of the 2D box
of digital extra-terrestrial delights,
apprenticing for a non-vocation
of being kept in passive ease, in isolation.

Like L. S, Lowry I sometimes see myself,

as 'A man who paints', but unlike him
I only recently found the gift,
and the means of looking after it.
I wish I had found both earlier.

As Easy As Dreams

Eugene Polley died today,
he invented the remote control.
The device which makes the armchair
life more luxurious, and television
viewing as easy as dreams.
Many could say his invention
was a nifty bit of engineering,
if they cared enough,
or knew how these things are made.

He did well to make inactivity
so enticing, and passivity so quietly passive
to the point that by merely pushing buttons
we can instantly summon, and dispose of,
millions of temporary, and faked, worlds.

He could have been a figure
from a Philip K. Dick dystopia,
he has remade us to live that way.

It Takes Grit To Get Through Life

If you see the planet as your oyster
you may well see yourself it's pearl.
As you, do appreciate you are made
of the dust of the earth, made round
and bright, for being polished under water.
Reflect long and gently, with humility,
on the duller forms of sand,
who for lack of shine muddily reflect
each other. They are as dependent
as you on that shell, for their shelter.
 
.

The Dyslexia Fairy

One of my best friends is my dyslexia fairy,
who before I could write used to give me sixpence
in exchange for the baby teeth I left for her under my pillow.
Now I am grown up her job is to transpose
my letters as I write online-where my words
are easiest read-and bless me with her typos
when my concentration flags.
Long may we have a fruitful relationship.

The Comforts Of The Night

Saint Augustine prayed nightly to be freed
of 'the glue of lust', or nocturnal emissions.
He did not even pray for a person
to be glued to, in affirming companionship.
His prayers were answered
by his coming to believe that since
he could not control his emissions
the way he controlled his prayers,
by intent, his ejaculations were not sin,
and his prayers were aspirations to absolute celibacy.
aspirations which were far as beyond him
as grace was beyond human virtue.

As an everyday wanker I would say
to my maker of the nightly emanations
that haunt my imagination
'Thank you for them being where they are,
in my head, and for the grace of what I see
not being real, nor in front of me wanting
breakfast in the morning. Amen'.
I admit I feel uneasy about cohabiting.

The nightly emanations I trust the most
are from the BBC, World Service Radio
telling me things that I did not know,
that when I wake up I won't remember.

Sophistication

is to sophistry what charm is to lies;
both make what would be better
resisted all to easy to accept.

Representative Democracy;

is fog and mirrors writ large on public life.
It is at best it is a circular motion.
Rather like pork barrel politics
where for having the vote
people exchange the passivity
of being kept for the active hope
of being listened to and material gain.

Any politician acting against the pressures
of their media advisers, their gate-keepers,
on a platform of reform will never last
without appeasing the old interests
that got them where they are now.
So what is the real hope of change?

At The Cliches Olympics

millions of brain cells died like lemmings
as people's eyes were glued to the screens:
Television was everywhere,
in both private and public.
It regurgitated ad nauseum
every familiar tick and twitch
that the everyday culture
of the last sixty years has produced.
Where The Queen of Banalities
and dysfunctional family values had ruled.
Her reign, which is going on and on and on
seemed be so much longer than it actually was.

The Primrose Path

of evangelical zeal
seems unshakably real
to those caught up in it.
But seen from the side
their journey is more 
a self righteous blindness
towards the choices of others,
denying the conditionality of reality.

From Israel To Belfast

fences root themselves in peoples minds
and become internal walls against open war between 'communities'.
Whilst the media feed the locals on each side cliches of their pasts
to help maintain the belief that the dividers remain 'peace walls'.
The better to sustain old enmities by means other than war.
How better to make 'cross community diplomacy'
each side repeating its losses to itself, and project the other side 
as winners, all whilst pretending to listen to and empathize?

Self Fulfilling Prophesy

is nowadays less to do with prophesy
and more about the self fulfillment
of the media pundit using the phrase,
who likes to be right
about the not-so-obvious in the near future.

True prophesy is about more
than predicting the new disguise
life will take on with the nearness
of changes in law and technology.

The contrariness of true prophets
is that they live so far beyond the obvious
that although they are right, they half invite
being misunderstood, until it is too late to listen.

The Word 'Scientist'

was coined in 1834, by the British Scientific Association,
and coined in fear of it's nearness to the word 'Atheist'.
Since then science has been so brilliant at solving small problems
through an intensity of effort that it belies the generality
of human apathy and myopia.

Where science remains truer to human sloth and evasion
is that the harder it hounds the bigger questions
about the history of life on Earth, the more science
makes it seem like we are at a party and are the last to arrive,
long after many other guests have already left.
And our arrival hastened their departure.
The harder science seeks big answers to the bigger
questions the more it makes myopia look reasonable.

Facebook-

the lifestyle addition
to a life that creates
an infinite capacity
for collective solipsism
that is ultimately
about avoidance.

Half-Sightedness

'An for an eye only leads to more blindness'-Margaret Atwood

It Takes Two To Listen

-one to the other and back again.
It takes two to stop listening, unawares
they are doing so, for trying to think
what to say next, and after that
to talk over each others thoughts.

It takes two to cast blame,
one to cast the blame, the other
to have the blame cast upon them.
It takes two to stop, separate and reset
their positions, gift each other the space
that will allow both of them to start again.

500 years

of the enlightenment project has created a Western World
with a bewildering variety of creeds, governments, and constitutions.
Many new religions and dependencies too, as identities splinter.
Most of all we revere new technologies for the good they do,
the short term ease they bring us, though the we fail to see
the line between reverence and blind worship until we cross it.

Nowhere are these changes more apparent
than in the way that we have reduced the awareness
required for mutual forgiveness, and the power of same,
to level of cognition of the contents the toilet bowl
before we press the handle of a flush toilet.
 .

Poor Willie

On his 75th birthday
Willie Nelson ruefully said
'I have outlived my pecker',
but I hope his sense of humour
grace and intelligence survive-
whatever a man douses with
he will survive better
for having something to seek,
and the right tools to seek with.

Human History

is the slow digestion of one narrative by another,
and another ad infinitum until all the ephemera
in language and memory, what gives it character,
breaks down, into a form so compressed it is petrified.

The vocation of historians, theologians and philosophers
-the few who choose what they get to do
on behalf of the many who don't- is to reverse the process.
Disinter the tangled mass of the past in ways
that make it fresh, readable by the future.

The human narrative is the shortest, most self referential,
arid and destructive in the history of the planet.
It is now said that the dinosaurs made themselves,
extinct by the greenhouses gases in their flatulence.
Like those deadly gases history can only repeat itself.

The Serpent's Eye

'One bad apple can rot a whole barrel'
is a medeavil  phrase that reflects a simpler
approach to the mysteries of the world.
That for the want of seeing mystery remains intact.

What rots apples is not the first apple,
but how the fruit is stored.
It is not merely that poor housing
starts the rot, or even that the first to rot
will be the first of many.
It is that both decay and virtue
hide how they are formed.
Unseen, they create their own consistency.

Thus the problem with the fruit
from the tree of knowledge
was not with the fruit itself,
nor it's apparent ripeness
or the lack of preparedness
of the intended recipients,
but with how the gaderene rush
became the light in the serpent's eye
when it knew how power in one person
reinforces shame in another, degrading both
as if they were the first form of  perpetual motion.

Signs Of Greater Age (5)

1-being aggrieved when an
email server says it is 'sorry'
it 'can't send' what you have
just written, as if it is human,
rather than a sum of logarithms
with some very distant human
being somewhere in the infinity
of cyberspace minding the shop
with something less than vigilance.

2-being more grateful than
when younger of successfully
negotiated an automated
multi-option phone system,
to have finally reached
a live human being, hopefully
capable of sensitivity and humour.

The Simulation Of Omnipresence

that mobile phones enable
has gone far beyond being resistible.
Through control of the present
it forces us aspire to increasing success
by having us multi-task our way into the future.

Whilst hitching lifts I often see
car drivers phone in one held to their ear
with one hand, the other at the wheel.
Their eyes fleetingly messaging me
in passing, 'waving not drowning'.

For as much as we spread ourselves
thinly through multi-tasking
by being in as many places at once
as we think we can be
we divide our selves too.
The simulation of omnipresence
is more simulation than presence,
much less is it omniscience.

Government Health Warnings Gain A New Finality

Without the kind permission of Ray Lowry

Wisdom

is the comb a man receives
after losing his hair to old age.

Life Is About Decay,

decline is the measure of life,
the slower the better for those
who fear is how steep and slippery
their descent might become.
And where it might land them.

The saints survive through
the recall of the miracles
credited to them, where they
briefly leveled the slippery slopes
of other peoples lives,
as written up in hagiographies.

Medical science has replaced those saints,
because we like our miracles to be predictable.
Slowing decay down to where we deceive ourselves
as to it's progress is as near as we get
to our preferred illusion of perpetual motion.