For That Tougher Journey

where the soul will be worn down before the soles will.....

When People Talk

of being 'self reliant' as if their independence
from others were their truest virtue, I wonder.
Who were their parents? Teachers? Influences?
Friends and lovers? Who were the civil servants
that cleared their tax avoidance? Which causes,
Political Parties, or institutions oppressed them?
Or liberated them into their present unforgiving shape?
Whoever these supportive sources were,
they are now being short changed through
the cheap talk that leaves them uncredited.

The Dignity Of Labour

may make you stand taller in the short term, but increased height
 will mean little in the end. With thanks to Hyuro

The Hypostatization* Of Work Through Language

Of all the media phrases that sicken me
one of the worst is 'They lost their job'.

It is used to describe the diminished remunerative choices
of an employee who is no longer in their previous
gainful employment, to suggest it was their choice
to give up on the money and withdraw their labour.
When clearly it wasn't. They no more 'lost their job',
than struggled against how their work took from them
all sense of play-until brittle and bitter, they snapped.
Just like the child who dislikes being pushed into school sport
enough to mislay their kit, because that is the only way
they can express their dislike of the hierarchies sport
and school imposes on them. Much to the annoyance
of their parents who are as competitive
as they are inattentive, driven and materialistic.

Much less did the job lose the employee.
A job is the intellectual property of an employer,
a role, and it is neither 'lost' or 'found' but it is withdrawn,
reshaped and redistributed from one individual to another
by it's owner, though some jobs will dissapear
when new technologies commit them to dustbin of history.

None of this will be commented on in a market place
where the height of honesty is the rareness
with which a successful person admits
that 'markets can fail' close enough
to a market actually failing,
and like the good Samaritan,
be moved to fix what has been broken.

The self employed can use the phrase
 'I lost my job' to accurately describe
the process-it was their job to lose,
but they are as adults we should object
most vehemently to the phrase being put
in the third person when used to describe them.


*the act of representing an abstraction (e.g. 'The market place') as a physical thing.

My Secret Passion

I thought I would tell the people
about my secret passion -
to clear the air
(I like to share)
besides, it was in fashion.

So first I told my doctor.
His words were not unkind
He said "I'm sure
we'll find a cure,"
and patted my behind.

And then I told my mother.
I thought she would be glad
She cried a lot
and said "Do not
say anything to Dad."

But still I told my father,
his lips began to foam.
He paced the floor
And cursed and swore
And said "You can't come home."

And then I told my cronies,
their attitude was critical.
They murmured "Dearie
this is dreary
Please don't get political."

And last I told my boyfriend.
It roused his deepest fears.
Before he fled
he turned and said,
"I draw the line at queers."

Logos Interruptus

When Shakespeare wrote his plays
they were his day job, his sonnets
were where his true self lay.
The older I get the more I understand
how for the modern ear the appeal
of his plays is how they record the coinage
of so many words that were new in his time.
Through the plays these words have stayed
in the language-one tenth of all the words he used.
Aside from his poetic vocation, what Shakespeare
really wanted to do was invent the short story-
think of the lacunae in his plots-
which he combined with writing a thesaurus,
but this troupe of actors kept interrupting him
before he could finish each story, and restitched
the word lists with the stories to dramatise them,
which is how they turned into his thirty seven plays.

What The Gods Of Education Did For Me

On the whole the formal education
wrought for me by my elders and betters
worked out quite well.
I got a first in accepting being lied to for decades.
Because I could not tell lies from truth.
I was blind to how I was deceived.
Because of this everything in life was mislabeled.
I also got A grades with commendations
in the subjects of Deep Despair,
Following directions which made me a loss-leader
for the profit of others, and finally
Being Absolutely Useless.
Best of all was the long term pass for The University Of Life
through the long term inability to be employable.
I got all this and more, much much more, in lieu
of a foundation fit for shinning up the greasy pole
with a movement that looked something like 'a career'.

Let's Stop For Lunch

Graffiti from Poitiers, France.

The Book Of Partings

For the person who needs to be separate from others

Never and Never

Never imagine that happiness is out there;
           It is always in here.
Never try to be like other people;
          Only try to be more and more like yourself.
Never tell your mother anything;
         Whatever you say will one day be used against you.
Never work; in fact before you do anything,
         Always ask yourself one question:

        Can I possibly get out of this?

Quentin Crisp 1909-99, image c/o The Guardian  newspaper

As Good As A Salvador Dali Painting.....

....and a lot cheaper too, from www.streetartnews.net

Watching Each Other Being Watched

When the state feels the threat that justifies the means
of repressing the masses,
then the threat to the public will be practically infinite-
for as long as they endure the state can repress more.
The unknown unknown that nobody can know
until they have gone past it is the level of defensiveness
the populous can internalise to think they are alive,
before they die inside, from being utterly divided
-for being pushed onto the defensive.....

When To Neither Sow Or Reap

Representative Democracy is delicate bloom-
easy to criticise for what fails to achieve,
easily crushed by pedantry and extremism,
not to mention block voting and party systems,
and finally it is inevitable that it will be blown off course
with the abundance of power and money
among the professionals who most often
get to represent everyone.
But I am thankful for the one great gift it brings;
where it works it gives choice in and from religion.
Particularly when some faiths brand themselves
on the voting populous by recycling revenge
through piously misremembered martyrdoms.

When The Elderly

and socially conservative say 'Youth is wasted on the young'
does it prove that maturity is wasted on the elderly?
Or merely show the onset of some old jealousy?

Signs Of Greater Age (21)

1-finding absent or greying hair-
in yourself and others-a comfort
and a highly validating proof of life.

2-meeting old friends in cheap supermarkets
and finishing your friendly catchup with them
by advising him to zip their flies up before
they approach the checkout, lest they present
the staff with ambiguities about how they intended to pay.

Deference to Emperors

in the Roman Empire was unconditional,
for this reason they had to be consistently
contrary and capricious towards their subjects,
near and far, for their subjects' obedience
to be assured. But for the ruling family
to live their life of toughness and luxury
they had to have reliable servants.
The trust they lent their closest slaves
gives the lie to how the first family
were supposedly like the gods they served,
whom their doyen made offerings to,
tricksters who were contrarian.
The public lie was that there was no trust
that was not worth devaluing in mistrust
and the violent pursuit of power,
all of which lent the first family a strange anonymity
-holding power meant the manipulation
of written history such that nobody could ever
say anything about how they personally trusted The First Family
without it being retrospectively rewritten by their successors.
Their rule stood for there being no trust
that could not be marked down through violence.
Thus it has proved for many attempted despots since.

Therapy

Nothing refreshes life better
than rehearsing old grudges,
the better to re claim them
for improved use in the future.

The Loss-leader Life

After more than a decade
of being my own pound-stretcher
by attending car boot sales,
half that time in the present unending recession,
I ask myself why do these events continue?
In the best times people smiled as new goods
passed through these events with ease,
proving to customers that life was about choice,
and it was vibrant.
Now decline marks these events,
what once exchanged  between buyers
and sellers with a smile and a comment
now exists more as an attempt to offload
the depreciating contents
from debt ridden households,
for a sum that is more than a song.

Now the only reliable profits for these events
come from the fuel sales that get customers
and the stall holders to and from the event.

Everything else is transient. 

A Different Beat

If you want to be ahead of your time,
then live without fear of being maligned
from being at the edge of other peoples lives.
Your will not be able to rely on your life
being recounted when you are gone,
much less can you hope for accurate recollection.
But whoever remembers you with acceptance
will recount how you were out-of-other-peoples-step
with them. You will be fixed in their minds
as outside of all the times you shared in, ahead forever.

In A Wordy World

I am often caught short
when brevity equals lucidity.

Reversible Values

Inside every masochist
there is a sadist
who just wants to hide
from themselves and their actions.

Self Knowledge

And the hope that you might cringe less with repetition.

As A Mistake

I feel it is only right for me to wonder,
and want to know definitively,
for the good of others whose lives
are more clearly built on intent,
which part of me is the most mistaken?

Laughter And Tears

Jindra says 'Solemnity is the armour of fools',
but the truest fools will be solemn,
for being unable to laugh with what made them foolish.
Other people have left them drained.
Many melancholics find themselves best
through staring into a glass darkly.
The better to know that laughter
from bitter, isolating, humour is strong armour in life.
They find this truth most acutely
when they are caught short and pushed into the spotlight.

The Shadow Of My Former Self

is rather more substantial than I am at present.

1553 And All That

No sooner did the printing presses start to churn
than books were stolen by the spies of city states,
and the material removed from printers
before it could be published. And heretics
were tried, their bodies burned to unknowingly
fan the flames of future freedoms,
that in those times could not have been
foreseen or imagined.

Light Entertainment

is where reason sleeps
in the name of fantasy,
and on-screen pleasantness
creates bigger monsters than ever
people would have though possible.

Signs Of Greater Age (20)

1-admiring bird song and the sounds of nature
over the human voice and so called modern music
more and more-because it requires less interpretation.

2-finding breakfast to be the best meal of the day,
it is so good you could have it several times, particularly
when you wonder what in life there is to do afterwards.

Can You Sense The Difference?

The Smoking Society

If only Karl Marx had not written

'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,
the heart in a heartless world, just as it [religion]
is the spirit in a spiritless situation.
Religion is the opium of the people',

However paradoxically true it seemed when written,
it says so little, now we are awash with media irony.
I wish he had written instead that 'the measure of a society,
if not consumerism, is how well it collectively creates
and supports a painful and destructively addictive nature,
whilst disguising that nature as virtue in the people
it was/is being fostered in'. But for Marx to write
that he would have had to recognise before others
who knew him better than he knew in himself
what he consistently  failed to recognise
-how he was inspired to write through smoking
and his inspiration made his writing his opiate.

The New Society

and even then I am not sure....

The Life of Jesus,

and how well it has been applied as an example to live by
through history, has proved that the messenger need not be shot,
crucified, or caged in Guantanamo-now a military camp
for forty years-for the message to be lost by the carrier.
As a parasite, virtue was never as easy to catch
as it's carrier-language, which transmits itself all too easily.
But this much can still be grasped,
where a life goes unforgiven and disrespected
it will be a difficult life to lead, and harder life to follow.
There is much more of life in the world
that is disrespected than ever we want to know.

The Blind Will Be Led By The Half Blind

Britain is no more bureaucratic than it was in the past,
though now forms seems longer and more complex than before.
The greater the choice, the more forms that have to be filled in
to organise the powers that be to act positively on our behalf.
Often when we filled in complex forms before we were flattered
by their attention to detail, imagining that the complexity
will help us make a better case for our needs than of old.
We had already been sold the merit of open choice.
Now in secret places civil servants and corporate patrons
devise abstract points systems, and ways for cross-referencing
the answers they receive, which will always grant them
more right to deny an applicant what they ask fo
than ever they will admit to, even to a deliberately blind media.

Their real agenda is to blind us,
whilst leaving them half sighted,
the better to mask the power
of their wealth. For all the liberal talk
Power will always be about rationing.

Ignorance Is Destiny

The brain is the ultimate locked room mystery
which keeps on causing suffering and delight.

Toil Beyond Need Always Create Waste

The icing is always the same, whether the cake is militarism
with a strong civil life built on weapons for export
or militarism for home use by more direct rule,
oligarchy in police states who import the weapons.
Both mean the right to vote but only for weak representatives,
with a highly censored media setting the agenda.
where good citizenship is knowing how to censor yourself.
Life has to be that way to maintain the sweet veneer
of civilisation through a popular selective amnesia.
There are some 21 counties in the world without armies
and they are all so small as to have no industry at all,
never mind a trade in arms, but their value comes
from being havens for the profits of arms traders,
whilst unknowingly we, and the planet we avoid
thinking too much about how we abuse,
absorb the sense of loss from this continually reversing alchemy.