Faith In Numbers

One of the phrases that always kills my will to listen
is 'Let me be absolutely clear about this'.
I  just know the speaker is going to quote quantities
and complain by numbers and their job
is to stifle debate via the power of statistics.

The Once And Future Government

Where Hope is never quite abandoned, but remains elusive.

The Maths Of Attentiveness

When a silence is inattentively shared
it divides and isolates the sharers.
Though a singular sense of solitude
is a strengthening life skill,
a treasure that increases in value with  maturity.
But where two or more people attend
to being still together, their stillness multiplies
to become a shared ease, positively company.

A Currency That Keeps Its Value

There is an acceptance at face value
at a moving distance that I know very well.
It happens when I stand by a local lay-by
and stick my thumb out to hitch a lift.
Whoever sees me whilst driving
has under two seconds to trust my face
sufficient to let me in their vehicle.
That is when I am an object in their mirror
-one which they did not expect to see.
When they stop it is out of trust.
I in my turn have to trust them for us both
to provide what might be the total sum
of that day's semblance of civilised spontaneity,
to briefly be a small part of one another's journey.

Serious Humour

Belief is about trying to be part of the telling of  the joke,
 rather than unwillingly having a role in the punchline.  

Daddy

did the Stations Of The Cross every week,
ten of them on his Littlewoods Pools entry.
When after many years he lost interest
he still paid for the form, but had his children
fill it in for him. At the weekend they checked the football scores too.
Whoever filled in the form, we never won any money,
but Dad was happy that he was preparing us for his idea
of an adult life. One where the displacement activities were more mature,
and they more effectively sustained the illusions of status he wanted us to hold to.
Had I paid for what I filled in and checked every week I might have
invested hope in it. He spent twice as much on the on pools
as my weekly pocket money, and I could not mind his faith
in gambling as the loss leader life du jour.
I was kept by him as a loss leader's loss leader.
But his faith in risk burnt him out when he became unemployed,
a status that I inherited far sooner than he did.
So never winning the pools was my prep for keeping
the civil servants at Social Security in work,
and myself in pocket money, by my applying for jobs
I was never going to get, but which it was my sacred duty was to apply for.

When The Medium Is The Massage

In the Democracy of the blind
the Vote is king and The Media is their minister;
there is no further need for government or messenger.
Nor if the massage is constant is further effort
required for people to vote more than how they are told to.
When the media massages the populous hard enough
they assume the role of upholders of democracy
by raising up voters of reduced opinion.
When a blind democracy fails what is the CPR that revives it?
Oligarchy? Then the message is much less what it seems to be.
But it reads 'Beware....'