Whatever The Hierarchy

and whatever the logic, systems
will always create 'winners' and 'losers',
through varying levels of competition.
Whichever role we end up playing,
for the benefit of ourselves or others,
the will to take responsibility
and share any credit going relies
on an absolute lack of absolutism.

Intelligence

is about far more than knowing a lot and quoting it 
ad nausiem to people whether they know it or not,
which is merely holding forth with your opinions.
Anyone can do that. Intelligence is about questioning
 what you know, allowing others to query you,
and listening. This is what refreshes us, 
what allows us to be changed, by surprises.

Progress

is merely the prison cell in the cul-de-sac
where the wallpaper seems the nicest,
until we can find somewhere better to ruin.

Question Of The day

Do I want to be dishonestly cheerful?
Or more authentic in my despair?

The New Year Sales Got Off To A Bad Start

And the other billboards were not that helpful either.

Signs Of Greater Age (31)

1-With age learning the difference between outrage
and irony. When we were young offending others
seemed fun, we thought we were 'waking people up'.
But later you realize they were awake all along,
but alert to quite different set of signals.

2-If born working class finding it easy
when young to dress according to the level
of self esteem permitted to you.
Without knowing it, the lack of money
made you naturally dress down,
and your peers made it all seem normal.
Later in life peers separate and the angst hollows out.
Through comfort you become declasse,
and enjoy watching the rats race past you.

Conditioning

I have never been homeless,
though I have often felt myself to be near it.
In an economy where to be officially recognized
as a citizen you have to have an address
it takes 4-6 weeks for a homeless person
to become habituated to their situation.
That is to find themselves naturally ill at ease
with having more than they can carry,
mistrustful of exchanges with other people
of more than the few words it takes
to thank people for their loose change,
whilst restricting eye contact with them,
and never exchanging names with anyone.
Nor having a roof over their head that is theirs
to maintain for which they don't have to pay
more than is due for the space, in gratitude.

I know how long it takes a young person
from an average to poor household
to become habituated to long term unemployment.
It takes nine months, the length of time I spent on the Y.T.S.
I was pushed on two short pretend apprenticeships
in which, whatever the appearance of being instructed,
the actual intent was to get me to learn how to live
in a very low income, be patriotically passive
to the government and my family, and most importantly
accept having very few friends for lack of money
whilst doing the most minor tasks for 'my employer'.
All the while being unable to become more independent
or move house without a support from a family
that was always tardy and unforthcoming.

I was grateful to avoid homeless,
but still the feeling I had most often then,
which stays with me still, was one of being frozen.
Deeply Learned Helplessness is hard to forgive in one's self.

Like 'Our Lord'

-a saintly patron for non-breeders
who has too long been hijacked
by the zealots of patriarchal 'family values',
many of them women-all we can do
is hold to what we sense is true
and resist the family centred world,
where false behaviour comes with such ease.
We can think carefully about our own flesh/nature.

How To See Christmas

And wanting to avoid the modern Christmas is quite natural.

The Advertising Strapline

I remember the most was applied
to the sale of televisions in the 1980's.
Naturally it was on television.
I forget which manufacturer's sets
it was there to promote. Bit it ran
'You'll be glued to our sets, not stuck with them'.
It reminded of how stuck I was my family,
and how much I'd like to held in a bond
that would hold me, close.
Rather than be trapped in ill fitting arrangements
that had to be constantly repaired and reapplied.

Icelandic Humour

From here

Blood, Sweat And Fears

are what we cling to most dearly
in the hope of creating a civilization
which we think makes for peace.

The Relief Call Centre Staff Seemed Strangely Docile

And rather quaintly old fashioned too. With thanks to here.

What Value Honour

between opponents in a civil society
when the urge to revenge
outweighs the will towards hospitality?
Where the ready availability of arms
makes the uneaseful death of enemies
too much of a temptation to resist?

Proportion And Passion

are very hard to balance.

The Man Who Loved Trees

'I will willingly confess so great a partiality for trees
as tempts me to respect a man exactly in proportion
to his respect for them'-James Russell Lowell

Heroism

has always been about a gainful opportunism

that with the false hindsight of others
becomes more like a pre-determined plan

than we cannot conceive or understand.
We can never understand the generosity
of The Hero's perceived effect, though we strive to.

Where this leaves the workaday dreams
of good will, kind deeds, and ideals of a fortune
for all, is left hanging for you and me to guess at.

On Living Alone

which will find priority
-the freedom of solitude?
Or the energy of silence?
One thing is for sure,
time will be less important.

Christmas in Dystopia

starts when families renew the year's disagreements
and disappointments to share over Christmas,
leaving something smaller to bicker over for birthdays
and other celebrations throughout the year to come.

Having aired their bad news they will proceed
(quietly at first) to accuse each other
of misunderstanding of their wrongs,
until the enmity falls as freely as the spent bottles
that surround parties of drunks who sit in public parks,
oblivious of anyone who feels disturbed seeing them.
The tipping point comes when outright one person
tries to defend their wrongs as not just their doings,
but a joint effort where they had not the means
to stop themselves from later wrong-footing others,
only for others to say 'You should have had the means,
because of you we can't have this, that, and the other now.
It is your fault that you did not stop. Stop blaming other people.'.

The accusations stop sharply when the one who feels
most horrible for losing their argument turns on the television
to watch a programme they insist should be watched,
which the rest of the family endure in silence.

Some families are better dismantled, root and branch,
and the members kept apart, never to cause each other trouble again.

Life Without Laughter Is Hell

'A religion where you cannot laugh at yourself
is a joyless and destructive thing'-Sara Maitland

The Great, The Average And The Small

Generosity of spirit is still the best proof of greatness, whatever the size of mind.

Small Ad

Hermetic seeks emetic
to get the life of the world
out from inside his insides.

When Breeding Is Over-breeding

What is the point of being The Master Race,
the breed who by nature deserves a place apart
in their own monoculture, if in our mastery
and isolation we shrink from what we think
we are meant to be masters over?
If mastery was the plan, it now seems half baked
and all there is left to prepare for now is a doom
for us where we don't doom all other species
to extinction. We owe the planet the duty
of making it sustainable-if only
for future master races-all else is folly!  

A Healthier Desensitivity

I used to feel rotten many a time in the past,
as if I'd personally made other people suffer,
as if their hurt was mine to help them recover from.
Even though logically I knew not all their ills were mine,
not all the time, there was no escaping this personal belief.
Had I been able to observe I would have seen
that there were many who acted being hurt
by blaming their ills on whoever come along,
which in my life just happened to be me.
My greed for acceptance made me accept
their blame, since that was all there was going.

I see now that I should have learned to feel and want
a whole lot less, thus I might have been more kind
and generous to myself, and to everyone else around me.

Merely Middling

I used to dress down when young
to be more working class
and authentically miserable.
In middle age I lost my angst
-a better life got cheaper
and I became declasse.
Now I am merely middling.

My Fifth Christmas Card of 2014

I will take a green light on that one everyday.

An Observation Of Civility

Is it just me? Or is it plain to all
that amongst everyone we meet in life
those who say 'Please' and 'Thank you',
and apologize, unprompted, are the people
who are usually the more observant
of the effect of their thoughts, words and deeds on others?   

When Waste

is definitive proof of choice
then Consumerism is King,
and the kingdom is for the willfully blind.
Those who seek forever-seek to consume
and destroy the here and now,
rather than to try leave behind the least trace
of their presence possible, for others
who have to be thrifty to live with and mourn.

The Amazon forest being destroyed, to make way for cattle.

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2014

For that younger person's sense Christmas. From here.

Family

are the fruit in the flesh,
the proof of The Fall,
that proves we all
should be asking
for much much less.

Life In Peace Time

Alcohol is like many a substance,
it makes a good servant and a horrible master.
To make the best of their choices
imbibers have to know themselves
inside out, to learn which they are
-unhappy servers or well served?
Those that avoid asking, out of fear,
have already made their choice plain.
Furthermore they will always create
in their dependents a bleaker sense
of humour and hope than ever
they dare to imagine.

Not that a communal life
without substances is temptation free.

If Winston Churchill had been asked
'Which causes does alcohol serve best?'
He would have answered 'War and government'.
Where this leaves the life of the masses
in the long domestic peace since 1945,
with so many outlets for drink
and so little for imbibers to rule over
is beyond hope and guesswork.

Naturally Artificial

The sign that would become easy proof to the masses
that artificial life had arrived would be if the machines we make,
and we rely on, spontaneously made Christmas cards
for each other. Some humans might think this insulting,
believing the machines do not have souls to rejoice with,
or expect the machines to do more for their makers
than each other, and send said cards to who made them.
If the humans returned the favour it might be okay.
But given the amount of despair that humans
have put into the planet they could hardly complain.  

As Jesus Never Said

Pride is the gift
that uniquely
you give yourself
that is hardest
to dispose of.

My First Christmas Present of 2014

I wonder how far it will go when it open it.

Hoarding Oblivion

for future use is not world leaders collecting weaponry
the way George the Sixth collected stamps,
to loving gaze upon them in self reflective moments.
It means cultures of addiction across the world
joining up with each other to make themselves
collectively unable of stop each other destroying
what they, and everyone else, is dependent on.

Acceptable Dystopias

The height of public intimacy for me used to be
being the younger partner in distrustful sex in public toilets
between drunken men and idiotic boys.
Mutually deceived about the effects of alcohol,
we fiddled with each other' bits through holes
men had made between the cubicle walls.
The married men always got the most attention,
Just like they did at home in different circumstances.
We further deceived ourselves that nobody knew where we were.
The mothers and wives in the town knew exactly what was happening,
but let it be, rendering it taboo, uncommentable on.
They were grimly glad to avoid drunken male fumblings.
I was never arrested. Nor was anybody I knew, there was no need.
When family values were about members guilt-tripping each other
into ever darker corners where neither could see, then nobody could trust the law,
nor could we seek help for poor mental health from the local social services.
The more powerful the family member, the more they could deny their jealousy
using spurious moral reasoning as their cover, whilst removing other peoples exits from them.

I have lived in places from which nobody was ever meant to retrieve themselves alive.

Stephen Hawking

need not be afraid of humans
creating an intelligent technology
which will outsmart them
without us knowing how it did it.
Look at life on Planet Earth,
is the most complex and complete
functioning mechanism we know,
complete to the point where
it is much more complex
than we know how to discern
and accept. The best we can do
is diligently test it to destruction
through our stupidity.

The Currency Of Acceptance (2)

'What will people think?'
is a question the english use
to express their fear of disapproval.
It is used by those who in their vanity
don't realize that fear and approval
are always conditional.
They are merely different sides
of the same coin-the hope
of being taken at face value. 

The Eternal Catch-22

Where the idea of escape is the ultimate trap,
and existence is a matter of torture or be tortured.