Human History

is the slow digestion of one narrative by another,
and another ad infinitum until all the ephemera
in language and memory, what gives it character,
breaks down, into a form so compressed it is petrified.

The vocation of historians, theologians and philosophers
-the few who choose what they get to do
on behalf of the many who don't- is to reverse the process.
Disinter the tangled mass of the past in ways
that make it fresh, readable by the future.

The human narrative is the shortest, most self referential,
arid and destructive in the history of the planet.
It is now said that the dinosaurs made themselves,
extinct by the greenhouses gases in their flatulence.
Like those deadly gases history can only repeat itself.

The Serpent's Eye

'One bad apple can rot a whole barrel'
is a medeavil  phrase that reflects a simpler
approach to the mysteries of the world.
That for the want of seeing mystery remains intact.

What rots apples is not the first apple,
but how the fruit is stored.
It is not merely that poor housing
starts the rot, or even that the first to rot
will be the first of many.
It is that both decay and virtue
hide how they are formed.
Unseen, they create their own consistency.

Thus the problem with the fruit
from the tree of knowledge
was not with the fruit itself,
nor it's apparent ripeness
or the lack of preparedness
of the intended recipients,
but with how the gaderene rush
became the light in the serpent's eye
when it knew how power in one person
reinforces shame in another, degrading both
as if they were the first form of  perpetual motion.

Signs Of Greater Age (5)

1-being aggrieved when an
email server says it is 'sorry'
it 'can't send' what you have
just written, as if it is human,
rather than a sum of logarithms
with some very distant human
being somewhere in the infinity
of cyberspace minding the shop
with something less than vigilance.

2-being more grateful than
when younger of successfully
negotiated an automated
multi-option phone system,
to have finally reached
a live human being, hopefully
capable of sensitivity and humour.

The Simulation Of Omnipresence

that mobile phones enable
has gone far beyond being resistible.
Through control of the present
it forces us aspire to increasing success
by having us multi-task our way into the future.

Whilst hitching lifts I often see
car drivers phone in one held to their ear
with one hand, the other at the wheel.
Their eyes fleetingly messaging me
in passing, 'waving not drowning'.

For as much as we spread ourselves
thinly through multi-tasking
by being in as many places at once
as we think we can be
we divide our selves too.
The simulation of omnipresence
is more simulation than presence,
much less is it omniscience.

Government Health Warnings Gain A New Finality

Without the kind permission of Ray Lowry

Wisdom

is the comb a man receives
after losing his hair to old age.

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.