Our Just Deserts?

Soon the Church of England
will gather together yet again
to agree on the churches' stance
on the sexual mores of their members.

Once again they will declare
that the imperative to breed,
declared in the Old Testament,
as a key part of their creed.

What they refuse to accept,
is that humans have over-bred
and have over-run the planet
and that non-procreative sex
is the safest sex for the planet,
which would like to keep fewer of us
in far less luxury a lot better
than we presently expect.

So whilst the Church of England
aridly justifies desert values for breeding
let us resist; it will create too many of us
for the green brown and blue of the planet
to remain rich in their natural colours
and not be returned to inhospitable desert
that won't even support talking snakes
or any other primitive life forms.

The Primrose Path

of evangelical zeal
seems unshakably real
to those caught up in it.
But seen from the side
their journey is more 
a self righteous blindness
towards the choices of others,
denying the conditionality of reality.

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.    

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....  

The Young Woody Allen

was asked 'Is sex dirty?'
after trying to look sheepish
he replied 'Yeah, if it is good'.

I admire religions of dirt,
where the faith is brewed
in secret, like poitin,
and it renews in the imbiber
equal measures of mirth,
melancholy and passion.

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

What's Your Poison?

A saint writes 'Resentment is like taking poison
and hoping the other person will die'-Saint Augustine.

The unfortunate thing is it does work,
and works best when the poisoned-by-proxy
don't die, but go on to lead reduced lives
as a result of other peoples intake.
  

Time Chooses Few

chooses few to be kind to, 

suffering is an integral to life.
But with the end,
time is infinitely generous.

Treasure Lives

where the heart lies.
Moth and rust
make honest dust.

Matthew ch.6 v.21.

In The Darkest Place

The smallest light casts the most contrary shadows.
Most of us don't want to know about these places,
or where they are, we are scared of the change
that comes from, even briefly, living there.

Unquiet Surrender

The Fall was Adam and Eve's first act of Creation.

Ever since then men have claimed
that they wanted to return the power
of choice, and the temptation to failure,
back to who they credit as their creator
only to discover how unwilling they were
to subdue their lives, in quiet surrender.

Freeganism

Jesus was a freegan.
No waste in his kingdom.