The Community Of Choice

has to be ungated.

Ban Sugar

I know well enough that where the homeless
drink together under trees in public parks
it is quite logical for them to leave their bottles
in uneven circles as they depart.
it illustrates their drunken unawareness.
Who with a heart could complain at honest junk living?

I am less forgiving of the origins of the rubbish
that covers urban areas, where plastic bottles
that once held sugary drinks stain the landscape
like bloches on the face of an acne ridden youth.
The dropping of the bottles by those who drink
the rubbish are the final act of unawareness
in a long chain of corporate greed and waste.
The drinkers could resist the tendency to be obese
and get fit by picking up their cans and wrappers,
and then buy less junk, and create a cleaner future.
If they did this they would disprove to me beyond all doubt
that SUGAR ADDICTION LEADS TO BLINDNESS.

Community And 'National Character'

used to be about corralling individuals
from an early age into mass organizations
and groups with narrow aims and deceptive titles,
through which individuality was nationalised.
The hypnotic effect was finally sealed
by the seasonal flummeries of bells, smells,
and prayers by the many in cathedrals.
Now community is virtual, not ritual,
and votes are more for instant new pop stars
than for politicians whose faces now seem made
to become moving wallpaper with soundbites.
Individuals now connect quietly, via phone and internet,
and through keeping connections personal first.
But to endure, and connect with each other,
we accept the distractions of bells and whistles.

Faith, Control, Distance

Cynical and juvenile as it might seem to see the external control 
of us humans and life generally as a push button life best done
from a distance, seeing life this way does reduce life's options
 to something that we can aspire to process and share
 with some degree of competence, not that such
an aspiration gets us beyond language.

                                                  

If Marriage

were a life boat without paddles
and individuation a shifting lifebuoy
we can never quite reach,
would that make civil society
the sinking ship that is never quite sunk?

When Being Kept Is Genuinely Mutual

As the dream remakes the flesh
and the flesh torments all life except itself
in an ever more deathly and 'rewarding' work ethic
I cannot help but admire the lack of striving
in the idle and infirm, the happy in simply being kept,
those who prefer to live in scale,
for whom proportionate self belief 
is about the thin hope of acceptance
more than the currency of  reward.

The Carbon Footprint;

one small step for the memory of man
one giant leap towards oblivion for the planet.

Indifference Beyond Outrage

The slings and arrows of outrageous indifference
post themselves through my letterbox, daily
in lieu of real post. E-petitions fall into my inbox too.
As economies shrink the worlds resources,
and corporations fight each other for pole position.
I see charity and commerce adopting each others values,
the better to mislead the more passive consumer,
as to how un-neighbourly the profit motive is.

The Hope Of Progress

As Spring Approaches

but winter lingers my task for today,
if I dare approach it,
is to separate the grey of the skies
from the fog in my mind,
and find the colour and calm centre
within my unmotivation.

Laughter

is proof of having of a soul.

The Recipe You Can Trust

Some Thoughtful Self Censorship

'If there is no God not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brothers keeper and he is not permitted
to sadden his brother by telling him there is no God'.-Czeslaw Milosz

The Illusion Of Communicaton

Early in the use of the printing press
it was written by hand
that the pen is mightier than the sword,
because the pen multiplied the word,
and all weapons left was death and destruction.
And conflicts needed  the shield of propaganda.
Now the comparison is between the computer
and the gun, and whether a bullet or an email
both distance the recipient of the message
from the sender, sometimes with shocking finality.
What value should we place
on improving our misunderstanding of others better?

The Hyper-Hygiene

of  the developed world comes from endless
supplies of clean hot water, stored and unused.
Purchased at the price of burning an amount
of fossil fuels we can never begin to estimate.
This is proof of how our neuroses about purity have shifted.
In the England in the middle ages every village employed
a man to collect urine for washing sheets and fulling.
The Piss Man was his title, and clean bedding was for the rich.
When it was clean it was rarely white, the colour of purity,
the colour of scientists' lab coats. Bedding had a greenish hue.
We have gone from collecting piss to boiling away water.
And even as we laud our scientists as modern secular saints,
make their websites shrines at which to leave prayer-like offerings,
we ignore their warnings to reduce our use of fossil fuels.
We like to think they are going to be our source of plenty.

The Rain Falls

on the pious and the impious,
and after they have been broadcast,
we all forget the hourly weather forecasts.
They have no currency.
But if money fell as randomly as rain,
the predictions about whose pockets
wealth liked to land would be watched,
avidly, and well remembered.
From region to region this measurement
of weather-as-wealth would double as an
account for human neurosis about diversity.

Chromodoris Reticulata

After the humble dung beetle, the next creature
I admire greatly is the Japanese sea slug.
The males penis detaches from its body
twenty minutes after it mates,
because it is better to discard it than keep it.
Twenty four hours later it grows another.
Is this how humans evolved patriarchal pride?
Human males are highly attached to their penises,
which are merely a flap of skin and muscle.
And all too often human males invest an existential angst
to the value to the penis, as if it were an article of faith
that the owner of said flesh is granted selected life-long rights
of ownership over all the penis touches, and similar
over much its owner merely wishes it had waved at.

 

Valentine Day Special

Having the valentine of choice is such a comfort.

As Marie Antionette

never said, when the people had their beef
with her lifestyle, 'Let them eat horse meat'.

Memo To Kim Jong Un

Essentials for 20th century dictators,
which 21st Century hereditary dictators
will need to renew to ensure their sons rule...

1-a civil war which can be seen as part of a wider conflict,
in which the motives for your activities are hidden in plain sight
from your own population.

2-have a founding myth to your state which reverses the meanings
of your actions, and ennobles your motives beyond any shadow of doubt,
particularly when your actions were actually incompetent.

3-have absolute control of the media, both privately owned
and state sponsored, through which to reinforce your founding myth.

4-be renowned for your military prowess, even if like Joseph Stalin
it started small-robbing Russian banks to finance the then-suppressed
International Communist Party.

5-have a state security that does what it says-provides security
for just the state, and does it by means it does not admit to,
by providing no exit from you at any point for your subjects.

6-have a foundation in a religion or a cult, the better to build
the aura of sainthood around yourself. Erect large statues
of yourself which your subjects will meet at the feet of
and appear to be paying you respect, though it is probable
they are worshiping the statue, when the statue
was erected to embody their fear of your omniscience.

7-early in your regime mismanage the rural economy
and ban imports and uncontrolled contact with foreigners
so the country can't feed itself and the rest of the world can't help.
Then blame the famine on your political enemies, and have them executed.
.
8)-make your contemporaries appear to be rivals for your power
(see 7) and change your subordinates often, the better
to make them renew their subordination more intently.

9)-finally when nobody can say 'No' to you at any time
realize that everyone will say 'Yes' to everything you do,
but nobody knows what either word means.
By this time it will be easier for you to die than remake
the world as a place where your subjects can be sure that  2+2=4.

History Is Life,

life with the smile wiped from its face.
Assuming there originally was one
captured in the lines of the pen portraits,
on ancient documents
-where all joy freezes in a deepening grimace.
If history is a record of life-as-pain,
then life without history would be amnesia.

If Only I Felt More Blessed

The way Jesus said people should be when I hear anyone
attempt to yoke the complexity of modern homosexuality,
and sex being about choice, with a toxic and pedantic negativity
by selectively misquoting  The Pentateuch on same-sex relationships.
The better to reinforce a patriarchal nimby-ism in the name of forcefully
avoiding all choice. Then I would understand Matthew Ch5 Vs11 a lot better.
And I would know how much more I was a person of faith.

It'snowjoke

The snowman is surely wetting himself with laughter at jokes like that....

The Circle Of Doubt

A prayer for the worried; Lord help them to worry
more about the lives they know they can change
more than life they can't. And to know the difference.
When they worry about life, then Lord help them to act,
to refresh themselves, to break the circularity of their thoughts.
Finally, Lord, give me insight when I worry about the worried.
Particularly including myself. Amen.

The Wisdom Of Solitude

'The difference between sex and death
is that with death you can do it alone
and no one is going to make fun of you.'
-Woody Allen

Some Conditionalities Don't Change

If the love of money could help me
improve how I loved my enemies
then I would embrace it, repeatedly.
Until then I will see money is the means
that shrinks the values of every end
it has ever been used to support. 

Signs Of Greater Age (15)

1)Enjoying reading and the radio,
as much as your senses permit,
but disliking television, because the latter
embodies all too well the cult of youth.
And it embodies the idea of activity
for its own sake which is something
you need less of. 
Television is both overpowering
and transient, it has expanded further
than ever most people imagined it could,
or that it should ever have gained the right to.

2)In the reading and speech based radio
you enjoy liking the amount of sex,
violence and bad language it offers
because they are grafted on to strongly written characters,
whom you can enjoy because they are well made fictions
that are easy to set aside when their charm wears thin.

A Choice Of Insanities

'Men are so necessarily mad,
that to not be mad would amount
to another form of madness'.- Blaise Pascal

Was Ken Kesey

the first person in the world to emulate
the omniscience of the mobile phone,
because the frequently with which he
told the world he was 'on the bus'?

If only there were some way of getting back there

Orwellian Architecture

Just got more reflective.

I Salute The Humble

and industrious dung beetle
who, to stop its journey,
with its heavy load, being circular
navigates its night time path
by observing The Milky Way.
Never in the field of Natural History
has anything quite as small looked up
and guided itself by anything so epic.
However small and near the gutter we are,
we all can, and must, look up to the stars.

If We Concentrated

as much when hiding our mistakes from others,
as we do, and tried to recover more
from living in error through creative ownship
of our mistakes, then we might be right more often.

The Bride Stripped Bare, Through Tradition

Regularly at night on the BBC World Service Radio
I hear woeful reports from small places I would not know of
if I could sleep. Recently I heard the phrase
'A Conservative Patriarchal Society' used about
one unhappy traditional third world society (there
are many choose from) where marriage is arranged
for the son by his family. The most common outcome
of this arrangement is that the son dislikes his wife,
because she was his family's choice, not his.
And if he had made a.choice of wife
then his family would be violently contrary
towards both of them. As it is the wife becomes a drudge
for the family, and comes to hate marriage
because it gives her no life and no exit from life.
The long term agenda for the family is to dismember
the dependent family unit in order to adopt the children.
The husband is already primed to dump his wife
through a separation that favours him. The choice
made  for the now ex-wife is to live alone in penury
as 'a used woman' in a 'shamed'  rural community
with other ex-wives. I have learned of many lose-lose
situations in life, and I try daily to keep my mind sharp
and maintain my studies of how and why people share
their unhappiness. But on hearing this account on the BBC
I was struck afresh by the evil genius of traditions
which renew themselves by multiplying malcontent,
and sharpening beyond belief the pointlessness
of perpetuating poverty in the name of property.

Signs Of Greater Age (14)

1)Being grateful for how loud modern films are,
when you watch them at the cinema-the volume
compensates for the decline in your hearing.

2)Being even more grateful for film actors
who speak clearly, and who like scripts where
they do not speak over each other,
or fight with their voices against background noise/music.

Self Restaint

Today I saw my neighbour walking her dog.
The dog held its muzzle in it's mouth,
growling and biting it with quiet joy.
I thought, 'what creative self control
by the dog that it chose to be restrained
by holding its restraint, rather than requiring
it's owner to forcibly apply the muzzle.
What gentle self mastery it lives by'.
If only human beings exchanged
a similar willingness to wisdom more often.....   .