The Life Of The Unchosen

When I was young my homosexuality
consisted of searching for descriptions
of places that linked the bent of my nature
to where I felt at ease, accepted as bent.
Fantasy always meant imagined aggression,
and the asexual transactions of  'the real world'
suggested something more closed than they said.

Homosexuality was tied in with masculinity,
and how both worked was opaque and hidden.
But any male worthy of their status was Alpha
and their manhood was about triggering conflicts
in others that only the male triggering them could win.
I felt invisible, particularly when men covertly fought
over all that was not them-the better to subdue it to their will.

Honest Cupboard Love

is knowing how sentimental we are
when we talk about food and restful sleep
in a world where we expect so many live without.

I Woke Up With A Splitting Headache This Morning

I can't for the life of me think why.....

Reel Time

Who among us can both play the lead
and direct the movie that is their lives?
And do both well at the same time?
The older I get the more I find
that we are often better being mere extras
in each others lives than it is easy to admit.

The Less You Know The Less It Can Hurt You

Dystopias are many and varied,
but consistent;comfort is for the few
at the top who control everything,
particularly how they are understood.
Discomfort is the norm for all
beneath them who are controlled.

In societies built on secrecy around control
the censorship works like the first rule
in the film 'Fight Club'; 'Nobody talks about...  '

For The Over-Sensitive

The difference between bullying and banter
in human behaviour is often hard to find.
But if confidence is to ever be found
it is through seeking the good humour
in the faces of those they pay attention to,
as those folk talk, rather than being afraid to listen.

Another Country?

In the western world we all know
how our pasts get washed away
by waves of peaceful technology,
so that how we was once amusing
and low tech, if not merely mechanical,
very quickly becomes false nostalgia
for future generations to feast upon.

Whilst millions across the world
lose much less and mourn a lot more
for being made to leave their country
of origin because the military hardware
which the rich supplies to strengthen weak
cleptocracies dictates their departure.

Selling Discomfort

is the easiest way to profit, the greater the discomfort the more the profit.

One Of The Deights Of Small Town France

Is how local people help each other to help themselves to lighter moments...

The Healthy Enmity

'Find an enemy for life
and you will never need a doctor'
-Sascha Arango

Selective Screening

The media cliche about 'the family breakfast'
used to be the scene where middle class fathers
would 'head' the table by insisting 'his' family
be silent whilst he read his broadsheet newspaper.

These papers were as big as they were self important.
Whilst he held his up he could not seen,
which was offered as proof that he was reading.
Nobody knew what he was looking at,
but his hands conducted the silence of the children
whilst they hold the paper by it's edges.

Now we isolate ourselves with screens
of different sizes, from mobile phones to lap tops,
I-pads and the rest, all of which absorb more
of our attention than we choose to realize,
to diminishing effect. They are the new broadsheets.
We have to sit still to be attentive of them
and through them we screen out everybody
and everything, whilst they keep our fingers busy.

  

The Extra Within The Ordinary

Whatever horrifies us most 
has to be rooted in the everyday,
the ordinary, to draw from us
the depths of feeling that it does.

Feelings of delight will be similar.

Contrariness

Many modern societies seem to work better
through rules where people disengage from each other
more than they would through clearly affirmative structures.

Capitalism/Cannibalism

'If somebody offers you a free lunch
it probably means they are going to eat you for breakfast'
-Micheal Bloomberg, ex Mayor of New York,
presently a candidate for U.S. president.

Accident Or Design?

I often hear the word 'hypocrite'
used by one person to describe another
from folks who imply they are consistent.
What this much abused epithet
never renders to me is whether the subject
of the insult was two faced by design or accident.

But if we are driven enough to be unobservant
then accident and intent will become our two faces....  

Monocultures Will Make Exits From Them Hard To Find...

There are many other ways of being ashamed to choose from...

Narcisism 1 Democracy 0

The more 'perfect' the society
the deeper and harder to eradicate
the flaws in said society become.

Criticism needs to be accurate,
but the more precise it is
the harder it will be to act upon.

Particularly when flaws are mistaken
by the many as major virtues...

Child In Time

It is not that 'time slips through our fingers'
when we try to measure the process of longevity,
but more that time is real and our fingers
are part of it, more than we can feel or know.
Some of us felt time more, and felt it to be more gentle,
before wrist watches became the sign to us
to join the queue to become the fraught adults
that we hoped we never would become.  

Small World Dictators

Orwell was well off the mark when in 1948
he created the idea of 'Newspeak',
as a key part of the apparatus of the state
to reduce the breadth of the language of the masses.

Though it would be natural to all governments
to manipulate any language which might describe
their covertly conducted mass surveillance,
in reality total control of language is impossible.

Youths the world over have always created slang
to find each other and detach themselves
from the adults who they feel control them.
Though equally said youths are still controlled,
but more by the supply of goods and images
through which they think they mark their territory
the places where they become the dictators of small worlds.

The Life After The Life

Most genius is most appreciated
long after it's carrier has died,
in markets where there is no life,
to speak of, in the living. 

For As Much As Families Exist

they will lay claim to us
-that is their reason for being
which we too take part in,
in ill health and great wealth.
It is up to the individual
to make others more individual
to make a life less forced by family ties. 

Hopeful Travels

A sense of courage is always retrospective.
You only know that you had enough of it
after you have been through the experience,
and later you find a calmer place,
whether that is of learning-or simply recovery.

Very few of us will get as far
through the many life experiences
as intact we would each of us like.

Evil Is Rarely Pure,

consistent or undiluted. The powers that fight it
are rarely as coherent as they are constant.
This is why the best choice is a messy life.

The Old School Tie

Education often refines and improves intelligence
but the education that adults use in networking
through career structures nearly always destroys
much more than it creates. Through sophistication
it narrows it's holder, even as it causes admiration. 

Nobody For Driver

The new driver-less car is going to become
the ultimate symbol of that recent idea
that has spread like a virus 'the free market'.
Both are all mechanism and no driver
and both will crash when least predicted to.
When they do then 'Nobody' will be in charge
though many who gained from being passengers
will claim they were taken for a very rough ride.
 

Hypocrisy With Elan...

'Charisma' is the ability to have as many faces
as you want and for them all to be thoroughly accepted
by others, no doubts quietly raised, and no questions asked.

The Competition For The New Flag Design Was Quite Stiff.....

And not just with indifference from diminishing patriotism.....

Refreshment Through Ease?

In these days of of being easily entertained
'genius' is generally defined as showing up
the quotidian for what it is,
the habit of being repetitive, slow and tired.

But I would say that a genius is a person
who proves that the creativity that goes on
around them is false and lacking
compared with their self-refreshing gift.

Technology 1 Representative Democracy 0

I am often astonished when I see government policies,
and how the powers that be see this or that issue, change
in apparent recognition of a changing the public mood.

So often it seems like the technology
used to transmit protesters messages
absorbs nearly all energy in the message
before said message reaches the target
-the relevant government department.

Which is why so little seems to change.

You Too Can Find Your Inner 14 Year Old (2)

Long before the age of video games teenage males had to find places

well away from home and family for certain personal energies/drives.

Being Sequentually Sexually Promiscuous

is less a matter of heart vs head,
more a matter of life vs sex drive.

Overly Sub Standard

Hollywood was founded on talented people
making too many romances, cheap thrillers,
horror films and actioners such that even now,
over a century on, many modern films are B movies
in disguise-costly and badly made fantasies.
Fit for nobody more than undiscerning teenagers.

But to sell these films to adults and families 
many of them are up-rated through overselling
to stop the glut of sub-standard entertainments
being too clear for too many consumers to see.

Just look at how Amazon accepts praise for films.....

The Perrenial Suffering Of The Spared

I have not seen the new film 'Son of Saul', by first time Hungarian director Lazlo Nemes, but presently it is much discussed in the media, particularly since it won the 2016 Oscar for 'Best Foreign Language Film'. As a film it naturally brings to mind the sharp crticism made by the German philospher Adorno after WW2 -

 'There can be no poetry after Auschwitz'.

But of course there was poetry after Auschwitz, and memoirs by many who suffered but survived the many death camps, until such books became a genre of book in their own right. My favourite of this type of book is one of the early and outstanding examples, Primo Levi's 'If this is a man'/'The Truce', which-trust me in this-is the best antidote to the false positive feelings and power of commerce that surround the season of Christmas that you will ever find.

But the full quote by Adorno should be quoted about the difficulties around any expression of art
that pertains to life, particularly film, which includes the portraying of profound suffering.....

'Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.  But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question
whether after Auschwitz you can go on living- -especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

with thanks to here.