Liquid Similes

Between the empty glass of hope
and the sinkhole in my unconscious
I think I have a problem with drainage.

Gender Values In Orbit

If men are from Mars
and women are from Venus,
where surely the shopping is wonderful,
then what planet, or stoney sattelite,
do gay men, lesbians, and those nearer
being a third sex than they are at ease with come from?
Wherever it is, between Venus and Mars,
they have to work quite hard
at being a force in their own right,
to resist the magnetic pull from one direction,
and the push of a sterile vacuum from the other,
to be stable and secure members of society.  

Signs Of Greater Age (26)

Being glad you are as old,

if not older, than the politicians

who claim to serve your populous.

You have now lived long enough

to see how their more outre ideas,

are retreads with no thread in them

-long before they have to admit this.

And you can quote when the same

presentations failed last time.

Finding that for all your memory
of public life reaches back quite well,
in the present-when in shops
you find have to say how much
you tender for the goods
you have purchased as much
as the cashier has to say
what the goods cost, for you both
to be sure that the shop is honest.

The Currency Of Stones

Give a man a fish to feed his family
and he will come back for more.
It is a gift or the beginning of a system of barter.
Sell the same man a loan to buy a rod
and he becomes the bait for you to fish
among his kith and kin for more needy people,
and he will have to keep on repaying his debt to you
long after he needs to.
Set the interest rate high enough and make it compound,
then you have got him by all his descendents,
by their balls, their purse, and later on
the land they can ill afford to live upon.
Jesus once, apparently misleadingly, asked*
'Which of you fathers would offer your son a stone
when he asks for bread? Or if he asks for a fish
offer him a snake instead?', referring not
to the goods concerned but the spiritual deafness
behind the misplaced gifts to the needy.
Anything that irreparably weighs down the heart
and mind is equal to, and is just as un/forgiving as,
a loan that is permanently unrepayable.


* The Gospel according to Luke Ch 11 Vs 11 

The Frailty Of Certainty

A friend wrote to me; 'I am glad I have never been brainwashed'.
Amazed at how blithe he was, I wrote nothing back.
I was too much in awe of his surety. In some uncertainty
I asked myself what it meant to be brainwashed.
I realised that at some point I had been.
I had lived in worlds where the words
I had to use automaticallly meant the opposite
of what was commonly understood, and pointing this out
with conviction was deemed to be deeply cynical.
I had seen how my family relationships were malformed,
beyond repair. I also knew that the brainwash
would fade if worked on. If I left it far enough behind
in another life it would rinse out.
To depart from it was the only cure.
I felt wiser for remembering that it did happen
and better still for learning how I had gotten over it.

Life-The T Shirt

the better to know how to love these things in yourself.

The Evolution Of False Teeth

Tina Turner's open smile radiated a thousand miles.
Like her wigs, her teeth said 'fake youth' to me.
Her teeth were that bright for being bleached.
They were the advert of their time for falsity.
Not that the gaps in The Queen Mother's grin,
or her taste in hats, were necessarily more genuine.

Thirty years on, and however hard dentists tried
the future of false teeth could not be brighter.
The edited highlights of costly dental surgery
are now integral to lifestyle make-over shows,
which are all advertising because the show
is practically paid for by the expertise being filmed,
the more to make the changes displayed seem easy.

Life is to Lifestyle what a book is to it's cover-
for a sense of life to show through
their has to be a correspondence between them.
I became the slave to fashion that I am
when I embraced NHS spectacles,
greying facial hair and early male baldness.

What folks can do if they do it themselves is amazing.