Rhyming Slang

In the1960's 'going for a Barclays'
was cockney rhyming slang for have a wank.
Given the admitted fixing of the Libor rate
by Barclays Bank, perhaps the meaning
should be amended to 'a covert measure
of combined theft, trespass, and false witness
in which the values of the person intruded
on would feel utterly undermined'.
Many a youth before going out to riot
might message their friends
with 'going for a Barclay's after the riot?'
were they so inclined, to complete their pleasures.

Life seems strange when yester-years
private joys and moments of tender self interest
are occluded by brasher new dishonesties.

Technology Infantalises

the more it advances, the more education
has to disguise how it institutionalises escapism as desire.
Desire and escapism is the currency of cheap grace
that leads to ruin. With what, and how, can we purchase maturity?

Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Education*

Many people do conflate the two and call it networking for profit.
 
*but never dared believe was true

The Same Goes For Me

Find out more about Mr Devito here.

May I Share This Dance

with you on the Unknown Planet? 
Unknown because there is nobody else
in this universal vacuum without a centre
to know that there is life, as my vitality slowly decays.

The measure of decay is time itself.
Decline is integral to life,
life is integral to decline, counted out by time.
Life dances with decay to the music of time
until the point of death, when the dance draws
in close towards it's last movement..

The Hope Of Health

Politicians are to nations
what doctors are to patients-
people we consult in times of need
(with politics and media that is all the time
then...  ) and in whom we invest power,
in the hope of health.

The more we see those we entrust ourselves to
mistaking our symptoms for our causes
the more our trust in them ebbs away.

With a doctor this means being condemned
to live out your illness in a state of disgrace
misunderstanding or taboo, being existentially sick.

When politicians mistake a symptom for a cause
it reinforces ghetto walls tightens poverty traps,
and reduces social mobility to media talk and spin.

Politics entrenches an apartheid of  wealth and poverty
that castles and gated communities have always encouraged,
separated by their wealth. Why else have Portcullis* House
next to the Mother of all Parliaments?

 
. 











*A grating of iron or wooden bars or slats, suspended in the gateway of a fortified place and lowered to block passage.

Filmed Pornography

is the oldest form
of  'reality entertainment'
known to man,
it is the preferred viewing
for those who need
to be conditioned
into being surprised,
by Predictability.

Homelessness

is not merely thinking, but actually living outside the box,
seeing from the outside how others box themselves in.

The New Absolution

is therapy; a quiet process of pedantry and revenge
against a personal past conducted behind closed doors,
where the client and therapist collude to imitate Confession.

A Reflection On Hard Surfaces

Yuppiedom is a glossy style of living
where the polished surfaces
in which yuppies see themselves reflected
are as near as they get to interior reflection.

Groundhog Day

started for us all the second Narcissus
looked into the pool, and was absorbed
by how handsome he appeared in the still water.
Nemesis quietly drained him of the will to live.

Nemesis still curses all life through humans.
Our mirrors are politics, art and the mass media
where the only real change is our amnesia.
Given how poorly we recognise how we live,
through destroying other species, the height
of our kindness should be our quiet decline.

Marketing Is War

through words, without armaments.
Conventional belief is that
'the first victim of war is truth',
propaganda being it's persecutor.
In marketing there is no truth
-only advantage to the manufacturer.
Marketing is the war waged
with images that outlast all wars,
through their repetition
which make us all obese
self-consuming shadows.

Football Is A Game

where two eleven person committees,
a referee and two linesmen,
each form agendas for the control of a ball,
and to compete with each other.
To entertain themselves first,
their audience second.
Football is where young men first taste
being picked for a committee,
and learn to disguise being led unwillingly.

In my school team I was always the last
to be picked, for being unfit at fitting in.
Forty years on I now see what I was blind to.
I never saw the fun in entertainment,
I felt more for the ball than the teamwork.

Liberal Elites

are tight cabals in rich countries
who plot the life of the masses
and plan the future poverty
of the developing world,
by ignoring the caution of recorded history
and denying how easily utopian plans
become dystopian realities
with the slightest paradigm shifts
in circumstances they don't own
and never controlled.

Journalism Is The Job

of taking the 'new' out of  news.
Everything journalists tell us
has happened has happened before.
Many times and in many places.
The words of reporters
leave their audience half-alive,
sleep walking through a past,
once solid, now gone.
Which is now our unconscious.
This half emptiness is our truest narrative,
and all the more so for the ease
of our denial that the paper we read
once breathed. Was once a  fully alive tree.

Facebook Is For Monkeys

If enough monkeys were given enough time
in front of a typewriter apiece that stored
and shared their data as they were wrote,
how long would they take to come up with Facebook?

And with hindsight how much would the net result
of their labour seem like coherent communication?

Aerobics For The Soul

One of my favourite writers,
Quentin Crisp, used to humourously
say of completing crosswords,
an activity he liked a lot,
that it was 'aerobics for the soul'.
Crosswords remain popular.
For as long as there is a press
there will always be a demand
for the study of clues and words
where the mind can both idle
and be active at the same time.
Much like settng and reading blogs,
where the setting of the words
become clues to their author. 

America

-the cherry pie of chance and democracy
that offers itself as Hope for The Free.
Hope and freedom are the two words
most devalued by overuse,
where for all who get to vote their votes
are all of equal value, very little
compared with what money buys.
By a serendipity beyond honesty
the richest pick, the ripest cherries
and the biggest slice of the pie-
the whole wide world-
go to the richest democracy.
Thus that country calls itself a meritocracy....

Signs Of Greater Age (6)

1-Looking at the latest design of car
and thinking 'I must be living in the future'
because in your  memory car design
was far more primitive, and for being
simpler was more repairable,
and for being that more ecological.

2-Hating waste, and treasuring thriift
but finding that what you stored away
against the rainy day that never arrived
has lost it's use as protection,
for some quiet damp that seeped in
and quietly ruined it, unobserved.