The Best We Never Hear About

I wish I were paid a pension supplement
for every time I had to listen through anyone
on my radio who says that of some aspect
of their country, 'We are the best in the world
at [insert subject from food to bureaucracy here]',
where no other country is presented for comparison.

This repeated linguistic twitch is just that,
the narcissism of minor difference on a national scale
or chauvinism that goes beyond the pale of reason.

I would be happy for being poorer
for hearing far fewer public speakers
verbally inflating the value of their country
with superlatives any listener knows were wrong
where only the radio off switch could end them,   

Creatively Unwaged As I Am

World please stop me from being offered
second hand stuff that well meaning people
think it has more life in it, where they decide
that life is going to come from my having the item.

I have more than enough
that is second hand and serviceable
and mine to keep, that nobody else wants.
and I keep the space it is kept in open and tidy.

I don't mind being low in the pile
of social needs-if I were offered a job
I would not know what to do with it-
so living as I do now seems to be quite enough.

Apologies To The Dead

who can not longer acknowledge
their pardons from the living,
for when the would-be recipients
should have received them but didn't.

Such apologies were never sent
because they carried too many caveats
and excuses that defended their would-be senders,
the state sponsors of injustice down the ages
for their pardons to be delivered on time.

Perhaps when one of the dead becomes famous
for their contribution to the modern life
posthumous honours will be heaped upon them.
Where the givers will be honouring their forbearers
more than the martyred dead, for the injustice. 

The School Playground For Adults

I have been slow to appreciate and rank
the plethora of media outlets, many of which
are no more than random names to me,
Facebook, X, Bluesky, Instagram, Tik-Tok,
whatsapp, and al the rest in terms of their speed
at sharing voluminous levels of communications,
where clarity and inclusive humour of the message
are in the mind of the receiver. For whom being there
often reminds them of times in the school playground.

But I think I have got it now,
the measure of how fast we think
is how fast we can be seen to write. 

But when that measure includes how crude
and rude to each other we can be, what that amounts to
is how we use public media to disown the parts of us
we want to disown before people who know us in person.

I take the slower route, and know fewer people,
with whom I try to represent myself in the mass media
who I would want to be, if we were to meet in person.

Old Ruins Are The Best Ruins

I am used to the future being unevenly distributed,
by parents who bury their pasts in their child's present,
as if, for rich or poor, their past was their gift to the future.
Where 'We do what we know to do.' excuses a lot of error.

What is harder to return to, or forgive, is when the past
that is planted into the present makes finding forgiveness
harder for the defensiveness, and historic refusal to explain.

But there time will either heal,
or make us recognise the ruin
of old hopes for what they have become. 

As a friend said about the remains of buildings
where the birds and the wildlife are the visitors
who appear most 'The best of man is his ruins'.   

R.E.S.P.E,C.T. vs Leadership

Positive disagreement in a consensus
always requires respect to make it work
and yet respect, to those who seek to lead
because they lack humility, seems absurd,
feebleness itself compared with the ideal
in their heads, the structure of command
where they don't have to think, they know best.

And nobody knows they are right like they do:
for them consensus is what forms around them.

Given A Choice Of Dictator,

and Empires past and present I know
I am spoilt for choice. Even now
I can hardly imagine the measure
by which they should be ranked,
beyond  how reassuringly circular
the leaders' self-belief will be.

But looking at the living dictators
Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Il, and Erdogan
Erdogan started earliest as Mayor of Istanbul,
and has become President of Turkey
without the support of any political party,
thus he sees all the parties as enemies. 

Putin has been in power the next longest,
having been President or Prime Minister
of the Russian Empire since the year 2000,
and is now bending Russian time to drag
that empire and its neighbours back into a past
where rewriting everyday history was normal,
it was only modern propaganda that revealed
how freakish faking the past could become.

Kim Jong Il is the only hereditary dictator
among the infamous four, who has been
keeping his people dirt poor since 2011,

Lastly there is Trump and VP Vance
who inherited a complex but flawed
democratic state which they seek to reduce
to a fiefdom where their word is law
and everyone, but everybody, knows this.

Donald Trump's Latest Public Venture

 

Holidays In Malaysia

That is where I want to go,
because I want follow where my rubbish goes,
now that China has ended importing the waste
the world used to send it, unsorted, 'for recycling',
that, naturally, never happened.

In the ancient world waste was natural, and was easily,
if slowly, returned to the state it started life as.

But in the world of chemicals and synthetic compounds,
the alchemy of modern plastics excludes the means
of returning the results back to their original form.

Since 2018, when China bowed out of receiving
the worlds waste, Malaysia has become the place to go
 to discover how the alchemy of the modern world
is not being reversed to its original materials. 
You can read more about it here and find many other reports about it.  

I Am Thankful For My Invisibility

when the country I grew up in
was led by myths and ghosts,
including how that country was,
until recently, the centre of the former empire
that we believed we had safely dismantled.
But the biggest damage was collateral,
when the former satellite countries we 'let go' of
proved divided as their independence evolved.

We blamed them for 'being immature',
after we shed all responsibility
for their immaturity, not seeing
that that was how to whitewash our language. 

At home the standard sign in moving times
in the windows in cities for rented accommodation
was 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish', no matter that
the country depended on the labour of two of the three,
for doing everything the locals wanted done for them.

The landlord was not going to admit his countries dependencies.

How glad I am with hindsight, that homosexuality,
my particular social difference, was nearly invisible
and the vehemence against it was an anger
against something that went unrecognised in the form it took.

Whilst now the latest outcry is against
people daring to live differently to how
their birth certificates predicted they should,
no landlord or landlady in the 1950's 
would put a sign in the window 'No Gays Today'.

Such people back then had enough to contend with,
from threats of blackmail and agent provocateur police activity
given how secretive they had to be about their 'criminal sexual choices'.
Along with being the object of hysteria in the popular press.

Gay men were the same as everyone else:
they did not need landlords to anonymously shame them,
as unwanted tenants, for being unable to recognise them on the street.    

 

April Remains The Cruelest Month

to started a war that was never settled after.

The American Civil War started on the12th of April 1861.
It was officially declared 'ended' 3 years and 362 days later.

After the war, new laws were passed
that extended American citizenship in the shape
of  the 13th ,14th, and 15th amendments
of the American Constitution. All of them
laws that have been observed in the breach 
in judgements contrary to them ever since.

Jim Crow states, with Jim Crow laws,
tried to make sure non white citizens,
including the descendants of former slaves,
'knew their place' in an economy that had been
built on slave labour that was reluctant
to abandon what had made the few so wealthy.

Over a hundred and sixty years later,
and some billionaires in the new USA
would like more new laws that resurrect 
the old dystopian extremities of wealth and power
to fuel inequality for a new millennium. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty One - Groping For The Light In The Dark

As Christmas and the season of commercial goodwill to all men approached, I met it knowing more than ever I was not as other men, and that it was meant to be less rewarding for me. Adelaide, my landlady proved it with her Christmas card to me. It depicted a cartoon of a man who was putting an image of himself at the top of his Christmas tree. As affirmative humour went, it went a long way with me.

On the surface I felt more sociable with the new short hair and beard. Though part of me wanted to grow the beard again, but I had nobody close enough to discuss the matter with. I was glad that the previous 'old man of the sea' look was gone. The new look made it easier for me to smile. I felt lighter in myself for the change of appearance. The rules that I knew guided the language of church people that seemed to be both easier to understand and more frustrating in what they dictated was off-limits. Those rules had been a good holding place but in my head I still had the memories of old holding places where I was held unsympathetically. There, back then, nobody would talk about how the rules favoured the few, and I was one of the many. The memories of the lack of sheer indifference from those times seemed to be clarifying into sharper focus the more I wrote about them at night when writing could easily make me cry. But the tears helped me sleep. The longer I went on with the new appearance the more I felt that the holding place is what creates the self, and to be the different person I thought I could be I needed to be in a different place. In the meanwhile I continued my arguments with previous less comfortable selves I'd been with the nightly journaling.

If I felt only loosely out sync with my neighbours and friends in Lady Bay I felt much further out of sync with those I kept trying to maintain contact with from my Lincolnshire life. My longest friendship at the time was with Graham in Newark, who whilst he lived no more than a thirty minute train journey away, the distance of a few miles had hid a lot of changes both of us had made apart from each other. In the Gainsborough of my memory he had stood out for being one of very few who followed an Indian spiritual teacher, where when Graham asserted the teachings of this guru/teacher it was impossible to ask why and how such a minority spiritual path was right about the whole universe. A cynic/rationalist, would have thought his belief was 'following a cult' whilst trying to soften their language towards him. Only for Graham's reply to the unbeliever being to reinforce the damning description of 'he is in a cult', where cults always defy shared logic and push the adherent into a position of isolation. 36

I was doing no better. In my nightly journaling I had found a language for what made me feel isolated, but I was waiting for the doctors appointment for the course of therapy to make how I felt sharable with other human beings in a setting I trusted. Comparing our different senses of what isolated us, past and present that outside of a mutual appreciation of 'outsider' folk musician Roy Harper and other music, we were both isolated by language where the language locked away how we had created memory and experience, rather than letting us share how we knew what we knew.

It was a given that we did not discuss homosexuality: he would not have wanted to and I did not know how discuss that matter. But if, for instance, he had asked me 'You say you are Christian and yet your Christianity is unforgiving of your homosexuality. How does that fit together?' he would have been right, and revealed to both of us part of how painfully divided I felt. If I had replied generically 'Lots of American soul musicians have felt the pull between the sexual urge and the spiritual urge, and conflated the two.' I would have been half right. But he could still have scoffed 'Sophistry!'. As it was the conversation usually stopped at his assertion belief that 'The world we are both in now could be utterly changed forever by the right collective belief in the right instant to the right guru.', where me saying 'Can I at least call him 'Teacher? That is at least a bit of English I understand.'. would be seen as weak. He would stick to his own ideas in his own language, where he saw that as 'conviction'.

My faith was  working for me rather poorly at the time. The conflict between knowing I was gay, whilst feeling led to be part of/supported by a Christian church which was an improvement on previous churches with how accepted the existence of homosexuality but parked it distance from ever having to discuss it. The new car park for homosexuality parked it closer, but kept it a distance from open acknowledgement. With the churches' belief in predestination, as drawn from The Bible nobody there would willingly get their heads around how some people's lives were randomised and anonymised. The churches refused to accept at face value personal experience where adults had had their lives randomised and anonymised by the authorities of the day when they were too young to stop the process. The church refused to countenance how that randomness etc had shaped their experience of sex. 

In the new year I stopped all effort I'd made to keep in touch with Graham. I wanted my group therapy sessions to begin, when after more than than a year of waiting the doctor was saying nothing about when or where they might be starting. Given that my closest friendship was built on so much misunderstanding, then what chance had I of saying anything about resolving my contradictions to my family? They were part of why I had such contradictions in the first place. 

The last time with family the time had felt right was in early Autumn, pre hair cut, and then it worked because of my father's absence. My sister was the only one of the family to learn to drive and own a car. She drove from Gainsborough to visit me in Nottingham for an afternoon. She brought with her her four year old daughter, and Mother. They liked the shared house I lived in when they viewed it, it felt homely. The high spot of the day was walking out after our  afternoon meal to pick blackberries across the road from where I lived. There it was safe for Vicki-Louise to toddle behind the adults at a distance as we walked along. Vicki walked far enough behind to keep our heads at the same height as the horizon. Thus proving to me one bit of research I had read about where concerned mothers. Their concern was why children naturally walk at a distance from the adults who they want to keep as part of a wider world, whilst the adults' concern was that the child should walk beside them. The anxiety of the mother whose child did not walk beside them was the focus of the research. in their anxiety mothers were not concerned with that that the child had reasons for choosing the distances they did. But I too had reasons for keeping family at distance and establishing my own sense of perspective where I saw my family as part of the world. This time my distance was proven and quietly accepted.

Early in the new year I cottaged again. By this time, with the writings about it afterwards reducing the urge  to a more occasional need than the silent compulsion it had been before. I had sex with a very easy on the eye hairy/chunky bearded man, where his appearance and ease of body language made the encounter affirmative for me in way I had not expected. We even briefly kissed before we both left. This was a major advance on a previous encounter where 'Thank you Malcolm' had been the payoff that changed how I saw myself. If with the kiss he was as silent and mysterious as the man from milk tray, then I was fine with that. The brief time with him was the best New Year gift I could give myself. 

In some undefined way Graham's universal certainty against the personal randomness that some endure was part right: through the ether and via my sexual experiences there was a message looking for me to receive it where the message went something like 'He is a bear, you are a bear, this is a bear encounter'. After the newness of New Year wore off there were other messages ready to be be delivered to me which confirmed to me that my new self was ready for delivery too.

To be directed to Chapter Thirty Two please left cluck here. 

For The Sensitive (With Good Hearing)

 

The Currency Of Freedom

is unseen and unregulated: like electricity it flows,
continually fluctuating whilst remaining current.
Everyone depends on it to be the agent of variety
whether that proves well spiced or not.

Constitutions will try to confine it,
thinking they can define its flow,
but freedom lives outside of language.      

Big Money And Bigger Wars

We are used to banks that are 'too big to fail'
falling prey to grasping 'investors who cause losses
too big for too most of their customers to carry them.
So the state enters in and and rescues the customer
from the investors, which is seen as a win-win
as far as anyone who sees the future can read. 

But what if the state that starts a war with its neighbour
is like the grasping investor in the failing institution
that 'can't fail'? Which state will rescue the neighbour
from its 'too big to fail' foe? Which country or continent
will measure up to getting the warmonger to back off?

Particularly when they have the detachment through technology
to not know when they are in the wrong and know when to stop?    

Signs Of Greater Age (61)

Comparing sex with learning first aid,
where both were first discovered,
and understood amid a misspent youth,
in which, with hindsight, poor instructions
amplified the hidden sense of risk,
where with your advancing years 
you know you don't want to repeat that. 

The Stone, The Flight, The Hand

Once a tool can be made into a weapon,
that extends the field of battle
it is impossible to take the weapon
out of the tool, impossible to stop
those with mean minds using all that can
to press this meanness to their advantage.

Whether warfare or sex the effect is the same.

A.I. and drones have become the new way
to protect some air space and weaponize
other, less protected, air space through which
other countries throw stones/fire drones
that destroy buildings, industry and habitat
whilst hiding the AI hand that threw them.

The latest social AI problem is now centred
around 'nudifying' -taking normally clothed
and sociably asexual depictions of women
and children and rendering the images 
sexually distorted depictions of the person
who owns the face that gets used.

That the men (it is mostly men) who do this
are flouting old taboo by new means
shows how flimsy the prohibitions against
such images and technology were in the first place.

Like the new wars, the renewal of 'the war between the sexes'
where males defy responsibility via jargon for technology
and deceive themselves whilst making others feel slighted,
well, I always try to rely on older analogue understandings
of the stone, the flight, and the hand that started it.
 

 

The Opportunity For Failure Has Never Been Wider

Political leaders strike different chords
in the adults who, because they can vote
and have to pay their taxes have a material stake
in the future, makes it their duty to have an opinion
on who leads them, from 'FFS Alexa turn that man off',
to  'I like him', where in previous eras there would simply be
a rush to turn the radio off when the speaker announced
a man who was so disliked was appearing next.

Voters have three questions about politics
which has balance against each other
to help them decide how to listen, and vote. 

The first is 'Is the party leader a good public speaker?'
meaning is the sound of their voice easy on the ear,
can they speak off the cuff, can they tell jokes
that score the right points when he is required to.
M. Thatcher was famously tone deaf to puns
but when her speech writers gave her humour
to deliver, she delivered as a straight man might
in a comedy duo, and got away with it.

The second is 'Is the leader a good administrator'
Clement Attlee became the best Prime Minster
Britain ever had in the six years he was in power,
for all that he was by no means public orator
and had the charismata of a local bank manager.

The third is 'What state is the leader's party in?'
A disciplined party with an atypical leader
can withstand a hostile press when the party
are behind a distinct programme far more
than a divided party can get behind anything
when they are the target of the press for reasons
that the public don't need the press to see why.

An undisciplined party with catch phrases
for programmes can get elected with a leader
who has the means, and the malcontent, to draw on.

But woe betide the country who elects such a party
-drawing on malcontent and rumour for having no other ideas
feeds what it draws on even more, and makes the leader,
the party and the (lack of) programme for government
prepare for ever bigger government failures for the future.    

The Ration Book For Misfortune

Was generous towards me when I was young.
But I was surprised when so many people I knew
gave me their ration of misfortune to add to mine,
telling me 'You can look after it better than I can.',
as if what they were giving had to be preserved
and my preserving it was better for me than it was for them.

It took me getting past the age of thirty
for me to begin wiping my slate clean
of the misfortune others said I had to keep,
and for me being well past sixty
before I could regard what was left
of other peoples pasts as minor stains
I could live with, and own as my own.

Whatever content from that ration book
of misfortune is left is now mine to do with
as I like, as long as I don't seek to recycle it. 

Review - 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Comerce Quay, 1080 Brussels'

This film by Chantal Ackerman is now routinely voted the best, most perfectly made, film of all time by 21st century film critics including those in 'Time Out' who have finally replaced their choice of Orson Welles' 1941 film 'Citizen Kane' with this title. For many decades, 'Citizen Kane' was recognised as advanced not just for its time, but for all time. But whilst the camera work and set design were dazzling in their complexity for a monochrome film, the script was eventually seen as 'severely clunky' at best, to somewhere between 'of it's time' and 'irredeemable' at worst. That is the point about films-when the set design, the acting and script are all edited and cut together to their best possible effect, the final cut is where the faults are fixed for as long as film exists waiting for critics to pronounce on them. 

The back story behind the making of 'Citizen Kane' was once part of what made the film so admired. But the myth/backstory of how the film was the one part of the film that was going to shift with time. The story of how the film was made, on-the-fly with a relatively low  budget by a first first time film director, but with an effect that produced an extraordinary sheen, where the distribution of 'Citizen Kane' was so mired in media and film company politics that in box office was where was where 'the film failed' and cemented Welles reputation as the wayward genius. Even the best myths wear out and can't be renewed. From early in the 21st century onward another film was bound to be chosen as 'best film ever made'.

I have been sitting on my thoughts for over a week since seeing the 1975 film 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Comerce Quay, 1080 Brussels', the three hour epic that knowing just a little about it, I thought I needed the big screen away from home for me to appreciate it properly. It is an amazing film, amazing for compressing such a complex and dark narrative-the everyday depression of a 1950s Belgian sex worker-into such a tight script-over 98% of which is non-verbal. The film passes The Bechdel Test, but only just-so all consuming is the silence in the flat that Jeanne Dielman lives in. In an alternative film awards there would be an award for 'wallpaper of the year in a film', perhaps stretched to 'set design of the year'. Ideally sponsored by a brave wallpaper company. This film would have won the award for wallpaper of the year in 1975 it being a subtle satin effect in a neutral blue/grey tone with a relief effect of diamonds on it-you would not want it as the screen wallpaper on your laptop. With its hospital blue/grey tones this wallpaper was even more the star of the film than the actress Delphine Seyrig who threw her energies into the routines of housework that she undertook whilst the camera never moved after assuming different fixed positions in different rooms for what were more than long takes. The stillness of the camera in the confined space became a statement, part of the script. 

But this is not the first opaquely scripted, unfathomable, film that actress Delphine Seyrig starred in. She was credited in a film I watched in the days of video cassettes 'Last Year at Marienbad' (1961) which is available to watch online for free here. Be warned this film is opaque enough for it to not matter whether you are watching it with subtitles or without. The film is rich in atmosphere, the camera gliding slowly across the ceilings of some luxury house, to the sound of ever ascending in pitch organ music with an off screen narrator speaking, sometimes nearer muttering, in French. Where the film is short on explainable plot and clear narrative the ambience of the film absorbs the viewer instead. 'Rumour of a murder' might have been as near as there was to a summary of the plot. 

There must be a whole sub genre of films that present opaque surfaces and resist interpretation that are more than 'slow cinema', slow as they are-but are a category on their own. For an alternative view of 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Comerce Quay, 1080 Brussels'. please left click here.

Hold That Page

It is depressing to think that man is the creature
that will drive himself to explore where there is
no atmosphere, where there is a vacuum, because
as a species he is so empty of wonder at the place
that he comes from.  

 

Breathe In/Speak Out....

Living on Northern Ireland as I do,
my best friends are those who as they speak
keep the ends of their words intact, like I do.
Many more I meet who speak the local accents
more readily breath in towards the end of their words
such the when they speak they seem to swallow the ends
of their words, making listening to them guesswork.

I have no explanation for this continued mistimed inhaling,
but I know that those breath more easily speak clearer too,
and living with this engineered half hearing draws some in.

But it can be quite draining.   

The Creative Way to Approach 'No Mow May'....

That way the grass is cut, the animals get fed
so they cost less in animal feed and man
 can take a relative rest from his labours 

 

Survival

When Incompetence mates with Indifference
the result should neither thrive nor prosper.
The progeny will be pulled through life,
as if being led through a hedge backwards,
garnering little respect with the results.

Later it will do what it can to disown
its parents, long after the effects
of such parenting can be reversed.
But it will salvage as can be saved
before it reaches retirement age,
when such ease may be well earned,
whilst it is unexpected.

If the offspring is called Survival
and it really wants to live
it had better live up to its name.      

The Patron Saints Of Prisoners

include the eleventh century saint
Leonard of Noblac, whose feast day
is November 6th and was prayed to
by many a crusader who was waylaid
before they got to the holy lands.

St Daniel of Padua, who was martyred in 168 AD,
has been venerated ever since as the deacon 
of the first Bishop of Padua. Daniel is invoked
by women whose husbands are at war. 

Daniel was similar to Portugese priest Anthony of Padua
who is also invoked by those who are confined or imprisoned, 
of which there have been many down the centuries.

Whether we subscribe to those ancient figures,
or declare them lost to a history we choose to forget,
we still have to face our own willfull loss of choice,
and recognise the loss of liberty of others - daily. 

Change Yourself, Enjoy Other Changing

I knew I was in a minority position
when not that long ago, governments
passed new laws that acknowledged
already secretly loose sexual mores
to be create a new respectability.

The currency of shame in the old morality
had become devalued, so a new hypocrisy
was required to support it.

I agreed with the new open policy.
'But' I wanted to say to anyone who might listen
'What if some future government tightens
the new laws to make them criminalise more people?'

I knew I was in hiding to nothing
before I expressed my doubts
with the people who liked me
with my doubts about of the new optimism.

Part of my Jerimiad nature
has now been proven right:
The UK Supreme court has
passed a judgement: before the law
everybody in the UK is the gender
their birth certificate says it is,
nobody can be any other gender
than what the law says it is.

But gender and feelings are flexible
and subjective, I should know that
as a male who aspires to some sensitivity.

But I shall pray that transsexuals
and other gender non-conformists
may find places where they are welcome
and are neither trespassers nor trespassed upon. 

And they shall change at a rate
that is comfortable for them.  

Humour For One

Partnerships are like stand-up comedy,
both have their routines and rehearsals,
new material always has to be worked up
for there to be future laughter:
when the humours slow for the lack
of new material there is danger ahead
-when neither comedy partner
knows where the next laugh line
is coming from...

Comedy for one can be hard to make funny,
but those who can do that have got my respect.    

Other Vegetables Are Available

I don't mind being goaded
by the people waving carrots at me,
rewards that are common in my society
but please, let me find my own sense
of what makes a choice worth living with.

Meanwhile the society for the promotion
of scientific illiteracy is making huge advances
in making phobias  about diseases more popular 
than the vaccines that might have stopped the same,
and quack cures backed by big advertising
will make a big killing, to help undertakers
towards future profits more than we can say.

Whatever the vegetable you choose to wave
at others. to say 'get your reward here...   '
choose it carefully-personally I prefer cauliflowers. 

  

Viral Ignorance

It is less that 'those who do not learn from
the lessons of history 'are doomed repeat them'',
and more that that those who are uninterested
in what the lessons of history has to teach
make sure that those around them, who could learn,
are never exposed to such learning, making sure
that others can't learn from history either.  

Soft Sell/Harder Sell/Resistance Sets In

I can't mind how much modern charity
puts their best foot forward for their cause.
But still, when who is meant to benefit
from their efforts is made to seem glossy
to the point of masking their poverty,
letting the strapline do the work,
the cause looks like an ad for 'Colors'.

There the diversity the magazine depicts
gets put behind the aspic of 'art photography',
to detach the reader from the subject
and make the reader enjoy their detachment. 

But these adverts that attract their audience
by getting their audience to enjoy the detachment
cannot hope to extract money for the cause that way.

There the real work of reeling the viewer in
comes when they engage with the petitions
and the website where the harder points
are going to be raised to make you a convert
to the cause just comfortable with discomfort
to think it as worth relieving the poverty and ill health
on display as long as relief is made to seem easy.

This works for a while but when the bloom
on the images fades, then it is time for another.