Halloween Special

For the days when life seems at its most grey.....  from here.

2 x 2 = ?

Does every couple lead a double life
-one with and one without each other?
Does each have a life apart,
of thoughts unshared and hopes unmet,
which get filed under 'fantasies'
and then masked off
for them being seen by others as 'an item'?

The partner who dies first
at least allows the other
room to live the dreams denied
denied reality in the masking.  

Ennui Is Us

I understand work now;
the more pointless the task
the more rewarding the hierarchy
that has to be built around it will be.
And the nearer you are to the top
the greater the reward detachment gives,
as ennui holds us all, together.

Wither The Poet?

On the eve the first publication of 'Leaves of Grass',
in 1855 Walt Whitman wrote 'The proof of a poet
is that his country absorbs him as affectionately
as he has absorbed it.'. That absorption
was surely meant to be whole, complete, both ways.

I doubt he was thinking of the fifteen nation states
who employ poet laureates today,
including North Korea which has six
-all busily essaying the life of Kim Jong un
with a breathless patriotic fervor which competes
with the media hyperbole of his country's past.

Poetry is so compressed a form
that whatever is written today
will always seem far too rushed,
too keen to impress, for it's own good.
So whatever is published now,
will be like the nation it is meant to reflect.

Any wisdom in it will be future conditional.

Habit Is Not Commitment

On Sundays male believers
sit in pews with their families,
booted, suited and tied to the nines.
Their wives stop the children fidgeting
by giving them sweets every so often.
The wives are competitively dressed up,
in formal pastel colours, like witnesses
at the wedding of a distant relative
rather than alive as part of the Bride Of Heaven
-who according to professed belief,
lives by looking for the groom
in the lives of everyone around them.

If ever they reach their destination
their Sunday itself will be consumed
in the never ending present,
and their once-best clothing
will seem like a faded joke
where they forget how their lives
once fed into the punch-line. 

Only Ever Half In Love

How disappointing,
to go to bed each night
hoping for a natural death
from a surfeit of dreams of ease.

Only to wake up the next morning....  

Oppression Will Expand When Disguised as Choice

The richer the society
the more it will divide.
The rules will expand
and vary to enrich the rich
at the expense of the poor
-who when faced with rules
which imply a choice
which they know is false
and are actually designed
to close down their options
then they learn to work around
how they have no chance of winning.

For not knowing what to trust
to avoid being scammed
the poor will lose the relatively little
that they have-to arrogance and greed,
well disguised as 'intelligence'.  

The Existentialist Dilemma

We make mistakes
through other people,
and we and they know it.
We have to leave them
to recover themselves.
Who can we expect them
to be able to turn to,
for their recovery?

Picture Post Special; Mental Health Edition

These pictures are apparently taken from a long abandoned

 Italian lunatic asylum. Abandoned by the patients and staff, for sure.

But not by graffiti artists, who for being sensitive to the ghosts,

the former residents and staff who gave their lives to the place

 represented the former staff etc, gave new life to the place.

When Our Sense Of What Kindness Is Cuts To The Quick

In the course of parenting
many adults both forget their childhoods,
and mercilessly mine/recycle them-
the better to distance their newer selves
from their former dependence on family.

What parents know, and bury,
is when and how children learn empathy.
Mostly this comes most with attachments
to the living animals immediate to them.
When something soft and friendly dies
that they used to stroke a sense of loss ensues.

I remember being six and at the butchers
with Mother, when she was buying
a rabbit for dinner. They were lined up
in attractive display above our heads
as we went through the shop door.
The distinction between life and death
came to me very sharply
as I followed the conversation;

Butcher; 'Do you want the rabbit skinned?'

Mother, 'No thanks, I'll skin it myself.'

and I knew the same could happen to me.
Only when Mother came skin me
there would nobody asking after me,
and there would be nothing of me
to make the bedside rugs with.
She had made curing rabbit furs
her hobby-to provide for the house
in a vehement bid for self sufficiency.
.   

Towards A More Self Aware Long Term Unemployment

From my twenties onwards
I had a beard, and I liked hats
for the change in my appearance
that they gave me. Without knowing
what one was I wanted to be a dandy.

My family always asked me
what was I disguising myself as?
They never listened for the answer.
But even as they had trained themselves
to not listen they needed some reply.
So I made myself funny but forgettable,
the better to help them laugh
and then repeat the question.

What I should have realized
at the time was that they were
preparing me for all the interviews
for jobs that I was never going to get
but I was still duty bound to apply for
-where the employer would observe me
for everything except what I said I was.

More Or Less?

The more I see the more life reduces,
to a single qualified two part question;
Suffering is inevitable-in so far as we think
we can foresee the times ahead of us
do we suffer to reduce future suffering?
Or do we suffer to increase how painful
life is going to be for our descendents?

A Good Life

will be like a good wine.
At the end both will leave
a positive sediment.

Vanity Publishing Reaches New Heights

And it has led to a few rather wordy reviews too.....

Positivity About Disability Is Not What it Used To Be

 

This is a picture of Black John Of Tetcott. Black John was dwarf and  a hunchback, being under four foot tall. I am sure he would be seen as 'disabled' in the 21st century. But in his time he many party tricks in his role as jester which included swallowing and retrieving strings of live mice and mumbling sparrows - removing their feathers with his teeth while the sparrow was in his mouth. Also known as James Northcote, he was a painter, was born in Plymouth, the son of a watchmaker and optician. Disability awareness has shifted somewhat since 1770s and 1780s-and not as often as we'd like for the better. From here.

Disguising Avoidance

From my twenties onwards
I had a beard, and I liked hats.
My family always asked me
what was I disguising myself as?
Not that they listened for the answer.
But even as they had trained themselves
to not listen they needed some reply.
So I made what I said funny but forgettable,
the better to help them laugh
and then repeat the question.

This was one of the milder
'gold fish bowl conversations',
where we went round in circles
knowing we'd been there before
and were likely to go there again
until something within us broke
which it did eventually..... 

Never to let repetition continue.

Doubt

'Love' is a difficult word,
at best it is shown by actions
which linked by attentiveness
to the task in hand on the day.
My attention span is something
I will always feel awkward about-
if my attention span is on form
and my actions prove right today
then how long
before they prove wrong?

The Family Values Nihilist Questionaire

In answer to the last question, the sooner you stop the better life gets....

The Maths And English Of Party Politics

The Political Party Conference season
has come and gone, like it always does.

Through their speeches
leaders lead/push their parties
until what they say goes through
the media mincing machine
popularly known as 'the commentariat',
whose comments the parties will strive to ignore,
buy off, bully, or otherwise mute/redirect.

Accountants and treasury officials
will make the chancellor talk
in accountancy-speak, a language
the public can't make plain in its intent
until it is way too late to counter
what he (it is usually a he) has said.
When the press apply their logic
to the combined effect of the speech
and the stats he quotes they will expose
the emptiness of the aspirational language.
This vacuum will set up next years debts.

But by then the process has moved on
to the legisature to be ratified. 

Heavenly Pyjamas

I'd love to think that if Heaven is real
then everyone present there will wear pyjamas.
Perhaps some of us will even have dressing gowns
in which to lounge about the same way we used to,
at home in our former lives. The ease of such clothing
denotes a suitable Heavenly sense of ease about time,
and the well being natural to the space we inhabit
when we don't have to impress other people.

Freedom Of Speech

Why is it that when I hear politicians
bigging themselves up through praise
for the country which they say they run,
when they know they are covering up
how they are puppets on strings of money 
it always brings me out the tourettes in me?

Perhaps that is the effect of democracy....

Not So Long Ago,

and not so far away, good health
was best found through inherited wealth. 
And poverty was just as inherited,
and far more widespread, but despised.
Poverty was hidden in plain sight
and was effective in making life miserable.
Doctors were often far from helpful.
So the rural poor had wise women for births
and self medicated on herbs and tonics
with many a worldly townie turning to alcohol,
for seeing doctors and hospitals as being like Bedlam.
Both were designed to make them ill
by denying them their liberty and Nosocomephobia-
the fear of doctors and hospitals respectively
was the logical corollary of a rough life.

Beyond Value?

One of the oddities of modern life
is how rich families in rich countries
become minor media celebrities
-particularly when they prove
dysfunctional because of their wealth,
which is when said families
portray an agenda of 'We can buy
our way out of trouble and the public
will find it entertaining to pay to watch'.

Buying their way past how they don't listen to each other
by employing multiples of therapists and lawyers
to help make decisions then it does seem
as if emotional well being were an extension
of the mangerialism of Parkinsons Law,
where the more the money that is spent
the less is achieved with it, thus devalueing,
all money and all effort, and bankrupting creativity.

Were such dysfunction dealt with
more cheaply, and with greater warmth,
we might never learn about it, but if we did
I am sure we woud find it healthier
than the avoidance of wealth based solutions.


   

How To Deal With Cold Callers

When they ask who you are,
which they always do to claim your attention,
quietly tell them 'I'd like to to talk to you
but there isn't a phone in the house'.
Then quietly put the phone down.
You will have ended the call calmly,
and faster than it takes them to realise
the illigocality of your answer. 

Politicians

are like swear words
-the less we know about either
the better off we feel we are.

When Verbal Versatility Decieves Us

Due to my limited education
I rarely measure how words travel.
Language often leaves me behind
-though less so than it used to.
For instance, until I checked
I didn't realise how far
the word 'market' has shifted.

It now has six basic meanings
which in a society built on money
-and credit at that-rather than barter
or any other system of trade,
incorporating every choice we make.

It is used to describe

1-a place for the transfer of goods.
2-the trade in goods.
3-the group that is sold goods to.
4-individuals who are sold goods to.

And of money at its most abstract
the word incorporates
5-a stock market-the sale of bonds
and other theoretical economic instruments.
6-economic systems which vary
between command, mixed and 'free',
as in 'unregulated', though this extends
the market for secrecy, hypocricy and vice.

Tellingly it does not describe the sellers,
only the goods sold and people sold to,
this helps create the sense of  invisibility
'the hand of the market' relies upon.

After that there the behemoth called marketing
-the promotion of goods through advertising
or otherwise making known the availability thereof,
which like stock markets and economic systems
dwarfs the individual in this age of mass media,
-defining the individual the same way
that a maze defines a rat when it curious.....

What to do when one word describes too much?
This is something proponents of markets won't discuss
for fear of the risk of the language expanding,
which might well legitamise customers saying 'No'
in such a way that might make marketeers listen.

Throwing Things Out

When taste
is a matter of waste
then the future
is going to get shorter.

Hurrah

for the effects of nuclear radiation-
when it evacuates human population
then the wild life will thrive again.

Who Censors The Censors?

In countries with overtly strong state security
what is presented in the public media
is often taken with a large pinch of salt.
This is not to give it flavour, but to remove
possible impurities in the presentation
when people know to not take at face value
what their governments tells them.

And who can blame them
when we are told our media is 'free'
by spokesmen for media moguls
who see the denial of ownership
of their media properties
as being good for paying less tax
and promoting commercial secrecy?   

The Scent Of History

Gods Piss on each others shrines,
the places where they are worshipped.
And with each fresh scent they create new followers.
The latest to piss resets the date
and moves human history forward a notch,
erasing the old labels and updating the technology,
but leaving the practice of everyday life
as near the past as they bring themselves to leave it. 

No worshipper knows who will be the last,
or the character of who it is they worship,
but they all yearn for when there will no more re-scenting.

An Incorrect Politcal Opinion

Newspapers love the cliched headlines
of 'Politcal correctness gone mad',
which imply that being mis-spoken for
in the past was the height of sanity.

The press are the universal masters
of recycled petty bourgeois outrage,
and can never resist repeating their past.

For myself I see political correctness
is the cultural equal of Munchausens-by-proxy.
This a condition where one person mugs another
and denies the mugged the freedom of speech
or thought through which to resist their attacker.
Families are the most accepted location for it,
Since it is a sickness that thrives on the nature
of accepted authority it has often been accepted, unnoticed.
 
But the press have expressed the idea of speaking for others
for far longer than any wacky local authority which, for instance
'Bans christmas trees because they offend atheists and muslims'.
With every recycled and false headline they expose their fears
of a potential loss of profit because the new competition. 

Practical Spirituality

If ever you want to raise money for a charity
then please read the followings suggestions.
They will make your gift seem natural to life
and improve your awareness of langauge.

Next time you install or update
some serious software on your computer
which requires multiple processes
with an attention span which seems
to be a rather awkward stretch for you
keep a swear box next to your mouse
and set a tariff on the different expletives
so that with each experession of exasperation
you stop, put the money in the box,
think of the charity that is going to gain,
and then return calmer to the online process.

The more you swear the more you pay
and the money raised will be authentic
to your sense of self awareness,
and if for you having been calm
you have been less generous
to your charity than you expected,
then you can always top it up,
in a fit of smug self satisfaction......    

Golf On Mars

The end of the world will not come through war,
though millions will die from advanced weaponry
being used against them, and the stress caused
will be filmed for mass consumption
to exonerate the guilty and imply it were avoidable.

The end will come from the plethora of golf courses
being built all around the world by/for the super rich.
These sterile landscapes will support no wildlife
and soak up water at unprecedented rates.

The real reason NASA is investigating Mars
for its water is less to callibrate the chances
of alien life forms and more to send billionaire astronauts
and their followers there to create costly golf courses
which will destroy less life than they do on earth,
whilst will coincidentally double as tax havens.