Once More With Feeling?

Being male and liking male company
one of the phrases that makes me shudder
when it is oh-so casually uttered is
'A man is only as old as the woman feels.'.

It takes so much for granted
that it flabbergasts me.
I like other men socially,
partially as a curative for my 'being gay'
and my wanting to be less sexual.

To think of all those young women
groped by older men, with their history of flattery
and the trail of self deceit behind their masculinity
makes me want to see more young men's bottoms pinched,
so that when they are older they might remember
how it feels for women and refresh the feminism
of their very distant fore-bearers. 

  

The Zombie Test

is an uncertain thing,
but it consists of the following;

How long are you comfortable
wearing a face mask in public
before you want to take it off/
you start to panic?

1-10  mins-you are not zombie material

11-30 mins-you can be temporarily a zombie when required  

30-120 mins-your longevity matters more than the quality
of your life and you don't want to know that. 

Me? I can go all day wearing the mask when I need to
-but I try to need them less. 

The Train Route We Can't Avoid

though some of us try not to go there,
by distracting ourselves beyond belief.

When Ageism Is Positive

How seriously we take 'The News'
with all its political bias and views
depends very much on our age.

The younger we are
the more we are meant

to part of the economy
which forces us to listen more

to the views of 'the powerful'

where the less we know, 

the less we know what to make of it.

The older we are the more satire
we have absorbed and the more
the satire gives us an immunity.

Until one day we are older 

than the leaders of the country

we live in and can look down

on their relative youth 

from our seniority

and know that the mistakes

the youthful leader is about to make

has been made in the past

and it did not work then either

The Well Of Emptiness

Many a book in history gained notoriety

for it's content and got itself banned

in one country but remained published

in the rest of the world, in translation.  

Such was the fate of 'The Well Of Loneliness'
which was banned in the UK in 1929
in a trail that the press made hay with,

or rather sold acres of newsprint 

on the back of as the judge 

revelled in being quoted in the press.

The crime of the book was it's unrepentant
mixing of gender. As 'she' became 'he'
so the relationships in it were lesbian
with one partner decidedly masculine.

Radclyffe Hall's book was banned
in the same era in which 'Lady Chatterly's Lover'
was bowdlerised to please the ruling classes.

Hall's book was republished legally

in the UK in 1957, fourteen years

after the it's author died,
with far less fuss than Lawrence's book
courted in the courts three years later

where lawyers publicly fought
to get the book published as written,

whilst mocking censorship with gusto.

But banning a book

and then making it legal

does not make it readable;

it merely makes the book notorious

and the trail more interesting

than the book ever could be.

  

Garden Riot; No Flowers Arrested

No garden police were called to the site
where the artichoke was left to flower amid the chaos.

No statements were taken from the rest of the flowers,
and when the rhubarb was asked it mumbled 'No Comment'.

The Slow Life

When I was at school
I was never allowed near science,
I was slow, clumsy and left-handed;
the teacher said 'This is far too technical for you',
so I was engineered to be scientifically ignorant.

I didn't mind that, except that proper scientific approach
of singular serial tasking, Hypothesis, Test, Assess Result
would have suited my slowness perfectly.
When I completed tasks one at a time
that was me to a tee, well cued up.

My Favourite Sunset

The power of medication
to suppress longing,

once accepted,
cannot be under estimated.

Once we are on the pills
the longing stops
and the permanent sunset
on want begins.

Grief

will multiply when it is synthetic.

Just it is with anger
the more synthetic it is
the more it will multiply....

Modern Surrealism (2)

the absorbent footwear
for the crustie in your life.

Lives Matter

whatever the skin colour
of their holder;
their thoughts matter
their words matter
their deeds matter.

In spite of how human history

is mostly a history of forgetfulness

and well designed cruelty. 

The Royal Prerogative

King Cnut was famous for setting his throne
upon the beach and bidding the tide 'retreat!'
Which of course it didn't, the event was passed off
as him proving the limits of his, and all kings, powers.

Fast forward a thousand years
and in the wealthy West
many more than before
live like the kings of old
but we have forgotten the lesson
of humility in the face of the elements
Cnut's eventide experiment exemplified,
as we stoke up further global warming,
by using up the earths resources
and have a media that we exhaust
when we don't listen to as it tells us
to live better within our limitations.

Book Disease

Is nothing to be ashamed of,
though people will resemble
their reading habits, so it is better
to choose your books by the people
you would like to be liked by.   

 

How late Is Too Late?

Don't worry about the apocalypse,

it is one of the type of events

where by the time we recognise

the signs for it for what they are

those same signs will also say

that it is too late for us 

to stop it happening.

We are already part way there,

with the mass extinction of species
which are much larger than ourselves,

because we have claimed their habitats

for growing food for the many

where the profits go to the few.

Soon it will be us versus the insects,

the microbes and the viruses,

where the virus that is Capitalism,

and the half life it gives humans to live on,

will be met head on by a self immolating planet

that is itching to get rid of us and start again,

with who-knows-what primitive life form. 

Remember Him This Way

James Marshall Hendrix (1942-70)
in his first band in the 101st Airborne Division, 1962.
In that first band he was described by one witness
as 'A mix of John Lee Hooker and Beethoven'.

Now he is everywhere, he is free from the limits
of the human body, though his legacy is not free
 of the bootleggers and a creative estate
 that takes a lot of managing.
The studio he built Electric Lady Studios
is his most lasting his mark on popular music.
It is the recording studio that has been
where everyone,  from The Clash to Frank Zappa
and David Bowie have found renewed inspiration.

It's A Male Thing.....

For all of my life, until now, I never realised
how much it is a male thing to say 'Let's talk',
As if mutually defensive talk
was a way that both sides
could see as 'good negotiation'.

Myself, I was always an alien
for believing in listening in.  

Book Disease

is still more sociable and wise
than the widespread ignorance
from the lack of learning
caused by popular education. 

Small Ad (2)

The Indignity Of Labour

Has been sorely proven
with the first wave of Covid
where people stopped doing 

what once seemed important

because important people told them  
it was important for them to do it,

and they did things more neighbourly,

basic and vital instead; 

thus the virus did not spread.

Now the governments want folks

to go back to their offices to work,

to reignite a more competitive

and less neighbourly economy

for us to keep them in comfort,

they don't want to have too

work too hard, you know.....

Modern Surrealism (1)

Each dog is playing with with an impossible 'toy'
 that Mathematician M. C. Escher designed
on paper that no human could create.

Violence Is Us

Whether the metal in our hands
is the sword or the plough it is a blade.
It cuts and that is the point of it.

The earth accepts how we cut it
more readily than we accept
being sliced up by each other,
another act we are good at,
whilst wishing we had
more skill and detachment
from the act as we did it.

The earth accepts our blood,
the blood of the animals we kill

where we make extinct whole species,
and the poisons we brew up
that have toxic half lives
of thousands of years.

Meanwhile we refuse to recognise
how worthy of sacrifice we are.

It Will Be A Long Night

if we have to continually wakefully prepare
for Communism to re-purpose our lives
amid the long night of private ownership.

But it will be a beautiful life
when we work out how common ownership 
actually works and we can make it stable.

Incomplete Works

A woman's work is never complete
because, institutionally speaking,
men never recognise it's full value.

Small Ad

Were this advert to appear anywhere
it could only only appear in a Western media
 where trying to be the exception is the rule.

Life In 'A flat'

'Shame was never best measure of social class'
he said, flattening his vowels as he did so.... 

The Divisions Of Human Appetite

If an alien could tune in
to the human/digital world
what might they find?

On Instagram they would see
lots of pictures of the food
that people were about to eat
which they thought the world
should see before it disappeared.

On facebook they would find humour
and politics though not always in that order.

On Tik-tok they would find youthful music
with lots of dance moves to make it sound better.

Finally they could tune into Pornhub
and go through all it's different categories
and sub categories. There they could discover
everything there is to be known
about non-procreative sex
that anyone could want to know
before after so many years
of thinking it was knowledge
they got bored with it all. 

Some Warnings (2)

have to be too big to be ignored
for other people to take notice of them.

Branded!

But as your enemies they do not want you
to know how unfriendly they actually are. If you knew
then they would have to find somebody else to hate 
and hide their hate from, and the effort required
would make it a bad deal indeed. 

The Civility Of The Open Question

becomes harder to retain as questions get bigger,
but that is where we need civility more than ever.

Anthem Of Sorrow

From the diary of Sir Edward Elgar, who lived well,
materially at least, for another fifteen years 
after the end of The Great War.

Disguising Loss

I call this sculpture 'pour yourself a tree trunk'
when I filed it away, but a better title
would be 'How to disguise a loss'
since the original tree must have been huge
and had a natural grandeur that outdid
all human creativity and adaptation. 

Freedom Of Speech

is now considered to be
the foundation of any free society,
with the United States as it's acme.

But, disappointingly,
when Americans speak
about 'the first amendment'
the amendment they talk about
is not even the first amendment,
in American law-it is a later clause
that amended an earlier amendment
when freedom of speech mattered less.  

Picture Set Of The Month - September - Picasso's Decorated Plates

Decorated plate by Picasso, fish pattern, 1952.

Ltd edition dinner set black face plate, 1948.

'Face 197' painted in 1963

Oval Face Plate, 1955.

Oval face plate, 1955.