State Security

In 1604 poet Sir Henry Wotton wrote
'An ambassador is an honest man
sent abroad to lie for his country'.
Does this make a politician
a person who stays at home
to lie in the name of The State?

Sir Henry Wotton.

The Sport

of being a restless spectator
to the activities of others
in a well padded armchair
is the most natural inactivity
known to man.

Ageing Is About Life,

life is about change,  aging is about entropy.
When offspring depart nests will empty.

The departed always hope that time will leave intact
what they leave behind, learning only later
how time alters them, and where they have left.

Departed or left behind,
with age the horizon levels,
and draws us near, embraces
us in the stillness of acceptance.

Is It The Lightness

of a shared kiss that makes men resist sharing their lips?
Prefer instead that more intense sense of another
chowing down on their member,
swollen in the pride of self absorption?

The New Open Air Private Hospital Was Strangely Unpopular...

Strange indeed how having to pay made people so healthy.

 

 

From 1896 To 1932

in the Modern Olympiad atheletes
erratically did their best without
government support. The sacrifices
towards excellence that were made
were made by well meaning
self-financing amateur athletes
standing in for their countries.

That spirit went out like a light
in 1936 with the invention
of the Olympic torch, which
with every subsequent Olympiad
symbolised earnest nation states
'pursuing excellence' through
hyper-efficient sporting elites,
and bureaucrats ticking boxes.

The Trickle Up Effect

is as old as The Fall.
As old as men press-ganged
by rulers to serve as soldiers
and sailors since ancient times.
As Control descends to the leaders
of the new global industrial base
I am pained when I (rarely) observe
factory workers making products
they would like but their wages
will never afford, in a hierarchy
they will never see the top of.

Farming started that hierarchy
10,000 years ago, reinventing animals
and plants as loss-leaders to support
an ever-expanding human population,
Reducing everything in it's path.
Before farming the more things changed
the more they could change again,
the more the change was accepted
and change was merely change
not measured growth or shrinkage.

After the world was farmed,
the more everything changed
the more it shrank. Even now
we think it a triumph that we
can measure the shrinkage.