The Oldest World Religion

is building walls,
behind which to keep ourselves in comfort.
The second oldest world faith is war
-destroying other people walls.
Religion in the modern world
builds walls that are not just physical.
Conversion is an immurement in words,
the better to multiply misunderstanding.

Life Is About Decay,

decline is the measure of life,
the slower the better for those
who fear is how steep and slippery
their descent might become.
And where it might land them.

The saints survive through
the recall of the miracles
credited to them, where they
briefly leveled the slippery slopes
of other peoples lives,
as written up in hagiographies.

Medical science has replaced those saints,
because we like our miracles to be predictable.
Slowing decay down to where we deceive ourselves
as to it's progress is as near as we get
to our preferred illusion of perpetual motion.    

Manners Maketh Life And Death

At family meals when I was young
at mother's command I parroted
'Manners maketh man'
as if it were The Grace.
Eating was learning how to swallow my curiosity,
keeping my self to myself, and never asking
who said that grace first? Or when?
And what did the phrase mean?

By example Mother taught me
that manners madeth deference
and with that acquiescense
a blindness to the convenient lies
we taught each other by then.
They eased life in the short term
and that was all we could ask for.
We made a virtue of not examining
the unexamined in our lives.

My forced uncuriosity eventually
undid itself. The original was in french,
'Manners maketh man as clothes
and food [but not prayer] maketh
the monk'. It was a criticism of gluttony.
'Manners makyth the man' was the family motto
of Bishop William of Wykeham-1320-1404.

I note what he did for education.
I learned nothing from the deference
which so well disguised all fear of truth.
I prefer a mutuality where humour graces
criticism, when both given or received.
And even more, humour leavens praise.

Benjamin Franklin Wrote

in 1789 to his friend Jean Baptiste Leroy
about 'the certainty of death and taxes'.
Daniel Defoe used a similar phrase
in his 'Devil's Dictionary', written sixty
years earlier.
Has the phrase lost resonance with modernity
because we have ceased to credit The Devil,
and deliver him his due?
Or has the phrase died because we are now
more indifferent to death
and more cynical about government and taxation?

Death and taxes are as certain now
as they ever were. But the new
capitalism is accompanied by an
absolute belief in growth, measured
purely by money.
In the older more limited growth the certainty
of taxes was relatively simple,
and growth was measured wider.
The new measures of growth depend
more than we prefer to think on
the armies of accountants and lawyers
who find legislative loopholes for use
by those rich enough
to believe that what they have is worth hoarding
in tax havens.
The value of these secret secretions
rests on the belief that the effort required
will outweigh the cost-the drain on the creativity,
relationships and energy for the activities
which are the origins of the wealth.

The hoarding is where death reaps
his reward, and where the devil returns,
disguised, unawares to us all....  

"An Englishman's Home is His Castle"

is cliché multiplied, as much as is a lie
built up as thick and high as castle walls,
through the solidity of repetition.

Every castle in every country
in the world was built
by marauders from abroad,
to secure their new
feudal rule, post invasion.

Home governments later adopt
the building as historical amnesia
as newer locals succeed in power,
unknowingly imitating the old invasion,
the hierarchy and enmity of divide and rule.

My home is a place of rest and focus,
a temple or a palace; an invitation to share
I would invite more people there if I knew them.

The Best Insurance Policy

used to be a combined belief in neighbour and deity,
both for better and for worse. At it's best,
when it worked, it was called 'The Kingdom* of Heaven'.
It had as it's reward an anti-litigious
no-claim-no-fee-win-win policy
called 'forgiveness', and it worked. 


*Mathew Ch 5 Verses 3-12 inclusive

History Is The Immurement

of the great and good by time,
through their deeds being mis-described
and where they are remembered at all
the deeds of the good are attributed to others.