Football Is A Game

where two eleven person committees,
a referee and two linesmen,
each form agendas for the control of a ball,
and to compete with each other.
To entertain themselves first,
their audience second.
Football is where young men first taste
being picked for a committee,
and learn to disguise being led unwillingly.

In my school team I was always the last
to be picked, for being unfit at fitting in.
Forty years on I now see what I was blind to.
I never saw the fun in entertainment,
I felt more for the ball than the teamwork.

Liberal Elites

are tight cabals in rich countries
who plot the life of the masses
and plan the future poverty
of the developing world,
by ignoring the caution of recorded history
and denying how easily utopian plans
become dystopian realities
with the slightest paradigm shifts
in circumstances they don't own
and never controlled.

Journalism Is The Job

of taking the 'new' out of  news.
Everything journalists tell us
has happened has happened before.
Many times and in many places.
The words of reporters
leave their audience half-alive,
sleep walking through a past,
once solid, now gone.
Which is now our unconscious.
This half emptiness is our truest narrative,
and all the more so for the ease
of our denial that the paper we read
once breathed. Was once a  fully alive tree.

Facebook Is For Monkeys

If enough monkeys were given enough time
in front of a typewriter apiece that stored
and shared their data as they were wrote,
how long would they take to come up with Facebook?

And with hindsight how much would the net result
of their labour seem like coherent communication?

Aerobics For The Soul

One of my favourite writers,
Quentin Crisp, used to humourously
say of completing crosswords,
an activity he liked a lot,
that it was 'aerobics for the soul'.
Crosswords remain popular.
For as long as there is a press
there will always be a demand
for the study of clues and words
where the mind can both idle
and be active at the same time.
Much like settng and reading blogs,
where the setting of the words
become clues to their author. 

America

-the cherry pie of chance and democracy
that offers itself as Hope for The Free.
Hope and freedom are the two words
most devalued by overuse,
where for all who get to vote their votes
are all of equal value, very little
compared with what money buys.
By a serendipity beyond honesty
the richest pick, the ripest cherries
and the biggest slice of the pie-
the whole wide world-
go to the richest democracy.
Thus that country calls itself a meritocracy....

Signs Of Greater Age (6)

1-Looking at the latest design of car
and thinking 'I must be living in the future'
because in your  memory car design
was far more primitive, and for being
simpler was more repairable,
and for being that more ecological.

2-Hating waste, and treasuring thriift
but finding that what you stored away
against the rainy day that never arrived
has lost it's use as protection,
for some quiet damp that seeped in
and quietly ruined it, unobserved.