From 'Gender Fluidity' To (Relative) Freedom From Poverty

I see today's transgender warriors
protesting en masse in the metropolis
and I wonder what their beef is,
though many would claim to be vegan.

Then on face book an image appeared
of a man clenching his fist in a toilet
in triumph at his 'fluidity of gender',
in the lamest surrealist protest I could imagine.

Then I thought of all the word's poor
who for lack of clean running water
and lack of privacy about where they crapped
-they did not merely have no freedom
from the germs that would kill the fragile and ill fed.
but the (lack of) arrangement left the poorest women
exposed to threats of both rape and murder.

I don't know what to do
when what binds us to others 
is what blinds us to how they live.

But taking some action
on seeing that something needs done
should be our starting point.

Comfort Ye My Beasts

The measure of civility of a given society
used to be how well it treated its prisoners
and how it limited the gap between rich and poor.

But I would like to amend that measure
to how well a country treats the animals,
it rears for food production, voluntarily.
Such creatures can have no understanding
of 'the nation state', or the law or custom
that they are subject to. For this
they are concidered 'beyond dumb',
for being raised purely for consumption.

The false superiority with which
we deal with the flesh that we eat
mirrors the hidden hierarchies
which heap upon each other.

'Jekyll And Hyde' Explanations

of predatory male sexual behavior don't work for me.
I recognise there are many who kid themselves
that consent in sex is cheap, worth taking
more than bargaining over, then the self respect
of other peoples free will is a technicality,
something that it becomes their life's mission
to dodge their way past as part of a wider contrariness.
The more often this strange dodge happens
the easier the avoidance of consent becomes.
These secret sex acts become 'merely' a series
of small thefts of moments of intimacy and trust.
Moments which once gained they must forever
deny having taken-particularly to themselves.
Hence the repetitions of their actions.

The way the media use 'Jekyll and Hyde',
as a cliche for a deeply split nature
further shrinks us from explaining predatoryness,
as if the deeds done came from a dissociation
in depths unique to the offenders character,
beyond everyday comprehension. Dissociation
is actually part of the corporate media agenda.

The Jekyll and Hyde theory goes some way
to opening up old sexual taboos, as if with hindsight
we see how they they were general misrepresentations
of sexuality-as if through language society
always produces some faulty divide between sex
and anger which can only be fathomed by looking back.
Combine taboo with what we know now
about our fight/flight/freeze responses
and this might explain why so many victims
have such delayed reactions in reporting deeds
done against them when they were young.

But nothing absolves any of us
from digging deeper for a clarity that lasts
about the animus that destroys.