Domestic Spin

The images preserved in family photographs
are meant to be the clean version of life, 
the seconds when we are wrung dry
of all the crudity and pressure,
ready  to be frozen in politeness.

Why Do Animals Not Celebrate Birthdays?

It is not because they don't have a calendar
-they do and it is what we call a natural Sat Nav
or an internal clock, and their sense of time is Millenia
older than ours, and actively functional.
Nor is it because as kin they are distant,
though many species thrive with the most minimal of familial values.
No. The reason is that that animals are incapable
of celebrating birthdays is because as such,
those days are human markers of longevity
which exist to hide our side, the sarcasm and secrecy
at the expense of celebrating others
which animals could not dream of copying.
They would intuit how they would suffer
from how toxic such 'family values' would become
long before we do-if we ever became that advanced.

Education, Edjucation, Schmedjucaishun....

I remember adults talking about education when I was young,
they made it seem as if children were the unworthy poor-
worth keeping but purely as an example of how not to be.
They were always worth discouraging from all dependency.
Education was spoken of as the poor relation of work.
'Those who keep themselves through the skill in their hands
do-those who have no skills, teach'.
In this scheme those who were too young to work,
or teach, still had to kept so were sent to be taught instead.
Not that their parents wanted them to share anything
they learned in the home, that was all for somewhere else.
Because education was widely thought of as child-minding.
Without children parents could temporarily pretend to be
the autonmous adults they were when they were single,
and use the self-justifying criticisms of working breeders,
to pretend they earned all their money.
They believed they heroically worked for the good of everyone else,
and agree with each other they were victims of their dependnents,
and finally and most likely, believe they were more autonomous
than they actually were, by doing down all teachers,
all children and all education-particularly their own......

Hardship And Hygiene,

are what children feel when deferring to parents
on how to live. From diligence in following instructions
comes the discovery that hygiene, and the distance
at which they are kept are always built on lies.
With hardship life always works out differently
from how they were told it will be. After that
apologies are as useful and common as hens teeth.
As adults the greatest trick the poor and choice-less
can learn will be to extract the gift of humility
from the curse of depression, to move quicker
towards reason, and be more genuinely forgiving.
An ambition that works needs to be free of vanity.

Licence To Misrule

Gambling, drink and whoring
are the three pillars of absentee patriarchy,
where the more the wife and the children
are confined to the home the less they know
about what a man does outside the home,
where the errant man has his full licence,
.

Relative Values In Space

Children are small satellites
who encircle dizzy parents
until they outgrow their space,
and spin out of their old orbit.
In adulthood they gain
the gravity of planets,

adrift in the vacuum of space
where when their turn is done
they turn to dust.