For A Cleaner Suffering

When Hollywood
remakes the story of Job
the lead actor's teeth
will shine through the squalor,
as aptly as the happy ending.

Revolutionary Zeal

is angst for the future.
Youths express it best,
for not knowing
what has been-
or what is to come
when their angst passes.

Enlightenment Always Involves Tyranny

In The Enlightenment in the sixteenth century

the arts flowered, as we can still see today
but that was a small gain compared with loss
of reinventing slavery from it ancient world 
household origins  to it being remade
as a tyranny of hard labour for careless masters
in which those enslaved could never be freed, 
except through death, after which they were forgotten,

The Enlightenment was a blight
on the many sophisticated,
but primitive, societies
and it remains a stain on us. 

Moral Hygiene

When the language of moral hygiene
washes over our minds, when the purity
spoken of is not explained for what it means,
then it will shut down people's minds.

The best sense of moral health
requires a healthy sense of irony,
the better to understand immorality.
.

Advertising

is the new Evangelicalism;
never mind the message
just feel the enthusiasm.

Nature's Fly Tipping

Flowers will lodge their seed
in the tightest of places
to add their sense of colour 
to the most barren of landscapes;
nature's fly tipping.

Education In Feudal Times

Was not limited to preparing male youths to rule or to serve.
It was about preparing 'the fairer sex' in running the household,
and being skilled in the softer arts, embroidery and playing music
and the many other skills without which, even in feudal times,
a home was not a home, was not civilised. 

That what many women knew and did
in feudal times is now lost,
except to researchers of obscurities,
is more to our loss more than theirs.

It is as true now as it was then
that for life to be fit for sharing
that life had to look beyond 
the pursuit of power through conflict.