My Last Words

are going to be lines
upon my grave; 'In this pit
is a quare peg who never fit
with his fellows, who has,
at last, found the place to sit
where he can be happy.'

Banksy On (First World) Prisons

Gaza is often described 
as 'the world's largest open air prison'
because no-one is allowed to enter or leave.
But that seems unfair to prisons
 - they don’t have their electricity and drinking water
cut off randomly almost everyday.  -- Banksy

The Double Edged Word

Please and thank you are two sides
of the same sword. Gratitude.
In an open world this sword enobles
all whose shoulders it gently brushes.
In a world of deference it destroys
those who manipulate others,
into using those words,
who denying they are ever
deceived in themselves.  

The Best Satire

used to be like the best in religion
-an affliction to the comfortable
and a comfort to the afflicted.
Both in their time held out the potential
for giving hope and reversing misfortune.
I have yet to see evolutionary science,
in all its materialist glory and remorseless logic 
give humans similar hope and humour.
In case I have missed something I am happy
to explore the nature of co-operation.

Nimbyism (1)

My trouble with zombies
is that they think they are alive,
and to attempt to prove this
they vehemently contend
that I am one of the undead
because I won't submit
to their order of dying alive.

Individuality

means withstanding the combined pressure for conformity.

My Next Therapy Course

I expect it to be very cheap
and quite refreshing, almost spiritual.... 
 

Ghost Stories

I hear many stories about ghosts,
and the older I get the more they seem
like minor disagreements about theology,
about which nearly everyone I know
is either bored or functionally illiterate.
As two people disagree with one another
about what one of them sees that the other
prefers to be blind to this forces the curious
onlooker to focus on the unseen, the subject matter
rather more than what is in plain sight - those arguing.

The Three Barriers

An honest pervert is a rare find in a society
where the breadth of desire defeats language.

Constant Normality means
summing our selves up badly.

The First barrier is the perverts inability
to explain to him/herself in ways that seem sane
about why they like doing what they want to do to others,
whilst imagining similar done to them.
Oh! sweetness of reciprocation....

If they learn why, the second barrier
is owning how they came to like it,
and having learned how deep 
the world's dishonesty is in leaning
to own their past asking
'How will this engage with anyone else?
Beyond my friends silently mouthing TMI*
to each other about me in future?'
Oh sad cliques in friendship....

For anyone who passes the first two tests
there are more. But in the final barrier
the lesson is about how to combine
the complex emotions and our sexual nature
into a single package, with an apt sense
of  the absurd. How do we square
wanting to be blown away in dirty sex
with a balancing sense of humour?
Both work best when one informs
the other. But the release from the latter
will take over for being the easier to share.
Ah! the consolations of philosophy....



*Too Much Information

Freedom Is Always Relative And Best When Mutual

The English 'The Lord's Prayer' contains the line
'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those
that trespass against us', as if the issue
were physical boundaries and property
as much as it were about reciprocation.
This is not wrong. But the original went

'Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors',
i.e. forgive us our appetites as we forgive
those who eat through our means.
This will be, in part, be about money.
But at a deeper level this line takes a big swipe
at our capacity for creating the debt bondage
by which to control others-the power behind slavery.

So by all means reduce your money debts
and where you can don't make new.
Leaving others lighter of load will prove
the harder, and more virtuous, path in the end.
 

The Law Of Dimiishing Returns

 This is the human problem;
 our growth always turns to waste.
Whereas other species submit
to being recycled a lot more easily.

 

Cogito Ergo Sum

is what Alzheimer's patients
and the slow in the head
-because they are tired-
say everyday to themselves
to account for what remains
of the energy in their memories.

The Pen vs The Gun

When our choice of society
lies between overt feudal control
of the many by the very few-
reinforced by violence and taboo-
or a bureaucracy which kills
it's dependents, but more slowly,
and from the inside out,
for it being incompetent,
then our biggest choice
is how long we take to die,
-with the second choice
being how many we kill,
quietly and unknowingly,
on our way to the grave.

What Comes After The Sixth Extinction?

Hypocrisy is a virus, and human beings
are it's most successful host/carrier.
We like to think we are intelligent,
but any host would do just fine.
Hypocrisy's gift to us
is an apparent immunity
from the extinctions of other species
that the virus causes via divorcing
our actions and words from our thoughts.
The sense of gain seems twice over
-the extinctions of other species
extends our lives, which makes it seem
our survival an easy flattery to swallow.
But the point will come
when we comes unstuck,
when we collectively realize
that there is not enough
clean and working planet
left for us to live on, or through.
What will the virus do to us then?
.

Degradation Is Us

“The commercial prostitution of love
is the last outcome of our whole social system,
and [it is] loves' most clear condemnation.
[This condemnation] flaunts in our streets,
it hides itself in the garment of respectability
under the name of matrimony,
it eats in actual physical disease and death
right through our midst; it is fed
by the oppression and the ignorance of women, 
by their poverty and denied means of livelihood,
and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them
by millions not only to gratify but even to speak
of their natural [and relatively chaste] desires;
and it is encouraged by the callousness
of an age which has accustomed men
to buy and sell for money every most precious thing
- even the life-long labor of their brothers -
therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?”
-Edward Carpenter (written circa 1900)

Christmas Is A Virus

These suits are now being sold in the USA
as easy-to-wear costumes for Halloween.
If I got one I would wear it to fend off
the twin viruses of false bonhomie
and oversold commerce that seek me out
to deleterious effect every Christmas,
which thankfully hide for nine months of the year.

Education

was for the very few in the past, and well designed
 to 'set people free'. Modern choice is nothing like
 how human existence was meant to be.

This Bog Is Taking A Rest, Please Enjoy The Interval Music....

Disembling

Some folks lie constantly,
believing that by avoiding all truth
they can rest assured nobody
can lay any claim on them.
Not that anyone does,
instead they learn to ask less
and less of the person
who claims to be their friend,
lest they choke on the smoke of lies,
before being consumed by the fire
of a bitter and lasting jealousy.

I Don't Mind Role Play

as long as it is more 'play' than 'role'
and it is fluid in it's gender politics.
It has taken me a long time
to see how right this is.

Conflict Is Us (2)

I would like to have liked
my dad a lot more than I did.
We could have been fine
if we'd made the time
to respect our differences.
But always the final straw,
on which I always tripped
-going headlong-
was his clear, but unstated, belief
that World Of Sport was his idea
of costume drama. Between him
and the programme being on every week
I could not help but submit to family values
as if they were wrestling moves,
which in turn became Gordian knots
-beyond our collective understanding.

Levelling Upwards

Utopian as this quote is, it is good to have something to live up to....

'Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies.'

          Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex

In Some Cities

bloggers don't need the threat of a public flogging,
a thousand times, for their fingers to fall idle.
After the fiftieth strike of the whip even the witnesses
are too ill to add up the effect of each strike-and that assumes
they had the will to count them before the public punishment
of other bloggers started. The promise of a long time in prison
is just as strong a disincentive to many to publish their thoughts.
Over time many quietly lose their faith that what they write is read.
As what passes for civil society ensures that it ceases to have effect.

The Intelligence Of Cruelty/The Cruelty Of Intelligence

Charles Darwin did well to publish 'On The Origin Of Species'
before his many rivals published similar ideas.
By it's behavior the publishing industry proved
that competitiveness was more integral to evolution
than Darwin's readers like to think.
Though evolution requires at least much mutualism
for life to work, and for evolution to be credible theory.
Some folks see nature's competitive disharmony
as proof that there is no life beyond this.
With utopian pseudo-scientific sophistry
they reason that a God who made animals
and insects for them to be cruel to one other,
in order for some of them to survive, as others don't,
is not worth the effort He would take to believe in.
They vehemently deny the very idea of any judgement,
final or other, upon them for anything they merely might have done.

How conveniently they forget that we don't need
an all knowing deity supporting a flawed nature
to have proper and enduring reasons for shame.
However much animals and insects torture each other
the suffering they inflict is nothing, the bat of eyelid,
as compared with how human intelligence destroys nature.

Where human intelligence has multiplied through technology,
so have human numbers, and our combined capacity
for indifference and cruelty has gone through the ozone layer.
Our capacity for destruction is now so vast
that it has to be beyond our maths.
Human beings don't know what they do in this life,
never mind what might be done to them in the next,
and with the knowledge of of our power of destruction
Blaise Pascal's game theory around faith seems weak,
beyond belief. But I firmly accept the judgement of the earth
upon my life and body, for my efforts towards it's suffering.

Some Ills Define Our Health More Than We Like To Think

Hypocrisy is to humans what Tuberculosis is to cows-
we create apparently sterile/safe product from both,
through our consumptive communications.
With the 'cleaned up' result we deny that the disease
is life, is here for life, and it sums up of our lives.
Because as humans we don't want to see
how our whole achievement as self employed
'stewards of the planet' is so much less
than the sum of the parts of how well we live
for being the top species in the world food chain.