R.E.S.P.E.C.T

I have long been 'no respecter of persons [of status]'
and yet every day I am pleasantly surprised
when for having a respect for ordinary people,
regardless of their status or lack of it,
that the same respect has been returned to me,
enhanced by me being included in it.   

Satire Protest And Democracy

When The President has no sense of humour,
proportion, nor an apt sense of what is decent,
or not, then it is the duty of the people to promote
their sense of what he should do on his behalf.

The Best Good Works

are often done in secret,
or when we are covered by a shame
that others invoke over us, unawares
whereof we can neither speak nor write
but sometimes pray with strange groans
because our thinking is so blocked.

If we can do good when more controlled
than we know about, or are comfy with,
then after that is when hindsight reveals
the good faith, built on an unknown grace,
that carries us through those bad times.

Friendships And Family Values

built on one self or another being pitied,
where others rescue them from same,
will only ever be as weak or strong
as the foundations they are built upon.

Where the weak they are apt to need
more consistent repair than they think
then they rely on others to find for them.

Friendships are best
when both friends
play to their strengths  

Mistakenly

conflating discomfort with public honour
will cause suffering for no moral cause.
Such suffering will also cheapen
the genuinely moral causes around it.

Flatocracies

Crude majorities
produce flattened democracies,
where the media debate (such as it is)
is that we can't debate anything
until the politicians decide everything
so the public can be told what to think.

Only then can the public seal their divisions
by where they ink their X on the ballot paper.

American Humour

often reads wonderfully well on the page
when that happens it sharpens the mind of the reader.

But when such great wit transfers itself
to team written situation comedies for television,
where the demands of the medium
reduce the attention span through tricks
product placement and and laughter tracks
which combine to to sell more product
within and between shows then the mind
rapidly glazes over and shrinks
with the depth of aggressive targeting.... 

Self Protection?

Common attitudes and advice
with regard to computer use
often leaves me mystified.

They are great for finding folks with,
but as people simulate meeting each other
we go well beyond 'common sense'
with people we are unlikely to meet.
Were they not taking part in it too
then  it would make writers science fiction
feel positively jealous of the potential for connection.

But the human problem is security;
the more sites an internet user visits,
for finance, dating, work, games, shopping,
and the simulation of sex then the greater
the amount of digital protection required.
The more the passwords have to kept safe.
because viruses are the digital equivalent
of Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

Mostly we keep our passwords in the laptop,
not in our heads or privately written down
-which they are discouraged from doing.
'No Phishing here' should be the clear sign
from solid security against all would-be invaders.

The paradox is that each password
is meant to be unique, unguessable,
and yet memorable to the owner.
For it to be easily memorized
then it has to be drawn from life.
But the more of our lives we put
on the internet then the more we have
to keep some life off it, and say to ourselves
'This is for just us, and good for passwords.'.

Bur whose life is so unique it is safe from plunder?
Not mine, I learned that when I lived my analogue life.

Periodic Table Extended

To incorporate the 'Don't knows' and 'Don't know whys'

Error For Error

The best any parent can hope for
is the longevity to find that their mistakes
were small enough for them to be forgiven
whilst they are still alive, rather than their errors
become so all consuming that they have to die
to be well mis-remembered.

The second best that a parent can hope for
is that if their children become parents
then the children's make their own mistakes
and do not take up their parents errors.

Let each generation fail on their own terms
and let all hope that the future has the grace,
and finds the means to accept Samuel Beckett's
quote 'Ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better'. 

'My Fellow Americans, Russians, Turks... '

'Are you  ready to see other empires screwed on your behalf?
We will shaft the earth itself for your delight and short term pleasure....  '

Schrodingers Cake

Never mind Schrodinger's cat, the mythic creature
that theoretically exists in two states, alive and dead,
at the same time in it's box. And by opening the box
the cat is reduced one state in the shared reality
it is forced to accept with the human opening the box.
Everyone knows about that, don't they?

What I want to know about is Schrodinger's cake,
the one which people can both have and eat,
and it will still be there to be had after it has been eaten.
It seems to be a popular metaphor for political freedom,
a Utopian 'freedom' from present day responsibilities.

If I saw Schrodinger's oven with a cake in it
and the same cake out of the oven, nearby,
then the politics that overstretch cake as a metaphor
would be much much easier to understand.  

A New Compound Noun

For an activity which I am given to believe is a rather popular... 

Signs Of Greater Age (40)

1-If 'more sex' is the answer
I am unsure how much my body
is up to setting up the question....

2-I get more calls on my landline
from strangers trying to sell me things
I would never have thought to want
than I get, and give, to friends.

3-I have a mobile phone,
but I use it so rarely
that it is much nearer
being a cheap token
towards modern living
than I'd like to think.

The Art Of Unlistening

 'Out of the frying pan and into the fire'
is a cliche used by people who don't like to ask
how anyone got into either - 'frying pan' or 'fire',
As a phrase it helps the unlistener avoid listening better,
the better to not learn how anyone got in there,

Few seem to realize that such a lack of humility
in the hearer is not as casual as it appears.
It takes generations of luxury and wealth
to create such apparently successful detachment.

Being poor enough to know why to listen
but rich enough to act is what will keep us
wanting to use what we have, to make a difference.

The Narcissism Of Minor Diffidence

The Autism Scale is very inclusive place.
We all fit on it, somewhere between idiot savant
and multi-lingual international financial genius,
with much muddy mediocrity between.

For the 99 % there is no point in checking
where on the scale they or their neighbours are.
Something might be learned from the test,
but there would be no treatment worthy of the name.

The best we can do is try to be more empathic
to those around us whom we consider
to be less self aware, or nearer savant,
than the 'normal' that we like think we are. 

Different Protections

I will never be as rich as others are,
through their boxing very clever.
The treasure in my life
comes from trying to be
open to listen, and clear. 

The House That Can Feed You

If you take care of it's walls and roof sufficiently well.
How well you live in it depends on choosing a site
 for your dwelling that has a sunny disposition,
to keep you warm as you live inside it too....

Artifice Of Intelligence

When machines apologize
as if they were real people,
and when we accept their words
without asking 'Who programmed this machine to say 'Sorry'?'
we have taken a step too many in the wrong direction,
away from knowing the weakness of our flesh and spirit selves.  

Sex, Money, And Choice

Promiscuity is like having a credit card-
both take the waiting out of wanting.
And with time both reveal the limits
of 'being human', and if we let them
both can teach us how having less
can be quite enough for our needs.

Too Good To Be Real

Heaven is a place where everything is direct,
there are no weapons or displacement activities.
There is no advertising; hopes are met
through needs being recognized as mutual,
rather than deferred and then multiplied
into wants that prove impossible to meet.
In Heaven there is neither debt or marriage,
just as there is no ownership or hunger.

Heaven is the perpetual motion machine,
where we imagine zero waste
being sustained by Absolute Grace.

In this life the above qualities
are known in full by very few.
Though many experience
the tiniest splinters of Heaven
in the midst of every day dis-grace.

What ever our faith, or lack of it,
Heaven is how we see really living.

Paradoxically the more that more of us
try to live out such impossible infinities,
where the whole feels like more
than the sum of it's (unknown) parts,
through finite planetary resources,
then the more we cut off future peoples
hope of a similar life. Best ask for less
if we want the future to be a sustainable.

Mirthful Housing

What improves my life
is the mutual reinforcing
strengths of humour and asceticism
that I find through good friends.

They combine so well,
and enrich each other,
they could define 'forever'.

I Don't Know When It Will Arrive

but I know that my shipwreck is coming in.
Given how well I am settled
it has probably already arrived,
and I did not recognize it on arrival. 

Existential Homelessness

is surely a very taut tautology,
as a repetition it is far from 'a failure of style',
but more the education and 'housing market'
creating greater need than they are inclined meet.
Thus expanding the market for human suffering. 

How To Create A Garden

Not being 'normal' is what will give it life, your life given to others...

Food And Violence

'A hand to mouth existence'
is a phrase that denotes a life
where there is never a surplus
and the financial moorings
of the masses are never as secure
as everyone says they wish they were.
But with a lot of grit, self discipline,
and enough luck the poor will survive.

Alas in the alcohol cultures
that many of the poor get trapped in
'hand to mouth' would also mean
the fear of being fed with a fist,
raised in spontaneous anger,
as much as the hope of getting by.

Call The Doctor?

Many people are very tired
of the media speculating about 'Brexit'.
It may well the new zeitgeist,
But it is zeitgeist full of indecision.
There are too many variables in it
for anyone to ever be mature
whilst they are being reassured.

I like single simple similes
which reflexively encapsulate situations,
mine is that the UK vote to 'leave Europe'
is like flipping the switch in the T.A.R.D.I.S.

It works Dr Who arrives rushed
into his T.A.R.D.I.S., slides the lever
to escape/the electorate vote 'leave'.
The ancient machinery of government
has to lurch into action, but it is so old,
so temperamental, eccentric and inefficient
that soon we don't know what it is we are
relying on for finding our momentum.

We don't know where the country will land,
or whether in the multi-dimensional vortex
of negotiating the 'politics of independence'
the country might split in to four different time warps.

Though given the regional disparities of wealth
many are saying that the country has already has split,
well beyond all possibilities of being repaired.....

And did I mention all the aliens?
Those who speak with alien tongues?
Look out Doctor! The people
your are trying to help don't know
that they are not who they say they are.
Their faces change behind your back.
Sometimes they look worthy of trust
and you do have to work with them.
But they really are very different....

It is not paranoia when can't see
how or why they are out to get you.

Last but not least, though she does not seem it,
in being seen in her 'futuristic' kitten heels/leather trousers
our esteemed leader Theresa May is, in her own way,
doing her best to suggest that she is The First Lady Doctor.
She was never just a Tory and some call her The Master.
Her late entrance and opaque campaign to be Tory Leader
worked because it was not just confused and contorted plotting,
She is not being gnomic about Brexit for nothing,
It is the start of the renewal of Dr Who's use of jargon.

Whoever we thought she was,
she was always a shape shifting Time Lord.

Safety On The Road

Mindfulness is....
gently putting the brain in gear
before letting the brake off the mouth
in the midst of highly complex verbal traffic.

Rules Are Never 'Just Rules'....

I well remember sports in school,
though I wish I didn't. I now know
why I lost my sports kit quite so often.
It was deliberate. Natural ingratitude.
An allergic reaction to how sport was played.
Buried within the rules was the principle
that 'competition had to be without mentoring',
a deliberate unfairness which exposed the weakest,
and the most unsupported from home, first.
After that they were made to feel useless
to themselves, the better to support the few
who knew all along that it was not just sport
-it was life, 'life chances' they were playing for.
Who ever it cost to put the few at the top in future,
whilst the many fell away on the journey,
their efforts were thoroughly worth it.

Coming To America, Soon

from Mumbai, From the president who is going 'refresh' politics, more than we think...

My First New Year Card Of 2017

The entire cast of puppets made by Paul Klee for his son Felix

Saving Time Through Failure

Looking back convinces me more than before
that when I was young I was stronger than I realized.
When I was resisting the pricks of false propriety,
the rules with nothing but their own force
behind them 'You can't have what you want...
You must do as I say. Blah', I more then survived.
Though it did not feel much like that at the time.
 
But that does nothing change the record.
I am still no more than an 'also-ran',
who gave their little all to prop up a system
that was designed to mis-remember me.
Later, in their own time, the other boys
in my school would become 'also ran's' too.

But I my achievement was saving time
by getting to that stage sooner than they did.