Us And Them

I often feel out of my depth with other people.

When I meet people I don't know what to say
that would please them and make me their friend.
When I am obliged to speak the right words won't come.
Awkwardness takes over and blunts my speech.

Because of this I no longer expect to be wanted,
much less liked, though I can have a fine time on-line,
where pretending to like/be liked is the order of the day.

I console myself, up to a point, by concidering
the thousands of years through which dogs have befriended humans
and the humans have not recognized the depth of companionship on offer to them.

To their loss humans continually under-rate
how dogs find more companionship in us than we see in them.

The Oldest Battle Of All

It is a battle in which we reduce the whole planet to partisanship and extinction.

 

Irreversable De-selection.

Competitive sports never appealed to me
-neither as participant nor as a spectacle to be applauded.
In school 'games' meant sport which meant teachers
who knew that bullying was inevitable organized sport
so as to disguise the school sponsored aggression
and make it seem like an unarguable form
of  'natural selection' in (and through) action.
It would hit the children who's parents would be the last
to see how their offspring were being marked down,
and they would be the least able to fight the school
de-selecting their children from education for opportunities.

A similar sense of hierarchy-de-selection
from apparently equal choice was repeated,
well beyond the comprehension of those
made to lose, but who would still be bound
by the system-was repeated. This time it was
'the jobs market', de-selection was the foundation
for the U.K.'s long term mass unemployment
of the last thirty five years. De-selection is
the base on which I have had to build my life.

A rebellious commensality eventually weaned me
off the depressions I learnt from being (r)ejected from 'the team',
but kept as a reserve, waiting. Merely to prove the system is successful.