When 'Once' Is Enough

'Love at first sight'
feels like a lightning strike,
that illuminates everything around it,
but who wants repeats of such clarity
when they recognise that they live
well enough with a greater modesty?

Some people will ask for it twice,
thinking 'once is not enough'
whilst being unable to see past
the limits of own understanding.

Other people are more prepared
to be surprised at what life throws at them.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty Two - Alone Together

The date is Monday the 9th of February 1992. The time is evening. I don't know why I am there - in a public toilet for all the reasons that nobody else knew or cared about. But I was one of several men there, all of us there for that same private moment that seemed important to us alone where our being alone together seemed most important.

Moments of meaninglessness is what the place has been adapted for, where resisting other peoples common understanding is something that has to be done quietly, though a Quaker meeting would do it with more grace and efficiency. I am there after several months of not going for anonymous sex. I am gripped by the need to seek it and past caring as to why. If the worst happens and I am named by anyone as the sex happens then I have determined that I will sort out how I feel about that after the event. I have to learn afresh how to own the experience of being named when the name for what I was doing was so secret and I thought I was anonymous.

It is dark and cold, and the lights are out, the bulbs have been broken or removed. There is a large disabled cubicle with a wide entrance, and two small regular sized cubicles with narrower doors. Lastly there are three urinals to the left of the cubicles. They are all rather smelly. One of the toilets may be blocked. It is a guess in the dark as to which one it is. There is also a queue for the use of each facility with probably five men, including me, waiting in row against the wall, and nobody knows how many men in the cubicles. We knew better than to be surprised if when one man left a cubicle the door closed again, and after a few minutes more another man would come out and then the door would stay open. The men who stood against the wall in the dark were starting to sort out with each other who wanted who and get what they came for; anonymous sex in a public toilet. In the dark nobody could see anything. So why wait for a space that would be no more private? Only not everyone there is sorting out their needs with the others in the queue.

Some, well, seem to not want sex with who is there. If they wanted sex it was not in this setting with anyone who was present. Maybe better weather and natural light was what they really wanted. Until then their sexual appetite could wait for somewhere that smelt better. In the silence and timidity of inaction who knows what the men there wanted? None of those present could say.

I decided that I had waited long enough and I made as if to leave. Without realising I'd done it, I caught somebody's eye as I left. To my surprise somebody my age started following me, a few yards behind, as I left the toilet, The fresh air smelled good after the wait. Most of the men I had anonymous sex with were not so anonymous that I could say absolutely nothing about them. Most of them had a ring on their finger, which meant that they were married and they had a script which worked for them better than who they went with; if the sex is not with another woman and is non-procreative then they have not committed adultery. That the sex might be non-relational, well that was okay for them. That makes it less to disown should the need to disown where they had once shared their willies later arise. 

Marriage was clearly a very leaky vessel for it to require the exceptions it did. I was one of the men who covertly maintained other men's marriages by meeting the male partners need for non-relational sex. But I was frustrated, less by the sex or absence of it, and more by how I'd become more aware of getting myself into the position of some sexual equivalent of 'The Samaritans' but without the virtue of being recognised as being supportive.

The man who followed me out did not have a ring on his finger, as he followed me into a nearby field, where I knew there was a log to sit on. In relative comfort, in the dark, we talked enough to negotiate the sort of sex we thought each of us wanted to prove that we wanted no more of it. We talked because we could, because we were on our own, well away from the toilet which acted as a sexual library, where, library or cruising site, silence was a given. We undid each other's tight jeans and both had a fumble, attempting to please each other. But between the cold, the dark, and where we had first found each other, our ardour had gone. But we could talk, and we both had beards, something I found attractive. Mine was slowly growing back again after I had shaved it off the previous November, in the hope of the shave symbolising a restart, a change of life. Who knows? Maybe this was the change of life I had shaved it off for His beard was trimmed but fuller than mine and in good light I could see it was ginger against his pale skin. He was not the first bear, gay bearded/hairy man, who I had attempted sex with. There had been a very few of them. But he was the first bearded man to remove from me the expectation that gay sex always had to be anonymous.

I said to him 'Would you like to come back to my house and share some soup and I want to be able to talk to somebody. Would you listen to me?'. Probably somewhat overwhelmed by my request, and not knowing what else to say, he said 'Yes'. He followed me the ten mins walk to the house where I rented a room. Part of me did feel as if I were bringing a stray cat into the house, something that it took no words to say was against the rules that I would not know how to explain if caught. Thankfully, nobody saw me smuggle Russell in and I never had to explain.

I made the tea and warmed some frozen chicken broth from my shelf of the freezer in the microwave, and we sat in my room. He ate and drank but with more interest in my story than the food. I laid out before him where I had come from and what had got me to the point of sitting with him, much as I have laid out the material in the two chapters of this memoir. He listened, and no doubt he thought me strange and wondered where the punchline was, and where story might go next. Much of what I said must have baffled and surprised him. To stop me saying any more he took on the simplest, most practical problems, first.

I told him that I had never been in a gay pub, did not know where they were, and I had been told 'They are very lonely places' by the church leaders who I had hitherto trusted enough to share with, who I expected to know anything about such matters. His response was brief and immediate 'Shall we go to The Admiral Duncan, when you are ready?'.

And we went. The walk to the city centre took most of an hour, which was a fine way of giving each other a more general introduction of ourselves before we found the pub. We arrived at The Admiral Duncan at near ten pm, the place was nearly deserted. The house-oriented disco music and fancy light show were both underwhelming to me. The music I normally listened to was bands like The Grateful Dead, who played real instruments with empathy towards each other in how each of them played.

The dance music might as well have been the theme to 'The Magic Roundabout' for all I could pick out of any empathy in the sounds. A lot of so called 'dance music' sounded like that to me. But The Magic Roundabout was my childhood memory of what used to enchant me on television and I understood how this manufactured music was made with the intent to enchant. With the volume of the music, the light show, and so few customers, there was nobody at the bar after last orders was called, with a handlebar moustache, to say 'Time for bed? as Zebedee always said as the last line of every episode of 'The Magic Roundabout'.

Russell and I kissed as we left the pub. He had to go his way home and I had to go mine. He asked me 'Will I see you here next Friday?'. Not thinking through what he said for even a moment, including that Friday was Valentines Day, I said 'Yes, and I hope I have completed my apprenticeship.', This may have been rather opaque, but I meant by it 'Now I can go where the men talk to each other, and whilst they are sexual people, the choice is much more than secretive silent sex. I can be among some men who will actually kiss each other.'.

Brian Wilson

Never intended for his face to be the face
by which the public recognised dementia
but with the last tour in which he led
The Brian Wilson Band, in 2022,
he was filmed looking lost as his band 
carried him through the gigs, musically.

His face froze, only unfreezing properly
when he performed a cover of his favourite
Phil Spector song, 'And Then I Kissed Her',
supposedly at the time in memory of the death
of Ronnie Spector who was a pin up and idol
of many males in their youth, including Brian's.

On the last date of the tour he stepped off the stage
with a Zimmer frame for the last time and withdrew
into the care of his wife Melinda Wilson, who died
eighteen months later. His final testimony came
in November 2021, with the documentary 'Long Promised Road'
and the poorly received 'At My Piano', where critics expected
more flash and sparkle in the playing of a man
who was in was in his sixtieth year of recording.

At the time nobody knew how much his spark,
like his memory, was going, whilst others worked
and projected that he was far from leaving yet.  

The Tender Revolutionary - Book Review Of 'A Victorian Rebel, Edward Carpenter' - Brian Anderson

How can somebody so famous in the gay world be so difficult to extract from his times? Because if he had lived in our times he would never have stood out, never been prophetic, and as any prophet knows being prophetic is a difficult vocation to stick to, where being misunderstood and the message being diverted comes with the job description. Where Carpenter was a prophet for the acceptance of same sex love, and where the book publishing industry of hs time was slow and often unremunerative, Carpenter, 'Chips' to his friends, did well with his inheritance, and with his education found a living as a public speaker, where his personal charisma made him well listened to. Carpenter was in the mould of some modern musicians who remain active today's music business, say Billy Bragg.

Writers in Carpenters time had to tour and lecture both for the income derived from them talking live and for them to have new material to tour with, where if it sold poorly then it pulled in audiences on the tour. To continue the rock star/famous touring author theme, it has been well known talented and thought-to-be-durable musicians who were famous died in the fifties, Michael Jackson, Jerry Garcia, and Frank Zappa each died of very different causes in their fifties, enduring many highs and lows in their public reputations over the years of applying themselves to the duty of public performance.

But get back to the author of this book Brian Anderson, he is something of a specialist in writing about figures like Edward Carpenter, who writers as they were, were well below the levels of high profile/fame of writers like Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Brian Anderson does a good job of putting some pace into the early and early adult life of Edward Carpenter, where many previous attempts by writers to get under the skin of the the early Edward Carpenter and utterly failed. I have read the Sheila Rowbotham doorstop of a book where Carpenter is thoroughly explored, but he is like a needle to be retrieved from a Victorian haystack. There is an awful lot of haystack to be gone through to find the man.

Here there is no haystack to read your way through, but as many quotes from EC that have some sort of pithiness and directness to them embedded among the ordinary modern prose of the author. The chapter titles help, 'A House of Mammon', 'A Rogue Intervention', 'The Making of a Socialist' where events are summarised briskly in the title. Some aspects of Victorian life suffer in this approach. The lack of delicacy means that the reader misses the nuance in how the opposition to the prophetic writings of Carpenter actually worked in opposing and and limiting Carpenter's effectiveness as thinker and speaker. Where Carpenter proceeded by inventing and adapting language his critics ignored how he reinvented language to broaden how life might be described. He certainly lived the broadened life and had many strokes of extraordinary good luck meeting people on his way through to settling at Millthorpe first as a market gardener, and minor local prophet.

Anderson does a good job of explaining the process of his writings. The first point is that EC writes in Millthorpe, not London, To go back to the writerly/musical analogies EC was 'getting his work together in the country' the way that band like Traffic recorded their early albums from 1967 onward. EC's work was writing pamphlets, not books. If there had been a guide to how the publishing industry worked and what got published it would have made clearer how EC got his works published. As it is what we get is a stress on how far from the mainstream publishing culture EC was as a writer, and how much a book consisted of several pamphlets and each pamphlet had to break new ground, politically, because as a minor non-London prophet Carpenter was so far from main stream London-based politics that to them he did not exist. The accretion of work that became the publishing of 'Love's Coming Of Age' amid the uproar that followed Oscar Wilde vs the Marquis of Queensberry which led to a collective press and public hysteria against homosexual behaviour took quite some charm and luck to pull off.

But Carpenter's quiet diligence was made him the the first writer in English to write and get published writings about same sex love. That librarians filed the writings under 'pornographic' or 'medical [therefore of no general interest]' was a battle against human habit that was too big for him. His finding lasting love aged 40, and after years of serious academia and friendships is sweetly told. His needing love, and the love of a working class man, to balance him as a person is made clear. What a biography of George Merrill might add and compliment the writings here about Carpenters search for the personal version of what he made it his message to say other people needed is anyone's guess. The book trails off towards the end. The author steers away from the way that the war based patriotism that attacked Carpenters conjoined twin thesis that socialism had to have a sexual and gender-based liberation element to it for the socialism to be truly redistributive.

Socialism that reinforced patriarchy property rights, and power balance, was not socialism. Wars reinforce patriarchal capitalism thus WW1 forced Carpenter and Merrill to leave Millthorpe, near Sheffield for a calmer life in the home counties. That is not commented on here, instead the reader gets the reflections that others left of the effect of Carpenter, the way he walked the walk and talked the talk, and was a comfort to many who were lonely from being unimaginatively told that marriage and property values mean you should not expect love and tenderness. His writings and others to dare to dream, and there is still the courage to dream of making empathic spaces, and not being afraid of hugs where self evident need should trump the fear of accepting our fragility.

 

Masculine, Feminine, Other

One of my favourite musicians, Jerry Garcia,
was often quoted as seeing his life, himself,
his experience, as 'being the butt of a cosmic joke'.
But he was a rare creature who lived a short life
in terms of years that were abundant in experience. 

I find being 'the butt of a cosmic joke'
is the nearest I can get to describing
what it might to like be both impelled,
to change gender whilst being barred
from going through with process. 

I know the shopping list: see the doctor,
see the specialist, take the hormones,
do the two years of therapy, wearing the clothing
of your new gender long before the surgery,
and amid that settle the legal and financial changes
that follow from living in a society that for ease' sake
prefers gender to be fixed, now by biology, because
there is now there is a science for it, where formerly
gender was assigned by outward appearance and gender roles. 

From 'whites only' to Hippies use the side door'
there is nothing new about exclusion notices.
But rarely have women on their own set out
who and where there the notices should  be applied.

then by wars and empires that created rules
that worked out on the ground very differently
from how the creators of them could foresee.

Rules that are part of a history that nobody can now accurately quote.

So where once recreational drugs and musical creativity
were the way of unpicking the rigid codes of gender,
the sense of wanting to change your gender has now followed.
Now trans men and women are acting out the sacred roles
as outsiders they act out being 'the butt of the latest cosmic joke
that eternity played on us in real time' where they get distant orders
that exclude them from normal society, the same way that between
1970 and 1974 hippies and freaks had to follow the sign
'Hippies use the side door' to get in their nearest masculine drinking haunt. 

Add Some Silence To Your Day

The difference between 'music is my doctor',
and 'music is my medication' is a slight one.
Either way the music, or more importantly
the silence spaces that help the music breathe,
are where we find balance and stillness in our days.  

On The 90th Birthday Of Terry Riley

 A recent recording of his 'In C' is a obvious tribute. Obvious as it is, it is this recording of The Castle In Time Orchestra is what I offer.  

Ontological Superlatives

Where would freedom be without the inflated claims for science
that the makers of food and everything else repeat 'proves'
that their product is better then everything else that can be sold?

Behind the scenes I am sure their are advertisers
who compete with each other to say to sellers
'my adverts can sell your product better than they can.'.

When superlatives assume their own ontological* logic,
and what can be sold as truth has to be sold as more than truth
then all I can hope for is the ontological collapse of overselling.

Then we, the sold to, might know where we are. Though advertisers won't....

*Originally a philosophical/theological argument as espoused by St Anslem, an 11th century Benedictine monk who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093, to 1109. which set the limits of what could be known, what practical infinity meant, by the outer reaches of what men thought they knew, his being unable to factor in how when the scientific method of hypothesis-test-result evolved, it still is evolving, it would supersede his relative measure of absolute truth. New hypotheses may be devised, but the truth of them always has to tested.  

   

Signs Of Greater Age (62)

Deciding that low budget commercial travel
is no longer the thing for you - you realise
that putting yourself in the hands of the airlines
where the rules and fines they bind you with
remind you of your days in primary school.

Right down to the queues the airline staff
makes you stand in before boarding the flight.
You find that however little you have to pay,
the prim bullying tones of the airline staff
should cost you less, including the time 
it takes to get to the airport to appease them. 

Government By And For The One Percent

One of the less accounted for effects
of billionaire public speakers who project
that their wealth is what gives them the right to speak
on behalf of the great mass of much poorer people,
is that they fail to realise that their wealth is also
what gives them a tin ear for how ordinary folks think.

Still, when their wealth is what buys them
their place in the present day high-gloss media
then where better to go to have their tin ears appeased
and tickled with deferential soft-ball questions?

That is when to ration our exposure to modern media,
ordinary people that we are, and save our attention spans
for something with grit and intelligence about it,
never mind that it might make us unpopular.   

Sit Up, Stand Down

And move when you are told to,
you may not know where you are
or why you are where you are,
wishing you were somewhere else,
when you feel like you are nowhere.

But every 'somewhere' starts out
from a 'nowhere' that does not know
where it is going to be in the future.

And few understand the transactions of the heart....

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty Three - Clearing The Decks

Part of the reasons for the nightly journaling was that communications with my family varied between silence and an opaque calm. I knew had to appear to take what they said at face value. It was best to say less when I had very little choice. To openly question them could easily have lead to defensive 'Don't you trust me?' type statements, in which when my family failed to get away with explaining less than was helpful, they played the victim. I say 'played the victim', I was well past, and appreciative of, the explanation for human behaviour expanded on in the paperback 'I'm Okay Your Okay' by Thomas A. Harris, which explained how the roles of victim, persecutor and rescuer were acted out, including how each flipped into the other, in ways that were coded, so as to appear to be 'normal behaviour' for the great mass of people. When well before the roles flipped, they were dysfunctional. 

But in mid January I got a more sobering message from my family that I was thankful I could do nothing about. My mother was the only person in the family to attempt to keep in touch with me. Sometimes she wrote because she did not have a landline at home. She rarely rang. I had a long memory of her ringing of a Friday afternoon in the boarding school she made me to attend, where she rang from the social services and made them pay the phone bills little realising that every time the public call box phone rang every Friday, post lunch when I was sent off to answer it, the rest of the boys marked me out as 'a mother's boy' with each time I took the call and chatted with her.

But one mid week evening I was at home and my landlady picked the phone up, but it was for me. It was mother, 'Hello love I have got to be brief I am using Ted's phone but I have something to tell you.'. Ted was her most relied on friend on the allotments. I used to walk with her to see Ted and Nora his wife for tea and chat of a midweek evening when I lived in Gainsborough. Ted would give us a lift back home in his car. He was reliable, though sometimes exasperated as to what his reliability was for. They were an intelligent and open couple compared with many I knew in Gainsborough. 'It is your grandad.' mother said 'He fell down the stairs from the landing of his first floor flat a couple of weeks ago. He has been in hospital since and they are keeping him in. We don't know what is going to happen. But I have seen him in hospital. I will be in touch when there is more to tell.'. The flat was the first floor room in a house the council had divided to make two households in. Both the landing and the stairs were very narrow. Mother's phone call told me everything and nothing.

Gran, his wife, had died four years earlier. They had both moved into the council flat in the village from the house they lived in for fifty years about eight years earlier. Her life was ebbing away when they were moved into the flat. To see her life shrink and ebb away further in the flat, as her will to live remained stronger than her weakening body. It was more numbing than alarming to witness. Part of me wanted a photo to remember her by. But my memories of here were so few so what would the photo be of? Or so ran the argument from mother's sister, Alice who jealously guarded the photos of Gran that she had.

Gran died the month that I left Gainsborough to start care work in Nottingham. Modest as the job was, it was the start of my life opening out in more ways than I thought possible. It did not matter that when I arrived I clearly lack a sense of direction. There was always enough change happening around me to absorb that I could absorb better without my mother on hand to set tight limits on me. I would visit my parents for the weekend but after just a few months the imprint that living in the town had put on me felt like it was part of my past, that my parents needed me to preserve more than I needed to preserve it. I adapted around mother's routines, and helped her stave off 'empty nest syndrome' when I there. But what routines she filled her time with when I was away were her own concern.  49

Now, grandad was in hospital and whatever happened he was unlikely to recover, or go far. But in Nottingham I felt ready for a big change. After just short of a year and a half of journaling I felt ready to 'come out', regardless of whether the church in Lady Bay, the people I knew most and who might claim to know me most, approved of me doing, or not. I thought I had written out all of the shame that I had absorbed whilst growing up, for now at least. I no longer saw the point in being ashamed of what I was.

A less blinkered/isolated person than me would at this point have made their acquaintance of Nottingham gay helpline as part of their 'coming out' and slowly transferred their reliance on journaling to conversations with live human beings, whilst keeping both in balance with each other. I had contacted them twice, both times in haste more than believing that I could say to them what I confined to the journal. But being challenged on how I had been taught 'do without', 'be self reliant' and 'make do and mend' was difficult with me not realising that they were part of how I had isolated myself, even as life in Nottingham carried me along. 63

A church that wanted me to stay quietly closeted, so they could help me ignore that I was gay, was another fraught area. Their warning that 'The gay life is a lonely life' made me look at them and think 'And you think that me being around you dose not leave me feeling isolated?'. All I can say now is that the paradoxes I was living with, and trying simplify through journaling whilst I was wary of being helped, were more complex than I could have foreseen them being.

Meanwhile Grandad was dying in hospital and I was being kept well away from knowing much about it. My family did a fine line in sarcasm as the humour of detachment, covertly denying how withering the sarcasm was. One such line of humour, used about life outside the family, was an alternate take on the optimism of opportunity, 'Where there is a will there is a way'. But in our family such optimism became 'Where there is a will there are relatives.'. There opportunity meant the opportunity for family arguments where we each shared a sense of fractious entitlement as old grievances were aired in defence of claiming new chances in life. If I had been kept informed about his decline, then my main thought would not have been spoken out, 'At least he is being decisive in stepping away from the all old arguments and well rehearsed sense of grievance'.   

Freedom Through Silence

I hear so much said, read so much written,
about how precious 'freedom of speech' is,
and I 'get it': with no freedom of speech
there can be no freedom of thought,
and that freedom matters most of all.

But the freedom of thought that I value
most is the freedom that speaks to me
through silence, of a life outside of time.

Because when noise fills the air we mark time
with that sound, whereas the silences that settles us
are the measure of our sense of immersion.

Over-Candid Camera

Where the photographer goes further
than you expect to get that candid shot of you
that you did not expect them to ask you for.
 

 

A Recent Page From The History Of Heartbreak

Review of the 2024 documentary film 'Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat'.

For a film that was two and a half hours long it was deftly edited and light of touch. There was so much material, so many characters, and such a complex knot of arguments that there was very little room for the music. Nina Simone got more screen time than others for defiantly singing and playing piano on 'Wild Is The Wind' over images of Patrice Lumumba, which struck home. As images of Lumumba, leader of the newly independent Congo, was filmed isolated as power ebbed away from him. But the glimpses of the other musicians, Louis Armstrong, Max Roach with singer Abe Lincoln, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Eric Dolphy, Ornate Coleman, Charles Mingus, Miriam Makeba, and Melba Liston, were more like amuse bouches of the artists concerned as the clips were squeezed into the film alongside footage of Malcolm X speaking so clearly that he could only be a radical. The main narrative the film, a CIA coup as seen mostly from outside of the planning of it, took up most space as the film followed the course set for it by the CIA, and Eisenhower's public pronouncements. The US government saw to it that the musicians could not recognise themselves as the 'window dressing' they were sent in as amid the fog of the cold war. But there was one core argument that stood out loud and clear, for all that a lot more could have been said about it. 

In today's international politics there are many Trump-style arguments about 'seeking rare earth elements'. In 1942 the equivalent arguments about seeking rare earth elements were about America seeking supplies of uranium 235, which was mined in the Katanga, a province of Southern Congo. The Belgians still controlled that region. The mines were solely owned by the Belgian royal family. The Belgians offered the uranium to the Americans who made the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with it. 

Fast forward to 1959/60 where by some odd international slights-of-hand that are depicted/explained in the film, Patrice Lumumba won the independence of The Congo in a vote ratified at the United Nations. Belgium appeared to concede the victory in public. The king of Belgium, King Baudouin would show a different hand soon enough. There was excited talk of 'a united states of Africa' where, as other newly independent African states gained independence and could vote as a block in the UN, they might all form some sort of union. The first effect of Lumumba's rule was for the Belgians to deprive the new leader of the greatest part of the wealth creating capacity of the country, with the connivance of the American secret services. After that an American counter coup was mounted to oust Patrice Lumumba, where what clear news there was was both confusing and dismaying.

The film stuttered to a stop as the Americans complete prosecuting their cold war against communism within the United Nations, where for them communism meant any creed or value that deviated from their covertly planned empire of greed. and their greed meant 'freedom'. 

The film left Krushchev in power for a few short years. He was replaced By Leonid Brezhnev. Swedish economist Hammarskjöld remained in place as secretary the United Nations and was on the side of the African nations, but would be dead before the end of 1963. And the USA and Belgium having driven several teams of nuclear powered coaches and horses through the fragile credibility of young United Nations Assembly, put paid to the aspirations of many of the newly independent African countries who had thought that they could steer the United Nations assemblies towards shifting the terms of trade and wealth in  their favour. The American Empire would not be that easily swayed.

But it was good to see moving images of Fidel Castro meeting with many like minded world leaders of the day, including Gamel Nasser president of Egypt, even when both were silent and they were at the United Nations in New York mostly for the photo opportunities.

When Old News is The Most Reliable

I have tried with modern Politics/media
And I will not give up trying to understand it.
But I am struggling to get a firm grip on it.

When a story moves like a whirlwind
over the vast plane of fast modern media
I have to wait to decide what to think,
because politics is about much more
than 'what is the first item in the news bulletin?'
Or a leader getting their name into the big type
of tomorrows news before the headlines are written.

I am thankful that I can see before the leaders
that populate the news headlines seem to,
that those who hear them will decide
well before the speakers do 'Nothing new here'.

By the time it is clear that there is nothing left
to switch off I have left the news long behind.
Older stories with more immediate cogence
and depth of thought take their place. They have to.   

Combustable?

One of the more memorable modern insults
hurled from behind the barricades of social media
at politicians of defensive temperaments is
'They could start an argument in an empty room'. 
though whether the room is empty even of them,
or just empty of other people has to guessed at.

When such insults become shorthand for their targets
this will make politics easier to read, but less uplifting.
It will make playing the know-all all the more tempting
whilst leaving listeners to the dialogue none the wiser.

The headlines in the paper will read something like
'Self combusting speaker sustains injury
from exploding argument: interviewer not injured.'
where the projected argument no longer matters, 
the burnt out speaker took all the oxygen out of it
with their personality as they spoke.

Later, calmer voices will reset the agenda,
and show an improved level of leadership
which make politics less conflicted.

We will only know that after it happens,
and the effect may not last for long.  

In The Summer, When The Weather Encourages Us

because the encouragement we gather in the summer
as we collect the wild fruits and spend easy times
with friends learning new things about ourselves
and each other are what will tide us over in Winter. 
will be what we live on in the Winter

 

Exceptional Family Values

My family were always the exception
to the advice they gave out, or more likely
made sure other family members followed,
whilst explaining the line to follow in a way
that denied them being held accountable
for their advice from who they made follow it.

So many times I would be told 'Don't get yourself
into situations you can't get yourself out of' when
the situation I needed to get out of most
was being told 'Don't get yourself into...     '
by people who put me in those same situations
they soon disowned putting me in.

But as they later said of choices laden with errors
'When you make your bed you have to lie on it*',
they will have their bed to lay on. They can follow
their own exceptional 'do as I say not as I do' advice,
which they clearly needed most in the first place.

*originally an English expression from the1500's about consequence of choice.      

Other Flags Are Available

Of course other governments with other flags
can also err and lie about it, but once this sequence
starts, and the process gets to stage two unrecognised
and unchecked, the process seems unstoppable
as the next lie builds on the last lie and erases
the base of what was formerly immutable truth.

 

The World Expands, The World Contracts

The world was made to stretchy, 
when we are sensitive we will feel
the contractions and the growth most
when the movements seems most in tune
when diluted by human expression- 
the worlds of government, social media,
religion and other matters all connected
with the three primary drivers of life
money sex and power which connect us all.   

Speculative Ventures

''Til Death does us join'
we won't know what we are joining with,
in the meanwhile are always projecting
this life onto the next. But when we arrive
we will know what we are part of.
And that alone will surprise us 

What Price The Future

of the world when in the USA,
one of many countries that claims to be
most free, greatness = violence backed by
detachment and technology, until unrecognised
nihilism = forethought before doing down
the neighbours in other countries, and at home.  

Winners And Losers

 Many who promote the appearance of order,
would deny that the reality they shape
and want other people to accept
hides their own lack of generosity
amongst the meanness of other people,
hiding their meanness from themselves.

I am happy to anonymise my generosity
by hiding it among the kindness of others
-let the tasks required still be completed
whilst the mean and demanding invent slurs
of my 'being unemployable' and 'not worth knowing'
for how they make hierarchy performative
and make themselves as the measure of others.

As long as there is space and means on the lower rungs
to do the good that made life work in ages past
I will not see what I do as 'beneath me'.     

Bust And Boom

I have lived with boom and bust
as if they were 'a must', for decades
until nothing about them surprised me
beyond that I could never see further
than the latest explosion and collapse
whether the leaders were my elders
and betters were praised for just that
-older where older meant better
at inspiring unimaginative deference
towards the failing leadership of the past.

When I reach the age where I am deferred to
I hope I know to not act it, but help others
see through wisdom requires the resilience
to see past appearances-including my own. 

Taking The 'Mentor' Out of 'Tormentor'

When the skeletons in a gay mans life
are the family experiences he grew up with
and they will neither keep quiet, but will disrupt
his every attempt it trying to grow beyond them
then he is perfectly right to remonstrate with them.  

But defeating them when they have the edge
and can ruin a social life in way they torment
can't predict is a tricky business, no treat.

Still the skeletons can be beaten
and their deeds undone, and not repeated.

There victory and life can taste sweet
for the victor and his companions 
where the secretive and abominable life
the family forced the gay man to live is no more.

He did not need the evil spirits
half as much as they needed him to live off.

The Consumer Index We Don't Expect

In Spain this year the item
that shoplifters like to lift most
and be unseen getting away with it
happens to be olive oil,
which is going up in price. 

One of the better measures
of any consumer society
is the quality index of products
that inspire consumers to theft. 

A Sign Of A Better Future

Men would not date women thirty years
younger than them and young women
would have the confidence to say
to these men when the men propositioned them
'Go and find woman your own age
with equal experience and greater maturity.'.

In a more gender balanced society we would not
have to know who was transgender among us,
and who was in the midst of changing their gender,
and where we knew we would care rather than
use the knowledge to excuse outrage and anger
to flood the social media with, to trigger point.

In a more gender balanced society fewer companies
would demand to know the contents of an applicants
birth certificate before deciding how to view them.

In a more gender balanced society the fact of 'being gay',
'being lesbian' or being any particular identity 
other than pair-bonded heterosexual whom the law
was designed to approve of-one of each gender-
would not be an issue and a same sex bond
can be as much for life as any other kind of attachment.

Such a society seems a long way off,
but where you see glimpses of it
add them to all the other signs 
you share of hope for a better future.     

Picture Set Of The Month - June 2025 - Andy Warhol's Oxidisation Paintings

In 1977, Andy Warhol turned a new page
in randomising his artistic practice.
He started using bodily fluids in his art.
Asking his assistants to urinate and ejaculate
on primed or copper-coated canvases,
he created a series of abstract works known as the Oxidation, Piss and Cum paintings.
Explore further the story of these artworks,
with a particular focus on the Oxidation paintings
here.