Can You Sense The Difference?

The Smoking Society

If only Karl Marx had not written

'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,
the heart in a heartless world, just as it [religion]
is the spirit in a spiritless situation.
Religion is the opium of the people',

However paradoxically true it seemed when written,
it says so little, now we are awash with media irony.
I wish he had written instead that 'the measure of a society,
if not consumerism, is how well it collectively creates
and supports a painful and destructively addictive nature,
whilst disguising that nature as virtue in the people
it was/is being fostered in'. But for Marx to write
that he would have had to recognise before others
who knew him better than he knew in himself
what he consistently  failed to recognise
-how he was inspired to write through smoking
and his inspiration made his writing his opiate.

The New Society

and even then I am not sure....

The Life of Jesus,

and how well it has been applied as an example to live by
through history, has proved that the messenger need not be shot,
crucified, or caged in Guantanamo-now a military camp
for forty years-for the message to be lost by the carrier.
As a parasite, virtue was never as easy to catch
as it's carrier-language, which transmits itself all too easily.
But this much can still be grasped,
where a life goes unforgiven and disrespected
it will be a difficult life to lead, and harder life to follow.
There is much more of life in the world
that is disrespected than ever we want to know.

The Blind Will Be Led By The Half Blind

Britain is no more bureaucratic than it was in the past,
though now forms seems longer and more complex than before.
The greater the choice, the more forms that have to be filled in
to organise the powers that be to act positively on our behalf.
Often when we filled in complex forms before we were flattered
by their attention to detail, imagining that the complexity
will help us make a better case for our needs than of old.
We had already been sold the merit of open choice.
Now in secret places civil servants and corporate patrons
devise abstract points systems, and ways for cross-referencing
the answers they receive, which will always grant them
more right to deny an applicant what they ask fo
than ever they will admit to, even to a deliberately blind media.

Their real agenda is to blind us,
whilst leaving them half sighted,
the better to mask the power
of their wealth. For all the liberal talk
Power will always be about rationing.

Ignorance Is Destiny

The brain is the ultimate locked room mystery
which keeps on causing suffering and delight.

Toil Beyond Need Always Create Waste

The icing is always the same, whether the cake is militarism
with a strong civil life built on weapons for export
or militarism for home use by more direct rule,
oligarchy in police states who import the weapons.
Both mean the right to vote but only for weak representatives,
with a highly censored media setting the agenda.
where good citizenship is knowing how to censor yourself.
Life has to be that way to maintain the sweet veneer
of civilisation through a popular selective amnesia.
There are some 21 counties in the world without armies
and they are all so small as to have no industry at all,
never mind a trade in arms, but their value comes
from being havens for the profits of arms traders,
whilst unknowingly we, and the planet we avoid
thinking too much about how we abuse,
absorb the sense of loss from this continually reversing alchemy.